News and Events

× Friday, October 9, 2026

Ordinary Made Extraordinary: Nietzsche’s Pedagogy of Non-Identity

Dr. Ulrike Wagner, Director of German Studies, Bard College Berlin
Hegeman 204A 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
What happens when reading makes the ordinary strange? This talk argues that Nietzsche’s lifelong engagement with Emerson recasts criticism as a pedagogy of non-identity: a practice of learning to see differently. Rather than locating philology’s authority solely in the institutional protocols of German Wissenschaft, Nietzsche finds its vital force in everyday practices of reading, habit, and encounters with exemplary others. For Nietzsche, Emerson transforms the past from settled knowledge into a resource for reimagining the relations among scholarship, poetry, art, and life. Against the specialization and moral conformity of the modern university, Emersonian exemplarity provokes thought in unexpected directions. Criticism thus becomes an embodied practice that may disrupt inherited certainties and reopen the present to unrealized possibilities. Tracing this Emerson–Nietzsche connection, the talk illuminates Emerson’s formative role in Nietzsche’s philology and offers a new account of transatlantic intellectual history.

× Friday, October 23, 2026

Locke on Substance Kinds and Human Minds

Jason Rosencrantz, Lecturer of Philosophy, California State University, Long Beach
Hegeman 204A 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Locke is explicitly agnostic about whether human minds are material or immaterial and claims there is no contradiction in supposing that God might have given a system of matter fitly disposed some degree of thought. Despite this agnosticism, many scholars have argued that Locke is implicitly inclined toward either materialism or immaterialism. Interpreting Locke as a consistent nominalist about substance kinds, I contend that his substance nominalism runs deeper than his apparent metaphysical inclinations and that his ontological and idea-theoretical commitments motivate a principled neutrality regarding the substantial basis of things we categorize as “thinking” or “material.” According to Locke, the sortal terms “mind” and “matter,” which figure prominently in competing propositions that human minds are material or immaterial, stand for complex ideas of substance kinds. But such ideas, on Locke’s analysis, are strictly limited: they are always to some degree obscure, always inadequate to the task of perfectly representing their archetypes, and always false when supposed to conform to the real essences of substances. I evaluate four competing arguments for Locke’s supposed metaphysical inclinations in light of these representational limits and argue that each is premised on a conflation between real and nominal essences.