Talk at Bogazici, Stephen Snyder (Bogazici), “A Critical Hermeneutical Reading of Danto’s Narrative Philosophy of History and the Problem of Style”

Please join us,

Friday, November 6, 5-7pm, TB 130 (Anderson Hall)

Bogazici University

Title and Abstract:

A Critical Hermeneutical Reading of Danto’s Narrative Philosophy of History and the Problem of Style

This essay explores the benefits of a critical hermeneutic reading of Arthur Danto’s aesthetic theory.  In his early writings on critical hermeneutics, Jürgen Habermas credits Danto with having reconciled analytic philosophy with hermeneutics.  The essay argues that Habermas’ acceptance of Danto’s narrative philosophy of history would support a critical hermeneutical reading of his aesthetic philosophy, but a problem could be encountered with Danto’s theory of style.  A critical hermeneutic interpretation of Danto’s work, however, would point to a new understanding of style that would resolve a problem in his claim that art’s history entails a cognitive progression. The resolution is shown through an examination of the Sartrean roots of Danto’s account of style, a shift in Sartre’s later writings toward a hermeneutical understanding of subjective consciousness, and the benefit Danto’s theory brings, according to Habermas, to a critical hermeneutic reading of Gadamer.

Conference at Bogazici University: Analytical Existentialism

14-15 November, 2015

Kriton Curi Room (in Albert Long Hall)

Papers in the analytic style (broadly understood), addressing topics that existentially matter to human experience

Saturday, 14 November

11:00 – 12:30 Paul Prescott (Syracuse University) “The Secular Problem of Evil”

The existence of evil is held to pose philosophical problems only for theists. I argue that the existence of evil gives rise to a philosophical problem which confronts theist and atheist alike. The problem is constituted by the following claims: (1) human beings must trust the world if they are to think and act within it; (2) the world is not trustworthy (i.e., sufficient evil exists). It follows that we think and act only by maintaining a state of radical self-deception. Theists resolve this problem by rejecting (2), only to confront the problem of evil as traditionally understood. Atheists also reject (2), but without grounds for doing so.

Lunch

13:30 – 15:00 Workshop on NGOs and Analytic Philosophy – Invited Speaker: Itır Erhart (Bilgi University), co-founder of the charity running organization Adım Adım

“How, if at all, can the tools of analytic philosophy be put to use to understand first-person experiences of participation in civil society?” Following her talk there will be an open forum on this question.

15:30-17:00 Invited Speaker: Christina Van Dyke (Calvin College) “Blazing Darkness and Drinking with Christ: the Phenomenology of Immortality (1200-1400)”

Discussions of immortality in the Middles Ages have tended to focus on metaphysical issues such as the nature of the rational soul and the prospect for its continued existence after the death of the body. In this paper, I focus instead on the phenomenology of immortality–that is, the question of how medieval figures expected to experience unending life. Christian doctrine demands a resurrection of the body, for instance, while Platonic influences push towards the transcendence of matter (and perhaps even individuality) in merging with the Divine. This tension comes to a head in the High Middle Ages. Apophatic philosophers and contemplatives portray human immortality as static contemplation of the universal good, where any experience of the individual self is transcended. In contrast, the ‘affective’ tradition (which includes a number of female mystics)  portray our experience of immortality as dynamic and active: they stress Jesus’s metaphor of heaven as a wedding feast, and they talk about living in unending community with God *and* neighbor. This tension between contemplative vs. active experience of immortality both tracks earlier debates (e.g., over Aristotle’s conception of happiness in Nicomachean Ethics book 1 vs. 10) and carries through in the Reformation, with Protestants (generally) advocating the more active and Catholics (generally) advocating the more contemplative view of the afterlife.

The 17:30-19:00 session (Sandrine Berges (Bilkent University) “From Slavery to Everyday Sexism – The Role of Self-Deception in Oppression”) is unfortunately canceled.

19:30 Dinner, followed by Keynote: Eric Schliesser (University of Amsterdam) “When becoming a parent means becoming a moral monster; with an argument against Rawls’s set up in the original position” (at BUMED Cafe)

This paper argues, first, that fatherhood, unexpectedly, generates immoral preferences. By this I do not mean, as one might expect, that (a) having a child is bad for the environment (and especially future people living in much poorer countries), although it is undeniably harmful to the environment to have children, or that (b) one favors one’s own children at the expense of other human ties (although undeniably one does do this). Rather, I focus on ordinary incidents that may occur in the process of raising a child.

Second, I use my argument to explore two important concepts in Rawlsian political philosophy: (i) a rational plan of life; (ii) Knightian uncertainty. I will argue that fatherhood is a species of Knightian uncertainty that causes trouble for Rawlsian rational plan of life.

Sunday, 15 November

The 9:00-10:30 session (Anna M.C. de Bruyckere (Durham University) “Conceptual vs Existential Work: Understanding Life and Self”) is unfortunately canceled.

11:00-12:30 Keynote: L. A. Paul (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) “Preference Capture”

I discuss two problems of preference capture arising from puzzles for decision-making under radical epistemic and personal change. The first problem of preference capture concerns the way that we might be alienated from the perspectives of who we are making ourselves into. The second problem of preference capture involves the way that we might fear that an experience could capture our preferences, making repugnant, counterfactually distant future selves closer to actuality.

Lunch

13:30-15:00 Workshop on Under-studied Topics in Analytic Philosophy – Speaker and Discussant: Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins (University of British Columbia) -via Skype-

In this workshop we will have students tell us about things that matter to them existentially which they have not seen treated in the analytic literature. Prof. Ichikawa Jenkins, with other speakers of the conference will be guiding the students on how to utilize tools of analytic philosophy in those areas.

15:30-17:00 Patrizia Pedrini (University of Florence) “The Lives We Can’t Live – A Study of Self-Deception”

According to Alfred Mele’s motivationalist account (2001), self-deception is caused by the biasing working of a desire that p be the case over the cognition relevant to the formation of the belief that p. I will assess the prospect of Mele’s account vis à vis the formulation of what I call the “causal problem” of self-deception. The causal problem of self-deception is generated by an objection to early versions of Mele’s motivationalism due to Bermùdez (2000), known as the “selectivity problem” of self-deception. The objection shows that self-deception is more selective than the presence of a desire that p be the case in the psychology of a subject can predict, as there are cases of people in the grip of a desire that p be the case who do not end up self-deceptively believing that p. I will argue when a desire that p be the case biases a subjects’s cognition so as to lead him or her to self-deceptively believe that p this happens because the desire that p be the case is not causally equivalent to the desire that p be the case which operates in the subject who does not end up self-deceiving.

Rather, it is a desire that is made causally suitable to let the subject reach the self-deceptive belief by the overall psychology of a subject. The causal theory of self-deception I will outline will also help us to do justice to the psychological complexity and the existential significance of the phenomenon of self-deception in the life of the subject who experiences it.

17:30-19:00, Camil Golub (New York University) “Biographical Identity and Regret”

All of us could have had better lives, yet we often find ourselves unable to wish that our lives had gone differently, especially when we contemplate alternatives that vastly diverge from our actual life course.  In this paper I ask what, if anything, accounts for such attitudes.  First I examine some answers offered in the literature: (i) the lack of direct (“first-personal”) psychological connections with our merely possible selves; (ii) a general conservatism about value; (iii) the importance of our actual relationships and long-term projects.  I find them all wanting.  Then I develop my own proposal, inspired by R.M. Adams’ (1979) answer to the problem of evil: we cannot regret many things in our past because they contributed to who we are.  Our biographical identities constrain the live options for our retrospective attitudes.

19:30 Dinner (location TBA)

BETİM seminar Stephen Snyder: Changing Human Nature – A Case for Intergenerational Justice 4 Nov. 2015

Changing Human Nature – A Case for Intergenerational Justice

Seminar by Stephen Snyder

St. Louis (MO)/İstanbul

Visiting Professor, Bosphorus University

Wed. 4 November 2015, 5.15-6.30 pm

Language of the event: English, no simultaneous translation

Click on poster to enlarge

All welcome, registration not required.

for directions see

http://www.betim.org.tr/index.php/iletisim.html

Talk at Istanbul Technical University, Alberto L. Siani (Yeditepe University): OVERLAPPING DISAGREEMENT. For a Dissident Reading of Rawls

On a standard reading, Rawls’s central claim is that, once philosophy produces an adequate account of rationality together with certain constraints aiming at reaching “fair” conclusions, and once this account is adequately expressed through the original position device, there will be a unanimous rational agreement (in A Theory of Justice) or an overlapping consensus (in Political Liberalism) on the two principles of justice and on the whole liberal-egalitarian conception. Against this standard reading I propose a “dissident” one (section 1), whose central point is not so much whether we (can) agree or not on Rawls’s design of the original position or even on his formulation of the principles of justice, but rather that political liberalism provides the right conceptual tools to inquire into the possibility, critical and progressive character and limits of a political agreement not conceived as the unanimous result of rational argumentations by reasonable citizens. I claim that political liberalism has a radical innovative potential for political philosophy that still needs to be fully actualized, and that this potential lies in the non-philosophical conception of the elements of political agreement and disagreement, and in their philosophical explicitation for political purposes. To the aim of a fuller appropriation of this potential I work around two poles: overlapping disagreement and reconciliation.

I juxtapose to the notion of “overlapping consensus” (explicitly central in political liberalism) the notion of “overlapping disagreement” which, though not being explicitly thematized as such, is arguably equally central to the political liberalism project (section 2). By introducing this notion, my main intention is rebutting the reading according to which Rawls attempts an explanation of the consensus on the principles of justice based on a philosophical theory of rationality yielding univocal and ahistorically valid results. Against this reading, I place Rawls’s understanding of political consensus within his idea of the task of political philosophy and show that he employs a rather minimalistic and flexible version of consensus. Political liberalism gives up once and for all the idea that philosophy or rationality are capable of establishing consensus even among reasonable individuals, let alone among unreasonable ones. On the contrary, political liberalism aims at showing that political agreement, if possible at all, has to be achieved on the basis of given political ideas, which constitute the groundwork of the philosophical construction, but are not themselves philosophically deduced. In other terms, political liberalism delimits the space of the public discussion on the political conception (section 3). Within this space, the domain of public reason, Rawls then proposes justice as fairness as the most reasonable candidate for a political conception, whereas it is fundamental to stress that he never claims that justice as fairness is the univocal philosophical answer to the task delineated by political liberalism, nor, for that matter, that there is such a univocal philosophical answer. In fact, within public reason overlapping disagreement persists even at the level of the definition of the contents of the political conception. The task of political liberalism and that of justice as fairness are hence to be kept well distinct, something I emphasize even against Rawls’s own duct of argumentation.

I then argue that both tasks constitute the two steps of a project of philosophical reconciliation, a project whose centrality emerges in the Rawlsian works especially after Political Liberalism (section 4). Finally, I discuss the limits of reconciliation through philosophy in order to consolidate the thesis that overlapping disagreement can never be fully dissolved through philosophical means, and that political liberalism is, in virtue of its realistic yet not resigned understanding of the task of political philosophy, is a formidable discussion partner for the debate on justice beyond consensus (section 5).

 

Istanbul Technical University

20 October 2015, 1:30 pm
ITB Seminar Room

Talk at Istanbul Şehir University, Özlem Yılmaz (Sabancı Uni), Ancient Philosophy and Modern Science: Aristotle’s Four Causes and Phenotype

Abstract

In this presentation causation in phenotype explanation is examined with its similarities to Aristotle’s theory of four causes. The research of the complex pathways of interaction net between genotype, phenotype and environment needs causal investigation which involves more than a single cause. This investigation is similar to the investigation of Aristotle’s material, formal and efficient causes altogether. Final cause will not be used in this consideration because with the theory of evolution, which is a fundamental principle of biology, it is clear that there isn’t any purposive happening in biological phenomena. Still the final cause gets place in many philosophical studies and keeps its importance. Here in this work author doesn’t think that there is final cause in biology, but despite this she will talk about the similarity between final and formal causes and the role of final cause within the gene centered view. Reducing natural phenomena about living things to one cause (for example: genes) is a mistaken way in explaining phenotype which has many different probabilities and complex interactions in every parts of it. It might sometimes be easier to use parts and to reduce some phenomena into single causes while investigating but the student of nature should always keep in mind that this reducing attitude is only a practical way of understanding the features of parts themselves, and these parts are in a complex and interrelated state all together (they have different features when they are together) and they should be thought and investigated (whenever possible) in this context. As Aristotle puts it; there is no form without matter, as it will be stated in this talk: efficient cause is intrinsic to the living things too; then we can say without material, efficient and formal causes there is no proper explanation of phenotype. In other words proper explanation of phenotype is possible with the investigation of environmental, physiological, developmental, genetic and evolutionary factors in the context of their interrelated state. Maybe this research programme; explaning phenotype with evaluating all these factors, can work with asking all possible causal questions in a proper way to the subject phenomena. In this sense, thinking on Aristotle’s formal, material and efficient causes altogether is similar to explaining and investigating phenotype in a most proper way. Examples from plant physiology in a changing climate will be given. —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

—- Fr., Nov. 20 2015, 15:00-17:00

—- Istanbul Şehir University (http://www.sehir.edu.tr/en/Pages/Home.aspx)

West Campus, Room 2008 (http://www.sehir.edu.tr/en/Pages/EventDetail.aspx?Etkinlik=1079)

Please join us!

Contact: manuelknoll@sehir.edu.tr

Talk at Bogazici, Patrick Roney (Koc U), “On Hannah Arendt’s ‘Banality of Evil’. Between Thoughtlessness and Sensus Communis”

Please join us

Bogazici University

TB 130, 5-7pm

October 23

TITLE: “On Hannah Arendt’s ‘Banality of Evil’. Between Thoughtlessness and Sensus Communis.”

ABSTRACT

The aim of my presentation is to argue that Hannah Arendt develops her concept of the banality of evil through a phenomenological appropriation of Kant’s theory of judgment and of his principle of sensus communis in particular. Even though Arendt initially defined the banality of evil as a form of thoughtlessness grounded upon her understanding of thinking as an inner dialogue of the ‘two-in-one’, I will attempt to show that she develops the concept much more extensively in relation to Kant’s doctrine of reflective judgment and the possibility of a sensus communis as a pre-conceptual model of unforced consensus for the public space. In contrast with interpretations of Arendt’s conception from the point of view of political philosophy—with a view, that is, to the question of rationally grounded norms for political action—I claim that Arendt seeks to ground political judgment on aesthetic judgment, and that the latter forms a necessary condition for the former, particularly in the era of modernity. I will thus show the ways in which her reading of Kant is carried out together with both an existential-ontological re-appraisal of appearances and its relation to the transcendental imagination.

Talk at Bogazici, István Aranyosi (Bilkent), “All God Had to Choose”

Please join us,

Bogazici University

October 16, Friday

TB 130

5-7pm

Title and Abstract:

All God Had to Choose

There is a theological creationist metaphor that some theorists of supervenience physicalism like to put forward in order to illustrate what the thesis is supposed to exactly mean. To think that supervenience physicalism is true is to think that once God created all microphysical facts about our world, there was nothing left for Him to do—He was done creating the world per se. I would like to put forward an alternative theological metaphor as a better heuristic for the formulation and understanding of physicalism. Instead of focusing on what God had to do, we should better focus, I will argue, on what God had to choose in order to make our world the actual one. This new approach is based on the once popular Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). If I am right, this device is more useful than the creationist one, and it has some interesting implications for the formulation of physicalism.

Kant Reading Group at Bogazici – Thursdays 5-7pm (Fall, 2015).

Lucas Thorpe and Ken Westphal will continue their Kant reading group at Bogazici this semester on Thursdays from 5-7pm in TB365. Everyone is welcome.

This semester we will begin by reading T.M Scanlon‘s recent book Being Realistic about Reasons. We’ll start by looking at chapter 1 this Thursday (8/10/2015). There are 5 chapters, so we plan to spend the first 5 weeks of this semester looking at this book.

If you’d like to join our mailing list, or get a pdf of the readings, please email Melisa: melisakurtcan@gmail.com

Support for this reading group is provided by the joint Boğaziçi -Southampton Newton-Katip Çelebi project AF140071 “Agency and Autonomy: Kant and the Normative Foundations of Republican Self-Government” run by Lucas Thorpe (Boğaziçi) and Sasha Mudd (Southampton).

Talk at Bogazici, Beril Idemen Sozmen (ITU), “Anattā and Animal Ethics”

Talk at Bogazici, Beril Idemen Sozmen

Thursday, October 15, 5-7pm, TB 310 (Anderson Hall), Bogazici University.

Please join us.

Title and abstract:

Anattā and Animal Ethics

In this talk I am going to argue that anattā – the Pali term for the Buddhist concept of no-self – has implications for ethics in general and for animal ethics in particular: Anattā as the most fundamental realisation of pañña (wisdom) is a condition of becoming the ideal moral agent. Buddhist ethics in its most comprehensive form cannot be understood without anattā but interpreted in this way it provides us with both challenge and inspiration for traditional Western debates in ethics. One of these is the tension between agent-centred and patient-centred moral theories, which also appears in the disagreement between Gary Francione and his critics. My particular thesis here is that the connection between anattā and Buddhist ethics provides us with tools, especially with the Buddhist concept of dukkha (suffering) to argue that Francione’s abolitionism is too focused on the purity of the agent and thereby fails to give due consideration to the consequences of acts of harm-reduction. Contrary to the position of Donaldson and Kymlicka in the question of suffering in the wild, some forms of dukkha continue to be moral tragedies but the Buddhist call for skilful means in dealing with dukkha taken together with anattā leads to particularist and strategic results. These do not simply conceptualise humans as moral agents and other animals as moral patients but consider them both to be at different constellations of agency and responsibility in a given encounter. One consequence of such an understanding of the moral situation is therefore the rejection of the relational aspect of abolitionism, i.e. of the minimisation of inter-species relations as Francione proposes.

Philosophy/Cog-Sci Reading Group on Perception at Boğaziçi.

Our philosophy/Cog-Sci reading group at Boğaziçi will continue this semester on Tuesdays from 5.15-7pm in TB365. This semester we will focus primarily on perception. Everyone is welcome.

If you would like to be added to our mailing list please email Elif at: conceptsandbeliefs@gmail.com

Provisional readings:

Tuesday, October 6th
David Marr, “Chapter 1: The philosophy and the Approach“, Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information, MIT Press, 2010.

Tuesday, October 13th
Frances Egan, “How to think about mental content.” Philosophical Studies, 2014.

Tuesday, October 20th
Matt Jones and Bradley C. Love, “Baysian Fundamentalism or Englightenment – On the explanatory status of Baysian models of cognition” BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2011) 34, 169–231

Tuesday, October 27th
Andy Clark, “Radical Predictive Processing”, Southern Journal of Philosophy 53:3-27 (2015) [see also Andy Clark,  Embodied Prediction]

Future readings to be decided.

This reading group is part of the Tubitak Project 114K348, Concepts and Beliefs: From Perception to Action, run by Lucas Thorpe.

Workshop at Boğaziçi: THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (5/10/2015)

WORKSHOP ON THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

The Kalam Cosmological Argument (A Critical Assessment)
One-Day Workshop (October 5th, Monday, 2015)

(This Event is open to the Public)

Venue: Boğaziçi University, North Campus, New Hall-Conference Room (1st Floor)

10.00-11.00 Opening Remarks & The Historical and the Philosophical Context of the KalamCosmological Argument (Nazif Muhtaroğlu/ Boğaziçi University, Philosophy)

11.00-11.15 Coffee Break

11.15-12.15 Discussion

12.15-14.00 Lunch Break

14.00-15.00 Actual Infinity versus Potential Infinity (Enis Doko/Koç University, Physics)

15.00-15.15 Coffee Break

15.15-16.15 Discussion

16.15-16.30 Coffee Break

16.30-17.30 A Scientific Evaluation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument (Ali Kaya/ Boğaziçi University, Physics)

17.30-17.45 Coffee Break

17.45-18.45 Discussion

Further info can be found here.