2025
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Friday, May 2, 2025 Hegeman 204A 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Critics of Hannah Arendt accuse her of neglecting working-class politics in what they describe as her attempt to “enforce a separation of politics from socio-economic concerns." This view of Arendt overlooks how the general strike is curiously close to the heart of Arendt’s political theory. Placing Arendt’s examples back into the world which they emerge from, this talk argues that Arendt is one of several 20th-century political thinkers who take up and make new meaning out of the idea of the general strike, using the strike to shape their ideas about power, equality, freedom, and democracy. |
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Friday, April 18, 2025 A vast philosophical and scientific literature has grown up around the nature and function of delusions. Professor Justin Garson will argue in this talk that we should abandon the concept of delusion entirely because it involves an unreasonable and harmful stance toward the “delusional patient.” As a case study, this talk considers the plight of targeted individuals (TIs), a global community whose members have the belief that they are the victims of organized stalking or electronic harassment. |
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Friday, April 11, 2025 Hegeman 204A 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 What is agency? To what extent does it manifest as the expression of internal will or as a response to external circumstances? This salon—part talk, part conversation—will explore these questions through two disciplinary contexts that are not often considered together: sociology and poetry, or more specifically, the sociological survey and lyric poetry. While we might think of the lyric as a pre-eminent space of authentic self-expression that issues from something “inside” an individual, and the survey as a technology that constructs selves through questions that impose a set of “outside” constraints on what individuals express, this salon will consider thinkers and poems from the early-mid 20th century that trouble this binary. |
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Friday, February 28, 2025
A talk by Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo, Visiting Fellow, New York University
Hegeman 204A 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5 According to the Humean consensus in philosophy, sense experience provides “no impression from which the idea of the infinite may be derived.” This talk explores the possibility that the consensus is mistaken. Can infinity in fact exist in the physical world, and if so, can our senses give us epistemic access to it? An affirmative answer would have consequences not just for the philosophy of mathematics but also for epistemology and the philosophy of mind. The discovery that we can, against the odds, experience infinity would compel us to rethink what it means to experience something, and to rethink what our sources of knowledge for distinct realms (abstract and concrete) might be. |
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Friday, February 21, 2025
Jordan Pascoe, George A. Miller Visiting Scholar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Hegeman 204A 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5 When disasters strike, we often imagine them as scenes from an action movie: violent, heroic, and focused on self-preservation. However, 100 years of disaster sociology tells us that, in reality, people tend to come together, care for one another, and find new ways to make life collectively possible. In this talk, I will examine the power of our dominant, violent disaster imaginary and ask: how can we begin to imagine disasters differently? What kinds of new imaginaries can foster collective, coalition-building, and aspirational practices? Drawing on Black feminist thought, literature and social movements, Indigenous philosophy, and moral frameworks grounded in African and Haitian practices of resistance, I will outline a set of tools that offer possibilities for reimagining our response to the climate crisis. To ensure our survival in the era of climate crisis, we must develop disaster policies and practices that actively support aspirational visions and collective creativity, while helping us resist nostalgic and reactionary narratives. I’ll draw on the work of doulas (those who support others through the crisis of birth) to show how we can practice disaster otherwise, even in the face of a hostile state. |
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Friday, February 14, 2025
A Talk by Qianyi Qin, Lecturer of Philosophy, Smith College
Hegeman 204A 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5 When you imagine something, are you yourself present in some way, in that imaginative episode? This talk explores whether imagination necessarily includes a “self”, and what this means for empathy, ethics, and self-transformation. While some argue that some acts of imagination involve, at most, a thin sense of self, others suggest that a thicker self, shaped by personal values and emotions, also permeates imagination. This raises profound questions: Can we ever imagine neutrally, without bias? Can we truly empathize with others, or are we always imagining ourselves in their place? By blending philosophical analysis with insights from psychology, this talk invites us to rethink the nature of imagination, empathy, and the self. |