News and Events

Chapel of the Holy Innocents  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
PASOLINI AND THE SACRED

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was an Italian filmmaker, poet, journalist, and public intellectual. Contradiction defined his life and work: he was a communist who rejected and was rejected by the Italian communist party, a gay man who refused to be a spokesperson for the gay community, a bourgeois intellectual who idealized the subproletariat. He was also an avowed atheist whose gaze was turned obsessively toward representations of the sacred. He sought out the sacred in lands far removed from his own—places like Yemen and Tanzania—while still hoping to find traces of it in the fast-paced world of his native Italy during the post-War economic boom. The figure of Christ was omnipresent in his works, as was the ambiguous specter of the Catholic Church. He invested in the sacred as a language, an aesthetic, a currency, a lost past, and a fading present. In this discussion, we will explore Pasolini’s complex, often contradictory views on the sacred. 

Email: [email protected] with questions.

Nicholas Dunn, Klemens von Klemperer Postdoctoral Fellow in the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Politics
Barringer House Global Classroom  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
My aim in this paper is to consider the relationship between two capacities of the mind: imagination and judgment. I do so by way of considering Kant’s account of the ‘power of imagination’ [Einbildungskraft] and the ‘power of judgment’ [Urteilskraft]. There are a number of striking similarities between these two faculties, which have been almost entirely overlooked. As a result, the question of how they bear on each other in their respective operations has yet to be taken up. I argue for the following claim: insofar as the power of judgment is the faculty of thinking particulars under universals, the power of imagination is the faculty of producing and providing particulars for judgment (either to reflect on or to subsume under universals). Consequently, without the activity of imagination, we could not make judgments at all.

Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Bard’s new Carceral Studies speaker series launches with a visit from the NYU Prison Education Project. Their recently published book Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality explores how the car, despite its association with American freedom and mobility, functions at the crossroads of two great systems of entrapment and immobility– the American debt economy and the carceral state. We will be joined by four of the Lab members, a group representing formerly incarcerated scholars and non-formerly incarcerated NYU faculty. 

Speaker: César Cabezas, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Temple University
Barringer House Global Classroom  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Moral condemnation is a key feature of contemporary public discourse on race. Folk racism talk tends to focus on assigning and evading blame for individual wrongs in the domain of race. Similarly, philosophers tend to conceive of racism as a moral concept whose primary function is to signal moral condemnation for race-based wrongs. While moral condemnation is widespread in folk racism talk, I argue that we must also recognize racism as an explanatory concept. According to the explanatory account I put forth, the point of having a concept of racism is to shed light on social problems afflicting non-white communities, such as police violence, mass incarceration, and racial disparities in education, employment, health care, and so on. I also argue that this explanatory conception of racism is central to the discourse of contemporary anti-racist movements, as well as the tradition of black political thought from which they hail. A proper understanding of the discourse of anti-racist movements will require us to interpret their ascriptions of racism as both moral (although not restricted to moral condemnation) and explanatory claims—with an emphasis on the latter. This is especially important for making sense of their claims regarding the systemic nature of racism.

Andrew Gregory, University College London
Hegeman 204  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Plato's use of number in his music theory, theory of matter, and cosmology raises some interesting questions in metaphysics and philosophy of science. What is the relation between mathematics, physics, and the world? Is there a beauty and simplicity to some mathematics and does that capture the nature of the world? What is the distinction (historical, philosophical) between mathematical physics and numerology? This paper looks at the nature and influence of Plato's views.

Francey Russell, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Barnard College and Columbia University
Barringer House Global Classroom  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Throughout his lectures on anthropology and in the published work, Kant describes an unruly form of thinking that he calls fantasy and an usual kind of mental state that he calls "obscure representations." Fantasy, for Kant, is imaginative activity that is "unreined and unruled" by the understanding, that is not object-directed, that is only "dimly conscious," and that is essentially private. What is most striking in these discussions is first, Kant's ethical-aesthetic-pragmatic claim that we human beings “have an interest” in obscurity and enjoy "walking in the dark;" this means we need to clarify the relationship between the pleasure of fantasy and the pleasure of aesthetic judgment. Second, Kant suggests that sexual attraction exemplifies and is constituted by this pleasurably obscure kind of thinking. In this paper I'll give an account of fantasy and obscure representation, clarify its relationship with aesthetic judgment, and argue that it facilitates an alternative interpretation of why Kant thinks sex is morally and psychologically risky. I'll close by raising an important evaluative question. If we want to resist Kant's condemnation of this kind of thinking and this kind of pleasure, we must ask ourselves: what is the good of it?

Speaker: Shivani Radhakrishnan, Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow, Department of Philosophy, Williams College
Barringer House Global Classroom  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
How should we go about criticizing society? According to Hegel, Marx, and philosophers in the Frankfurt School tradition, critiques of ideology are best if they are immanent. Unlike other forms of social criticism, they argue, immanent critique judges institutions and practices against standards contained within their objects of analysis. This enables critique to be both convincing and self-reflexive. Psychoanalysis is meant to be a helpful analogue. Therapists enter their patients’ conceptual frames in an attempt to figure out how their patients’ ways of perceiving and feeling prevent them from living a good life. The same is true for the ideology critic, who is supposed to come to social practices and judge it using norms that are already present in our ways of behaving and acting. In this paper, however, I argue that immanent critics have insufficiently reckoned with the insights of feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial philosophers. More specifically, I argue that in measuring social life against standards contained within our form of life, immanent critics replay a mechanism of domination articulated by Sandra Harding, Enrique Dussel, and Ashis Nandy. The ruled are supposed to oppose their rulers within the psychological limits set by the latter. After diagnosing the problem, I argue that feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial philosophers offer us resources for envisioning a more situated and emancipatory version of critique.

Professor Susan Neiman
Director of the Einstein Forum (Potsdam)
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture will discuss the ways in which contemporary voices who consider themselves leftist have abandoned philosophical ideas which are crucial to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism, a firm distinction between power and justice, and a belief in the possibility of progress. These ideas are connected and have their roots in the much-maligned Enlightenment. Most critiques of contemporary positions on the so-called woke left have been made from liberal, centrist, or rightwing perspectives. Neiman, by contrast, situates her work squarely on the left, and argues that today’s left has deprived itself of concepts which are crucial for resisting the right-wing lurch.

with keynote sessions by Dr. Lara Harb
Online Event  “Forms and Functions of Islamic Philosophy” seeks to highlight how Islamic philosophy (falsafa/ḥikma) was practiced “in conversation”—between scholars, with various audiences, and with different disciplines,  approaches, and rhetoric. Islamic philosophy was composed not only in traditional forms of treatises and commentaries but also through narratives written in poetry and prose. For example, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī penned a panegyric poem written in Persian in praise of logic, physics, and metaphysics, alongside his many philosophical prose treatises. Ibn al-ʿArabī’s philosophical mysticism includes prose that reads as Aristotelian commentary alongside succinct poems highlighting his key philosophical concepts through mystical metaphors. In reference to Ibn Sīnā’s allegorical treatise, Ibn Tufayl’s famous Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān provides an intriguing narrative and philosophical thought experiment. What do story-telling, poetry, narrative, metaphor, and allegory reveal about the nature and purpose of philosophy? The conference is organized in conjunction with the “Islamic Philosophy in Conversation” working group. The conference aligns itself with the goals of the working group, and therefore seeks to highlight the work of a diverse group of scholars, including emerging scholars of Islamic philosophy, as well as those who identify as female, non-binary, or as belonging to a historically-marginalized group.

On Thursday, March 31, from 5-6:30 pm, Dr. Lara Harb will lead a discussion of a primary source text (sections 38 and 39 from Averroes' commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics). If you would like to join the discussion, please contact Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed ([email protected]) for the meeting link.
 
For the full program and details on how to attend see our website.

  Getty L. Lustila
Northeastern University
Barringer House Classroom  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In this talk I put forward an account of Indigenous environmental justice that is both substantive and inclusive of other marginalized populations. This account is substantive insofar as its concerns extend beyond considerations of procedural fairness (or, ensuring a fair distribution of environmental goods and ills). An Indigenous account of environmental justice aims to reestablish our distinct relationship to the Land as “place” and not “space.” Reestablishing this relationship requires that we see ourselves as accountable to our human and nonhuman relations and take agency over the writing of our shared stories. I also argue that an account of Indigenous environmental justice must be inclusive, or sensitive to the history of state violence against other marginalized groups, which complicates the “colonizer” and “colonized” dynamic. I claim that members of these groups can also become “people of place.”