Public Events
Postponed
New York Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series: Hannah Ginsborg (UC Berkeley)
The 2020 NYIP Lecture Series has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic (to be rescheduled when conditions permit).
Fall 2019
Tuesday, October 29th
Brown Bag Talk: Julian Nida-Rümelin (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
"Structural Rationality"
12:15pm - 2:00pm
NYU Department of Philosophy, 6th Floor Lounge
5 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003
Lunch will be served.
For information, contact: nyip.events@nyu.edu
Spring 2019
Friday, May 3rd - Saturday, May 4th
The Ethics of Donor Conception
There are no reliable statistics on how many children are created in the United States from donated gametes. The CDC, which collects statistics on in vitro fertilization, reported that roughly 9,000 children were born from IVF with donated eggs in 2015. But according to the Donor Sibling, Registry, a survey of such parents found that 40% of those responding were never asked to report the birth of their child. And most births from donated sperm do not require IVF and are therefore not counted at all. Journalists writing about donor conception tend to rely on an outdated report of the Office of Technology Assessment, which estimated 30,000 births from donor insemination in the year 1986/87. The fertility industry has grown enormously since that date.
Although many countries have outlawed or restricted anonymous donor conception, the practice is virtually unregulated in this country. And because the U.S. has never debated legislation or regulation for donor conception, there has been almost no public discussion of whether it is ethical and, if so, under what circumstances and conditions.
Friday and Saturday, 9:00am - 6:00pm
Kimmel Center, Room 802
60 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012
Registration is free but required. Please register here.
For information, contact: nyip.events@nyu.edu
Friday, April 5th
NYIP Biennial Lecture: Kieran Setiya (MIT)
"Public Philosophy"
In recent years, academic philosophers have increasingly pursued what is now called “public philosophy.” Almost everyone agrees that this development is positive. But what is public philosophy? What should it be? And why does it matter? Looking back to models both ancient and modern, this talk will be an exercise in public philosophy that explores the nature and value of public philosophy.
5:00 - 7:00pm
Silver Center, Jurow Lecture Hall
31 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003
Registration is free but required. Please register here.
A reception will follow the lecture.
For information, contact: nyip.events@nyu.edu
Spring 2018
Friday, May 4th
NYIP Lunchtime Talk: Tim Crane (CEU)
"Psychologism and Behaviourism Revisited"
12:30pm - 2:00pm
NYU Department of Philosophy, Room 202
5 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003
Lunch will be served.
For information, contact: nyip.events@nyu.edu
Wednesday March 21 (Part 1)
Friday March 23 (Part 2)
Wednesday March 28 (Part 3)
New York Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series Featuring Michael Friedman (Stanford)
Part 1 (Cancelled due to inclement weather)
6:15pm-8:15pm
NYU Law School, Lipton Hall
108 West 3rd Street, New York, NY 10012
Part 2
4pm-6pm
NYU Law School, Lipton Hall
108 West 3rd Street, New York, NY 10012
Watch the March 23rd lecture here.
Part 3
6:15pm-8:15pm
NYU Philosophy Department
5 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003
Watch the March 28th lecture here.
For title/abstract, please visit the NYU Philosophy Department's event's page.
For information, contact: Amy Moore (akm411@nyu.edu)
Fall 2017
Friday, October 6th
Saturday October 7th
Deep Disagreements: Philosophical and Legal Perspectives
9:30 a.m. – 6:30 p.m.
Room 202, 5 Washington Place
Conference Program can be viewed here.
If you would like to attend, please register here.
For information, contact: Amy Moore (akm411@nyu.edu)
Spring 2017
Saturday, April 22nd
Meaning and Other Things: A Conference Celebrating the Work of Stephen Schiffer
9:00 a.m. – 6:30 p.m.
Auditorium 101, 5 Washington Place
Speakers:
Una Stojnić (NYU/Columbia)
Karen Lewis (Barnard)
Ray Buchanan (University of Texas at Austin)
Hartry Field (NYU)
Crispin Wright (NYU)
Ian Rumfitt (Oxford University)
Sponsored by the New York Institute of Philosophy
For information, contact: nyip.events@nyu.edu
Friday, February 10th
Rage Against the Machine: Anger as a political emotion
The talk asks how we should respond to large scale social injustices like the pattern of police shootings to which the Black Lives Matter movement has called attention. The focus is on our moral and emotional responses: How should we feel when we take in this sort of sprawling and uncoordinated pattern of injustice? Whom should we blame? How should we judge? The natural response to injustice recognized as such is anger (moral outrage). But anger is a form of blame. For deep reasons, it is hard to stay angry at someone when one is genuinely uncertain about whether he is morally responsible for what he did. Confronted with large scale social injustice, this is our predicament: it is often quite hard to say, given our uncertainty about the underlying facts, who if anyone is to blame, both for concrete episodes of injustice and for the pattern as a whole. Our emotional response thus tends to oscillate between blame focused on individuals — which ebbs as we lose confidence in their blameworthiness — and an abstract frustration that is qualitatively quite different from anger. The aim of this talk is to ask whether there is a stable form of political anger that does not depend on judgments of blameworthiness in this way.
Fall 2016
Monday, September 26th
Inference to the Best Explanation and the Receipt of Testimony: Testimonial Reductionism Vindicated
I develop a local reductionist account of what is required for testimonial beliefs to be justified, and argue that human recipients of testimony typically form their beliefs in accordance with these requirements. Recipients estimate the trustworthiness of a speaker’s assertion by constructing a mini-psychological theory of her, arriving at this by inference to the best explanation, and accept what they are told only if this theory has it that the speaker is expressing her knowledge. The existence of a social norm governing assertion, the knowledge norm, is a key factor making such an explanation accessible to recipients. This local reductionsm supports explanationism as a general account of the justification of empirical beliefs.
Speakers: Elizabeth Fricker (Magdalen College, Oxford)
Location: 5 Washington Place, Room 202
Spring 2016
Monday, February 1st
Louise Hanson (Cambridge) "The Real Problem with Evolutionary Debunking Arguments"
Monday February 1st, 1pm
Location: 5 Washington Place, Room 202
Speakers: Louise Hanson
Friday, February 26th -
Friday, March 4th
Peter Railton "Intuition and Intuitions"
Friday, February 26, 5pm, Lipton Hall (108 West Third St)
Tuesday March 1st, 5pm, Jurow Hall (100 Washington Square East)
Friday March 4th, 5pm, Jurow Hall (100 Washington Square East)
A reception will follow each talk.
Speakers: Peter Railton
The ideas of intuition and intuitions have played an important role in philosophy at least since the time of Aristotle, and are firmly established in everyday life, where we often speak of acting intuitively, or of relying upon intuitions when making up our minds about what to think or feel. While we often cannot explain why, intuition and intuitions seem to possess a kind of authority we are reluctant to ignore.
Despite the ubiquity of appeals to intuition and intuitions, these notions have never been entirely free of an air of mystery and concomitant doubt. And recent years have witnessed an intensification of this doubt, partly due to work in cognitive psychology and “experimental philosophy”.
In these talks I will be undertaking a qualified defense of intuition and intuitions, by developing a theory of what mental structures and processes might lie behind some of the most important appeals to intuition and intuitions in philosophy and everyday life. This defense takes empirical psychology seriously, and connects intuition and intuitions with a rethinking now underway of the fundamental architecture of the mind in intelligent animals such as ourselves—detailed study indicates the centrality of statistical learning and evaluative, model-based action guidance. It seems that a posteriori evidence and a priori normative considerations are converging, and that we now can see what intuition and intuitions might actually be, how they can be well-grounded, and also what particular limitations they can be expected to have.
Lecture 1 will introduce the notions of intuition and intuitions I will be using and connect them with some key uses in traditional and contemporary philosophy. I then will begin to present the substantive account of intuition and intuitions I am developing, using the case of ethical intuitions as the key focus. I will also present some evidence that this account affords a plausible explanation of how intuitions seem to work in some well-known “problem cases” in ethics, e.g., trolley problems, and what this might tell us about their authority.
Lecture 2 will continue to develop the substantive account, extending it to epistemology and the theory of action. We will consider arguments and evidence concerning the structure of intuitive knowledge, how it yields spontaneous learning, and how it coordinates the key elements of thought and action to make possible self-consciously rational thought and behavior. We will consider as well the vulnerabilities of intuitive knowledge, and what distinctive contribution self-conscious thought can make to overcoming them.
Lecture 3 will move into “meta” issues. Why might intuition and intuitions have a special role to play in philosophical analysis, and what might this tell us about how concepts operate in natural language? How might the present account of intuition and intuitions help resolve some of the challenges faced by naturalism in ethics and epistemology? I believe it is now possible to defend what I call the “strong program” in meta-normative naturalism, according to which the naturalist must discharge the burden of showing, not only that a naturalistic basis could in principle be given of key normative phenomena, but that such a grounding plausibly exists.
Friday, April 1st
Örsan Öymen "Scepticism in Sextus, Hume and Nietzsche"
Friday, April 1, 12:30 p.m.
5 Washington Place, Room 202
Speakers: Örsan Öymen
Tuesday, May 10th
Sean Carroll (Caltech ) "Quantum Field Theory and the Limits of Knowledge"
May 10th, 2pm
5 Washington Place, Room 101
Speakers: Sean Carroll
Fall 2015
Friday, September 25th
Julia Wise "Effective Altruism" (Lunch Talk)
Location: 6th floor lounge, 5 Washington Pl
Time: 1-2:30pm
Speakers: Julia Wise
Friday, October 16th
Tamar Gendler (Yale) Self-Regulation: A Recipe Book for Foragers
Location: Jurow Hall, 100 Washington Square East
Time: 7–9 pm
What does it feel like to act virtuously? The western philosophical tradition offers two competing answers to this question. The first, commonly associated with Aristotle, tells us that virtuous actions should feel automatic and effortless; they are the result of long-term cultivation of character and habit. The second, commonly (and perhaps mistakenly) associated with Kant, tells us that virtuous actions involve effortfully overcoming inclinations to the contrary; they are the result of explicitly willing the correct action in the particular circumstance. Which of these pictures more accurately depicts real-life virtuous agents? Drawing on recent work in developmental, cognitive and social psychology, as well as historical and contemporary work in western philosophy, this talk offers reasons for thinking that the original dichotomy is mistaken, and that both pictures offer important insights on the nature and value of self-regulation.
Speakers: Tamar Gendler
Spring 2015
Saturday, May 1st -
Monday, May 3rd
The Metaphysics of Quantity
Schedule link
Speakers: David Baker, Sam Cowling, Marco Dees, Cian Dorr, Maya Eddon, Niels Martens, Brent Mundy, Zee Perry, Brad Skow, Jessica Wilson
Location: NYU Philosophy Department, 5 Washington Place, Rooms 201 (Friday) and 101 (Saturday/Sunday)
Saturday, February 21st
Workshop on Clausal Complements, Truthmaking, and Attitudes
Program
Speakers: Jane Grimshaw, Wataru Uegaki, Kit Fine, Friederike Moltmann, Mark Richard
Thursday, March 5th -
Saturday, March 7th
Philosophy of Street Art: Art in & of the Street
Speakers: Christiane Merritt, Shelby Moser, Roy T. Cook, Tony Chackal, Alison Young, Christopher Nagel, Alison Lanier, Angela Sun, Erich Hatala Matthes, Mary Beth Willard, Sondra Bacharach
Monday, April 27th
What is Music?
Francis Wolff, Professor of Philosophy at the Ecole Normal Supérieure, Paris, will present a paper on "What is Music?"
The discussion will be moderated by Paul Boghossian, Director of the New York Institute of Philosophy at NYU.
A reception will follow.
Speakers: Francis Wolff
Moderator: Paul Boghossian
Fall 2014
Monday, September 15th
New York Philosophical Logic Group Meeting
"Strict Truthmaking Logic"
Speakers: Mark Jago (University of Nottingham)
Monday, October 6th
New York Philosophical Logic Group Meeting
"‘Plural logic and Sensitivity to Order"
Speakers: David Nicolas (Instutut Jean Nicod)
Saturday, October 18th -
Sunday, October 19th
Workshop on Naturalistic Approaches to Ethics and Meta-ethics
Program.
Speakers: Anthony Appiah, Max Barkhausen, Nic Bommarito, Justin D'Arms, Daniel Jacobson, Ryan Muldoon, Regina Rini, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Brian Skyrms, Jada Twedt Strabbing, Sharon Street
Location: New York University Philosophy Department, 5 Washington Place, Room 101
Monday, November 10th
New York Philosophical Logic Group Meeting
Title TBD
Speakers: Joel Hamkins (CUNY)
Monday, December 8th
New York Philosophical Logic Group Meeting
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Spring 2014
Friday, April 11th -
Sunday, April 13th
Research Workshop: Logical and Modal Space
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Friday, April 18th -
Friday, April 25th
Lecture: New York Institute of Philosophy Lectures
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Saturday, May 10th
Workshop on Imperatives
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Friday, May 16th -
Saturday, May 17th
Value and Virtue in Ethics and Epistemology
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Spring 2013
Friday, January 25th -
Sunday, January 27th
Conference on the Philosophy of Kit Fine
NYU will host a conference on the philosophy of Kit Fine on January 25-27, 2013, jointly sponsored by the New York Institute of Philosophy, the NYU Philosophy Department, the University of Bucharest and Oxford University Press. The conference will be held in the NYU philosophy department auditorium at 5 Washington Place and will feature many of the contributors to a new volume of essays on Fine's work, edited by Mircea Dumitru and forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
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Thursday, March 21st -
Saturday, March 23rd
Vagueness in Law: Philosophical and Legal Approaches
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Fall 2010
Friday, October 22nd -
Sunday, October 24th
Conference on the Nature of Taste
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Saturday, November 20th
Workshop on the Phenomenology of Synesthesia
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Fall 2009
Friday, October 30th -Saturday, October 31st, 9:00 a.m. -5:00 p.m.
Lecture: Denis Dutton Lecture in Philosophy
Denis Dutton, author of, The Art Instinct, (University of Canterbury, New Zealand)
Speakers: Denis Dutton
Location: New York University Philosophy Department, 5 Washington Place Room 101
Spring 2009
Friday, January 23rd,
4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Workshop on Perception, Action, and the Self
Jointly sponsored by Transitions, the CNRS/NYU Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the New York Institute of Philosophy.
Speakers: Mel Goodale, Amanda Woodward, Patrick Haggard and Hakwan Lau.
Location: New York University Philosophy Department, 5 Washington Place, 2nd floor seminar room.
Fall 2008
Saturday, December 8th
Panel discussion on Church and State and Public Science Education
Hosted by the Project on Science and Religion.
Speakers: Ronald Dworkin, Kent Greenawalt, Noah Feldman, and Jeremy Waldron
Fall 2007
Tuesday, November 13th
Launch of the NYIP
Lecture by Professor Ronald Dworkin titled "Can We Disagree About Law or Morals?" Comments by Professor Gideon Rosen.
Watch the video here.
Other
Wednesday, May 9th
Public Discussion of Explanation, Epistemology, and Intelligent Design
Hosted by the Science and Religion Project.
Speakers: Alvin Plantinga, Philip Kitcher, H. Allen Orr, and Michael Behe
Location: New York University Philosophy Department, 5 Washington Place, 2nd floor seminar room.