Professor Jim Keller Receives ITERATA Fellowship for His Research on Generative AI in the Classroom
Bard professor Jim Keller has been honored with a Small Grant Fellowship from ITERATA, the Institute for Transformational Education and Responsive Action in a Technoscientific Age. The $5,000 award will enable Professor Keller to advance his research and writing for publication, “‘The Technological within Its Own Bounds’: Responding to Generative AI with ‘Speaking Speech’ and Embodied Learning Models for Transformative Pedagogies.” Keller is director of the Learning Commons, visiting associate professor of academic writing, and senior faculty associate for the Institute for Writing and Thinking.
Professor Jim Keller Receives ITERATA Fellowship for His Research on Generative AI in the Classroom
Bard professor Jim Keller has been honored with a Small Grant Fellowship from ITERATA, the Institute for Transformational Education and Responsive Action in a Technoscientific Age. The $5,000 award will enable Professor Keller to advance his research and writing for publication, “‘The Technological within Its Own Bounds’: Responding to Generative AI with ‘Speaking Speech’ and Embodied Learning Models for Transformative Pedagogies.” Keller is director of the Learning Commons, visiting associate professor of academic writing with a faculty affiliation in philosophy, and senior faculty associate for the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College.
This fellowship will support Keller in expanding on insights that he shared in his 2022 American Association of Colleges and Universities presentation, copresented with two Learning Commons tutors and director of the Institute for Writing and Thinking, Erica Kaufman. He plans to explore embodied cognition and literacy education, disseminating the Learning Commons’ innovative best practices, position, and principles across various platforms to faculty and administrators and advocating for learning approaches founded on understandings of language and education founded in enactive, embodied accounts of thinking.
Bard College Assistant Professor of Philosophy Kathryn Tabb has been awarded $40,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund her book project, Agents and Patients: John Locke’s Ethics of Thinking, that explores Locke’s theory of psychopathology and its implications for his philosophical theories. The NEH grant will support her work over an eight-month term beginning in January.
Bard Professor Kathryn Tabb Receives $40,000 NEH Fellowship in Support of Her Book Project Agents and Patients: John Locke’s Ethics of Thinking
Bard College Assistant Professor of Philosophy Kathryn Tabb has been awarded $40,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to fund her book project, Agents and Patients: John Locke’s Ethics of Thinking, that explores Locke’s theory of psychopathology and its implications for his philosophical theories. Based on her dissertation, which focused on laying out Locke’s theory of madness as caused by the association of ideas, this book will be the first to present Locke’s theory of irrationality, and will invite other scholars to challenge how we think about Locke—and perhaps other historical figures—on key themes such as personal identity, nativism, religious toleration, freedom and enslavement, private property, and empire. The NEH grant will support her work over an 8-month term beginning in January. Previously, Tabb was an investigator for the NEH grant project, “Humanities Connections Curriculum for Medicine, Literature, and Society” (2017–20).
“I’m so grateful to the NEH and to Bard for providing me with the support I need to dedicate this whole academic year to research and writing. It’s an enormous luxury, and will allow me, I hope, to finally finish a project that has been a long time coming,” said Tabb.
John Locke’s wide corpus of writings is generally considered to contribute to three areas of philosophy, namely politics, metaphysics, and epistemology. But Locke was also a doctor. Tabb’s account presents him not primarily as a political theorist, metaphysician, or epistemologist, but rather as a physician concerned with reason and its limits. Tabb sees the normative study of the mind as Locke’s central project, and some of his most celebrated theories as deriving from it. Locke thought that the correct management of our ideas over the course of a lifetime was requisite for discovering truth, living virtuously under a commonwealth, and assuring our salvation. In this sense Locke’s central project, what Tabb terms his ethics of thinking, provides the foundation for his assessments of what sort of lives—and, indeed, which lives—are worth living. Because of Locke’s influence on American colonists, these assessments found their way into the founding documents of the states, justifications for the imperialist project, and, later, the terms in which independence was conceived of and argued for.
Tabb will present her account of Locke’s ethics of thinking through a series of what he would call archetypes: kinds of people who exemplify the various ways in which we can go right—and more often wrong—in the conduct of our understandings. Taken together, these archetypes will allow the reader to recognize previously unappreciated commitments in Locke’s work that ground Locke’s ethics of thinking. The book’s chapters will work together to present Locke’s ethics of thinking and show how it motivates diverse facets of his philosophy.
The one-night-only, six-hour-long opera Stranger Love by composer and Bard alumnus Dylan Mattingly ’14 and librettist Thomas Bartscherer, Bard’s Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities, has been selected as one of the best classical music performances of 2023 by the New York Times. The performance was conducted by Mattingly’s fellow Bard alumnus David Bloom ’13.
Stranger Love by Dylan Mattingly ’14 and Professor Thomas Bartscherer Among New York Times Best Classical Music Performances of 2023
The one-night-only, six-hour-long opera Stranger Love by composer and Bard alumnus Dylan Mattingly ’14 and librettist Thomas Bartscherer, Bard’s Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities, has been selected as one of the best classical music performances of 2023 by the New York Times. The performance was conducted by Mattingly’s fellow Bard alumnus David Bloom ’13. “For all its abstraction and timelessness — what is more ageless than the opera’s themes of love and beauty? — this work is absolutely of its time, slowing down emotion in a world that moves uncontrollably fast,” writes Joshua Barone. “The premiere run, at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in May, was just a single evening, but Stranger Love deserves a life far beyond that.”
Olin Humanities, Room 3075:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Professor Ungvary will be speaking about the ancient Christian Saint St. Anthony and the birth of hegiography as a literary genre.
Friday, November 3, 2023
Christopher Moore (Penn State) Hegeman 204A12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Some intellectual traditions take the four cardinal virtues – wisdom, justice, courage, and self-discipline – to constitute the virtuous (moral and successful) life. This list of canonical virtues, and an account of its sufficiency, is ascribed to Plato. In this presentation, I argue against doing so. Rather than asserting how things stand with virtues, Plato depicts many conversations about an already emerging (fifth-century) view of human goodness as articulable as a cluster of virtues. Throughout his dialogues, his Socrates criticizes the explanatory value of such clusters. A clinched tetrad of virtues sometimes proves dialectically helpful for him but, at the end of his writing career, Plato says that we need to keep investigating the number and nature of the virtues. I argue that Plato is depicting – and is advancing in the very process – perhaps the prime step in the development of ethics as a field of philosophical reflection: debating which virtues matter to the well-lived life.
Friday, October 20, 2023
Susan Buck-Morss (CUNY Graduate Center) Hegeman 204A12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 My book Year 1 (2021) is a philosophical recounting of historical time inspired by Walter Benjamin. Its thematic converges with the humanitarian border crises that now include the Hamas-Israeli war. The task is to address the destructive convergence of history and myth, nation-state and human rights, sovereignty and ecological survival, not by taking sides, but by addressing our shared state of emergency with every intellectual resource that we have.
Friday, September 22, 2023
Hegeman 20412:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Interested in learning more about the Philosophy Program at Bard? Come to our Philosophy Program Information Session to meet faculty and current majors and to learn more about courses, requirements for moderation and graduation, senior projects, etc.! There will be light refreshments!
Friday, April 21, 2023
Yarran Hominh, Philosophy Aspinwall 30212:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 What role is there for hope in hopeless times? The present is, if any, a time where to respond objectively to the state of the world is to despair. The systems of oppression and domination that comprise the basic structure of society are rampant; the political democratic means available of changing those systems are powerless, sunk in institutional deadlock and political polarization. The world continues to suffer from an ongoing pandemic, and to top it all off, we seem incapable of even so much as slowing our rush towards an uninhabitable future. The predominant forms of hope that are culturally available have been co-opted. At best, they are politically inert. At worst, they act as ideological figleaves by which existing systems and destructive ways of being are maintained and reproduced. Yet, I argue, drawing on a 1983 conversation between Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, even in such hopeless conditions there is still a place for hope. It is a hope not for a future way the world could be, but a hope in others, tied to the present possibilities of collective agency.
Friday, March 10, 2023
Marina van Zuylen (Literature) and Garry Hagberg (Philosophy) Olin 20512:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Join the Philosophy & Literature Programs for a conversation between Marina van Zuylen and Garry Hagberg on the connections between philosophy and literature. What might it mean to read philosophy as literature? Does literature count as philosophy? In what ways can literature and philosophy together help people live a good life, or one that is good enough?
Speakers: Clara Sousa-Silva, Assistant Professor of Physics, and Kathryn Tabb, Assistant Professor of Philosophy Olin 20412:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Physics Phriday and Philosophy Salon will be cohosting a conversation on the intersections between science and philosophy. How might philosophers help scientists in their work? How and when does the practice of science give rise to philosophical questions? What is the nature of life? Does the scientific attitude give rise to humility or to hubris?