2019 Conference on Issues in Modern Philosophy: Normativity

The Sixteenth Annual NYU Conference on Issues in Modern Philosophy

November 8-9, 2019

Kimmel Center, Room 914

60 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012

Registration is free but required. Please register on our Eventbrite page.

The New York University Department of Philosophy will host the sixteenth in its series of conferences on issues in the history of modern philosophy on November 8 and 9, 2019. Each conference in the series examines the development of a central philosophical problem from early modern philosophy to the present, exploring the evolution of formulations of the problem and of approaches to resolving it. By examining the work of philosophers of the past both in historical context and in relation to contemporary philosophical thinking, the conferences allow philosophy’s past and present to illuminate one another.

• Nomy Arpaly - Nomy Arpaly is a professor of philosophy at Brown University. She is the author of three books (one of which is co-authored with Timothy Schroeder) and various articles. She has written about rationality, reasons and deliberation, desire, virtue and moral worth, moral responsibility, and the relationship between being a good person and having accurate moral beliefs. Lately she has been working in normative ethics as well.
  
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• Rachel Cohon - Rachel Cohon is Professor of Philosophy at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of Hume’s Morality: Feeling and Fabrication (Oxford University Press, 2008). She edited Hume: Moral and Political Philosophy (Ashgate, 2001), and wrote the entry on Hume’s moral and political philosophy in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. She has published many journal articles and anthology chapters on Hume’s philosophy, as well as articles on topics in metaethics and moral psychology such as normative reasons for action and situationism and promises.
  
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• João Constâncio - João Constâncio is Associate Professor of philosophy at Nova University of Lisbon (UNL/ FCSH). He earned his PhD there with a dissertation on Plato in 2005.  He is Head of the Philosophy Department, and also the Director of IFILNOVA (Instituto de Filosofia da Nova). He is the author of Arte e niilismo: Nietzsche e o enigma do mundo (2013) and co-editor of five books on Nietzsche, including Nietzsche and the Problem of Subjectivity (De Gruyter, 2015) and Nietzsche and Kantian Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2017). He has also directed and co-directed several funded projects on Nietzsche and published many articles on this and other authors, including ‘On Consciousness: Nietzsche’s Departure from Schopenhauer’, Nietzsche-Studien 40 (2011) and “Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: On Nihilism and the Ascetic ‘Will to Nothingness’”, in: Shapshay, S. Ed., The Palgrave Handbook to Nietzsche, London: Springer/ Palgrave, 2017.
  
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• Stephen Darwall - Stephen Darwall is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor, Philosophy at Yale University, and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan. He has written widely on the history and foundations of ethics. His books include Impartial Reason, The British Moralists and the Internal Ought, Welfare and Rational Care, The Second-Person Standpoint, and two recent collections of his essays, published by Oxford University Press.  He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, with David Velleman, a founding co-editor of Philosophers' Imprint.
  
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• Julia Driver - Julia Driver is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and Professorial Fellow at CEPPA, the University of St. Andrews.  She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from The Johns Hopkins University and has published books and articles in the areas of normative ethical theory, moral psychology, and meta-ethics. She is currently working on a book manuscript on moral sentimentalism.
  
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• Gary Ebbs - Gary Ebbs is Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University, Bloomington.  He is author of Rule-Following and Realism (Harvard University Press, 1997), Truth and Words (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Carnap, Quine, and Putnam on Methods of Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and coauthor, with Anthony Brueckner, of Debating Self-Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He has also published many journal articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics in the philosophy of language, logic, and mind, as well as in epistemology and the history of analytic philosophy.
  
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• Michael Gill - Michael Gill is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He works on early modern moral philosophy, and on contemporary ethical issues. He is the author of Humean Moral Pluralism (Oxford) and The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics (Cambridge). He has also published articles on contemporary moral pluralism, on the comparison of morality to mathematics, and on physician-assisted suicide.
  
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• Hannah Ginsborg - Hannah Ginsborg is Willis S and Marion Slusser Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.  She has a B.A. from Oxford University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She is the author of The Normativity of Nature: Essays on Kant's Critique of Judgement (2015) and of articles on both historical and contemporary topics.
  
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• Janum Sethi - Janum Sethi is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She works primarily on Kant's theoretical and aesthetic philosophy, as well as on related issues in early modern philosophy, philosophy of perception, and aesthetics. Topics she is currently working on include the nature of subjectivity and self-consciousness in Kant, as well as the role of the aesthetic common sense in his account of judgment.
  
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• Jacqueline Taylor - Jacqueline Taylor is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of Reflecting Subjects: Passion, Sympathy, and Society in Hume’s Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2015), editor of Reading Hume on the Principles of Morals (OUP, in press), and co-editor (with David Fate Norton) of the Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge University Press, 2009). In addition to work on Hume and other Enlightenment figures, she has published articles and chapters in moral psychology, on such Humean topics as pride, moral praise, hate, and resentment.
  
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• Ariela Tubert - Ariela Tubert is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA.  She received a BA in Computer Science and Philosophy from New York University and MA and PhD degrees in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin.  She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Parr Center for Ethics and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Her research is in the areas of moral philosophy and action theory. She is primarily concerned with the connection between accounts of agency and free will and issues in meta-ethics and practical reason.  She has interests in nineteenth century philosophy, existentialism, and ethical issues in artificial intelligence and the environment. Her published work includes "Constitutive Arguments" (Philosophy Compass 5, 2010); "Korsgaard's Constitutive Arguments and the Principles of Practical Reason" (Philosophical Quarterly 61, 2011); "Nietzsche's Existentialist Freedom" (Journal of Nietzsche Studies 46, 2016); "Sound Advice and Internal Reasons" (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 97, 2016); and "Nietzsche and Self-Constitution," (The Nietzschean Mind, Routledge 2018).
  
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• Marcus Willaschek - Marcus Willaschek is Professor of Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt, member of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and chair of its Kant-Kommission, responsible for the Academy Edition of Kant’s writings. His publications include: Praktische Vernunft. Handlungstheorie und Moralbegründung bei Kant, Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler 1992; Der mentale Zugang zur Welt. Realismus, Skeptizismus und Intentionalität, Frankfurt: Klostermann 2003; Die Gegenwart des Pragmatismus (ed. with M. Hartmann and J. Liptow), Berlin: Suhrkamp 2013; Kant-Lexikon, 3 vols. (ed. with J. Stolzenberg, G. Mohr and St. Bacin), Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter 2015; and Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics. The Dialectic of Pure Reason, Cambridge: CUP 2018. Numerous articles mainly on Kant, the philosophy of action, free will, and epistemology. Click here for his personal website.

• 2018 "Philosophy's Use of Its History"
• 2017  "Idealism"
• 2016  "The Imagination”
• 2015  "God”
• 2014  "Animals”
• 2013  “Consciousness”
• 2012  “Inequality”
• 2011  "Freedom of the Will"
• 2010  "The Metaphysics of Modality"
• 2009  "The Foundations of Morality”
• 2008  “Skepticism”
• 2007  “Aesthetic Judgment”
• 2006  “Understanding Space and Time”
• 2005  “Reason and the Emotions in Modern Philosophy”
• 2004  “Self-consciousness and Personal Identity in Modern Philosophy”

The Philosophy Department provides reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities. Requests for accommodations should be submitted to philosophy@nyu.edu at least three weeks before the event.

Please email philo.modernconference@nyu.edu with any questions about the conference.