Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Event Date: 25 May 2012
Senate House
Room S349
University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU

The Institute of Philosophy presents

Understanding Equality

PROGRAMME:

10.00 Registration

10.15 Joseph Raz (Columbia & King’s College London) – Equality: Political not Philosophical

11.45 Coffee

12.00 Veronique Munoz-Darde (UCL & Berkeley) – All the Fun in the Fair: The Elusive Case of Equality

1.30 Lunch (own arrangements)

2.30 Niko Kolodny (Berkeley) – Rule Over None: Social Equality and the Value of Democracy

4.00 Tea

4.30-6.00 Sam Scheffler (NYU) – The Practice of Equality

Event Date: 21May 2012
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

The Aristotelian Society presents:

Professor Michael Thompson (University of Pittsburgh) – You and I

Michael Thompson received his PhD in Philosophy at UCLA, where he was a student of Philippa Foot. He is a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, and was formerly an Assistant Professor at UCLA. He is the author of Life and Action (Harvard University Press 2008, 2012; Suhrkamp 2011) and “What is it to Wrong Someone?” in Reason and Value, ed. Wallace et al. (O.U.P. 2006).

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Event Date 17 – 18 May 2012

Day 1: Bolivar Hall,
54 Grafton Way, London WC1.
Day 2: Large Common Room,
Goodenough College,
Mecklenburgh Square, London WC1N

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy

Presents:

Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts

2011–2013 (AHRC 914469)

Workshop 3

Case Studies 2. Transdisciplinary Problematics: Anti-humanism and Gender Study

This two-day workshop will examine the notion of a transdisciplinarity problematic, via the cases of anti-humanism and gender studies. The first day will approach theoretical anti-humanism from the standpoint of its destructive effect upon disciplinary fields in the humanities and as a radical problematisation of the discipline of philosophy in particular. The second day will focus on gender studies as a transdisciplinary problematic and on the transdisciplinary nature of the concept of gender itself. Topics will include the historical reconstruction of ‘gender’ as a boundary-crossing concept; the relation of its conceptual content to its functioning as a general concept across disciplines; the transformation of the disciplines in the humanities by ‘gender’ and gender studies; and the current productivity of ‘gender’.

Day 2: Gender Studies

Ken Corbett – The Transforming Nexus:  Psychoanalysis, Social Theory and Queer Childhood

The social critique of the normal is now developing developmental theories.  Questioning the rigid necessity of a normative symbolic order has led not only to rethinking human development, but also to the re-conception of psychotherapeutic care. The frame of psychotherapeutic action has been rethought as a potential field open to both the patient and analyst, one that necessitates a broader-based analysis, one that includes the relational exchange between patient and analyst, not just what has come to be called the “one person” psychology of the patient.
I have come to think of one technical feature of this practice as seeking what I refer to as ‘a transforming nexus’.  I move forward to illustrate this process because I could not think about it outside of my doubled education in psychoanalysis and queer theory. The congress and accomplishment of this union, this potential space, if you will, seems important to catalogue and consider.  What is more, it is suspension, the knitting nexus, and the transfers that unfurl to shape this space that clinical psychoanalysis has to offer, as it may be similar to and/or distinguished from queer literary, theoretical or textual analytic instruments, aims and spaces

Ken Corbett, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is the author of Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities (Yale University Press, 2009).

Lynne Segal is Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies, Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include: Is the Future Female? (1987), Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (1990), Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure (1994), Why Feminism? (1999) and Making Trouble: Politics and Life (2007).

Event Date 17 – 18 May 2012

Day 1: Bolivar Hall,
54 Grafton Way, London WC1.
Day 2: Large Common Room,
Goodenough College,
Mecklenburgh Square, London WC1N

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy

Presents:

Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts

2011–2013 (AHRC 914469)

Workshop 3

Case Studies 2. Transdisciplinary Problematics: Anti-humanism and Gender Study

This two-day workshop will examine the notion of a transdisciplinarity problematic, via the cases of anti-humanism and gender studies. The first day will approach theoretical anti-humanism from the standpoint of its destructive effect upon disciplinary fields in the humanities and as a radical problematisation of the discipline of philosophy in particular. The second day will focus on gender studies as a transdisciplinary problematic and on the transdisciplinary nature of the concept of gender itself. Topics will include the historical reconstruction of ‘gender’ as a boundary-crossing concept; the relation of its conceptual content to its functioning as a general concept across disciplines; the transformation of the disciplines in the humanities by ‘gender’ and gender studies; and the current productivity of ‘gender’.

Day 2: Gender Studies

Sara Heinämaa – Sex, Gender and Embodiment: A Critique of Concepts

This paper consists of two parts. The first part offers a set of systematic and historical clarifications of the conceptual distinction between gender and sex. The aim is to get clear about the senses in which these concepts are used in contemporary social and human sciences. The latter part shows how the phenomenological account of human embodiment differs from the dominant paradigm of sex-gender interaction. It argues that the female and male bodies which are thematized, theorized, and explained by the biosciences, and distinguished from gendered roles and gendered performances in the social sciences, are themselves results of complicated processes of objectification which rest in their sense on two fundamental types of experiencing bodies: living bodies as instruments for intending material things and living bodies as expressions in communicative interaction with others. This does not mean that the human body would be a mere social construct or cultural artifact. Even if the bioscientific articulation of the human body is an outcome of complicated scientific practices of objectivization, the body itself is fundamentally a prescientific object that is co-given to us in action and communication and is not something that we make, fabricate, or invent.

Sara Heinämaa is a senior lecturer in theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. Currently, she works as Academy Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki (2008–2013). She has published several articles on phenomenology of embodiment, selfhood, personhood, and intersubjectivity. She is the author of Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir (2003), and has co-edited Consciousness: From Perception to Reflection (2007) and Psychology and Philosophy: Inquiries into the Soul from Late Scholasticism to Contemporary Though (2008). Her latest publications include Death, Birth and the Feminine: Essays in the Philosophy of Embodiment (2010), with Robin May Schott, Vigdis Songe-Møller, and Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir.

Event Date 17 – 18 May 2012

Day 1: Bolivar Hall,
54 Grafton Way, London WC1.
Day 2: Large Common Room,
Goodenough College,
Mecklenburgh Square, London WC1N

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy

Presents:

Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts

2011–2013 (AHRC 914469)

Workshop 3

Case Studies 2. Transdisciplinary Problematics: Anti-humanism and Gender Study

This two-day workshop will examine the notion of a transdisciplinarity problematic, via the cases of anti-humanism and gender studies. The first day will approach theoretical anti-humanism from the standpoint of its destructive effect upon disciplinary fields in the humanities and as a radical problematisation of the discipline of philosophy in particular. The second day will focus on gender studies as a transdisciplinary problematic and on the transdisciplinary nature of the concept of gender itself. Topics will include the historical reconstruction of ‘gender’ as a boundary-crossing concept; the relation of its conceptual content to its functioning as a general concept across disciplines; the transformation of the disciplines in the humanities by ‘gender’ and gender studies; and the current productivity of ‘gender’.

Day 2: Gender Studies

Tuija Pulkkinen - Disciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity in Gender Studies

Over the last forty years Women’s and Gender Studies have effectively grown into globally practised academic disciplines while simultaneously resisting the notion of disciplinarity and strongly advocating multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinarity. The defining paradox of gaining identity through refusing an identity is a practice that continues to perform strongly in the field of Gender Studies. From the perspective of the institutional promotion of innovation, Gender Studies could thus be viewed as a successful academic product. From another perspective, it could, along with cultural studies, be viewed as having a destructive effect upon disciplinary fields in the humanities. In this paper, I will discuss the very particular historical conditions of Gender Studies as a transdiciplinary intellectual discipline. I will argue that the critical, transformative, interventionist practices within Gender Studies promote and provide space for intellectual exercise in liaison with theoretical anti-humanism. At its most interesting, scholarship in Gender Studies takes part in a radical problematisation of the discipline of philosophy in particular.

Tuija Pulkkinen is an academy Professor of the Academy of Finland, Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Helsinki, and leader of the research team Politics of Philosophy and Gender (PPhiG). Trained as a philosopher, as well as a historian and political theorist, she has in the past engaged in studies of Hegel, postmodern thought and, more recently, conceptual history. Her areas of specialization include feminist theory and feminist political theory. Her many publications include The Postmodern and Political Agency (2000), and the edited volumes The Ashgate Research Companion to The Politics of Democratization in Europe: Concepts and Histories (2008); Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? (with Kimberly Hutchings, 2010) and Siveellisyydestä seksuaalisuuteen – poliittisen käsitteen historia [From Sittlichkeit to Sexuality – the History of a Political Concept]  (2011). She is also the chair of the Finnish Women’s Studies Society, and a board member of International Association of Women Philosophers.

Event Date 17 – 18 May 2012

Day 1: Bolivar Hall,
54 Grafton Way, London WC1.
Day 2: Large Common Room,
Goodenough College,
Mecklenburgh Square, London WC1N

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy

Presents:

Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts

2011–2013 (AHRC 914469)

Workshop 3

Case Studies 2. Transdisciplinary Problematics: Anti-humanism and Gender Study

This two-day workshop will examine the notion of a transdisciplinarity problematic, via the cases of anti-humanism and gender studies. The first day will approach theoretical anti-humanism from the standpoint of its destructive effect upon disciplinary fields in the humanities and as a radical problematisation of the discipline of philosophy in particular. The second day will focus on gender studies as a transdisciplinary problematic and on the transdisciplinary nature of the concept of gender itself. Topics will include the historical reconstruction of ‘gender’ as a boundary-crossing concept; the relation of its conceptual content to its functioning as a general concept across disciplines; the transformation of the disciplines in the humanities by ‘gender’ and gender studies; and the current productivity of ‘gender’.

Day 1: Anti-humanism

David Cunningham – Intersciences, Philosophy and Writing

In a 1982 report written in preparation for the founding of the Collège International de Philosophie, Derrida ‘links’ the word ‘philosophy’ in the Collège’s title to a concept of what he terms ‘intersciences’. This term (borrowed from Einstein) designates, Derrida writes, ‘any thematic, any field, any research activity … that the map of institutions, at a given moment, does not yet grant stable, accredited, habitable departments’. Such ‘zones of instability’ are ‘sites of great traffic, privileged sites for the formation of new objects or rather of new thematic networks’. In this paper I want to consider the concept of transdisciplinarity that this ‘motif of intersection or crossing’ implies, and to seek to trace some of the dilemmas that may be located in the very ‘link’ it establishes to philosophy itself. To the extent that deconstruction is associated by Derrida and others with a form of ‘thinking that, while undertaken by philosophy, does not belong to it’, such a ‘philosophizing beyond philosophy’ emerges necessarily from the critique (or deconstruction) of philosophy’s own self-sufficiency. In doing so, however, it also confronts the difficulty of disentangling the ‘interscientific’ space(s) of transdisciplinarity that might be opened up by such going ‘beyond philosophy’ either from the meta-disciplinary claims of philosophy itself, on the one hand, or from some hegemonic position assumed by another ‘alternate’ discipline, on the other. Taking this dilemma to be defined in Derrida’s early work on ‘writing’ by his engagement, above all, with the repercussions, for philosophy, of both a so-called ‘linguistic turn’ within the ‘human sciences’, in general, and of structuralism’s cross-disciplinary claims, in particular, this will, in turn, be explored through a re-reading of Derrida’s account of grammatology as that which ‘must not be one of the sciences of man’, nor ‘just one regional science among others’.

David Cunningham is Principal Lecturer in English Literature and Deputy Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culure at the University of Westminster. He is the co-editor of Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century (2005) and Adorno and Literature (2006). He is a member of the Editoiral Collective of the journal Radical Philosophy.

Simon Morgan Wortham is Professor of English Literature and Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University London. His research has focused on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. His most recent books are The Derrida Dictionary (2010) and Derrida: Writing Events (2008). He is currently writing a book on sleep.

Event Date 17 – 18 May 2012

Day 1: Bolivar Hall,
54 Grafton Way, London WC1.
Day 2: Large Common Room,
Goodenough College,
Mecklenburgh Square, London WC1N

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy

Presents:

Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts

2011–2013 (AHRC 914469)

Workshop 3

Case Studies 2. Transdisciplinary Problematics: Anti-humanism and Gender Study

This two-day workshop will examine the notion of a transdisciplinarity problematic, via the cases of anti-humanism and gender studies. The first day will approach theoretical anti-humanism from the standpoint of its destructive effect upon disciplinary fields in the humanities and as a radical problematisation of the discipline of philosophy in particular. The second day will focus on gender studies as a transdisciplinary problematic and on the transdisciplinary nature of the concept of gender itself. Topics will include the historical reconstruction of ‘gender’ as a boundary-crossing concept; the relation of its conceptual content to its functioning as a general concept across disciplines; the transformation of the disciplines in the humanities by ‘gender’ and gender studies; and the current productivity of ‘gender’.

Day 1: Anti-humanism

Nina Power – Is Antihumanism Transdisciplinary?

This paper will address the way in which the humanism/antihumanism debate as configured i) as a way of reading Marx and ii) as an inter-disciplinary problematic that presents philosophy with a series of problems regarding the nature of its own ‘subject’ raises methodological and political problems concerning both how, why and what we read, and the way philosophy seeks to carve out a space for a philosophical ‘subject’ that is somehow separate from the subject understood as both a political and legal entity. The paper will examine Badiou’s curious relation to the humanism/ antihumanism debate, and by doing so address his relationship to Marx’s critique of philosophy. It will argue for a notion of antihumanism that is both consistent with Marx’s historically and politically specific critique of philosophy, and for a notion of antihumanism that is productively transdisciplinary.

Nina Power is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University and Tutor in Critical Writing in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art, London. She is the author of One-Dimensional Woman (Zer0, 2009) and a forthcoming book on the collective subject (Brill).

Event Date 17 – 18 May 2012

Day 1: Bolivar Hall,
54 Grafton Way, London WC1.
Day 2: Large Common Room,
Goodenough College,
Mecklenburgh Square, London WC1N

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy

Presents:

Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts

2011–2013 (AHRC 914469)

Workshop 3

Case Studies 2. Transdisciplinary Problematics: Anti-humanism and Gender Study

This two-day workshop will examine the notion of a transdisciplinarity problematic, via the cases of anti-humanism and gender studies. The first day will approach theoretical anti-humanism from the standpoint of its destructive effect upon disciplinary fields in the humanities and as a radical problematisation of the discipline of philosophy in particular. The second day will focus on gender studies as a transdisciplinary problematic and on the transdisciplinary nature of the concept of gender itself. Topics will include the historical reconstruction of ‘gender’ as a boundary-crossing concept; the relation of its conceptual content to its functioning as a general concept across disciplines; the transformation of the disciplines in the humanities by ‘gender’ and gender studies; and the current productivity of ‘gender’.

Day 1: Anti-humanism

Étienne Balibar – Anti-Humanism, and the Question of Philosophical Anthropology

The controversy opposing “humanism” and “anti-humanism” was especially virulent in the 1960s and 70s in France, involving different tendencies of Phenomenology, Marxism, Structuralism and Hegelianism, around such issues as the meaning of history and the agency (or praxis) of the individual and collective subject. In order to trace its genealogy, the lecture will begin with a presentation of the “two scenes” on which the “dispute of humanism” (Althusser) was fought in the 20th century as a debate involving the redefinition of philosophy as “anthropology”, which were dominated by the works of Heidegger and Lévi-Strauss, respectively. It will then focus on Michel Foucault’s “intervention” in The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses, 1966), where the two debates are merged into a single attempt at divorcing the “quasi-transcendental” objects of anthropology from their humanist prerequisite, from the point of view of the “analytic of the finitude” itself. In conclusion, it will propose some hypotheses on the dividing lines ‘or “points of heresy” that characterize the subsequent debate on epistemology, ethics and politics “after the death of Man”.

Etienne Balibar was born in 1942. He graduated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne in Paris, took his PhD from the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands). He has an Habilitation from Université de Paris I. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Paris 10, Nanterre, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine (USA). Since 2008, he has been Professorial Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. Starting in September 2012, he will be Anniversary Chair Professor in Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University London.  His books in English include Reading Capital (with Louis Althusser) (1965), On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1976) and Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (Verso, 1991, with Immanuel Wallerstein), Masses, Classes, Ideas (Routledge, 1994), The Philosophy of Marx (Verso 1995), Spinoza and Politics (Verso 1998), Politics and the Other Scene (Verso, 2002) and We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, 2004). Forthcoming are Extreme Violence and the Problem of Civility (the 1996 Wellek Library Lectures 1996, Columbia University Press), and The Proposition of Equaliberty (Duke University Press).

Event Date: 14 and 15 May 2012
Senate House
Room S261
University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU

The Institute of Philosophy presents

Neuroscience, Responsibility and the Law

DAY 1 (Monday 14 May)

Al Mele: Free will and substance dualism: the real scientific threat to free will?
[AUDIO HERE]

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Marcel Brass: Who is in control? Brain correlates of intentional action
[AUDIO HERE]

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Paul Catley: Responsibility and personality change
[AUDIO HERE]
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DAY 2 (Tuesday 15 May)

Lisa Claydon: Criminal responsibility and the issue of involuntariness
[AUDIO HERE]

Event Date: 14 May 2012
Senate House
University of London
London WC1E 7HU

The Aristotelian Society presents:

Professor Frank Jackson (Princeton University) – Leibniz’s Law and the Philosophy of Mind

We draw some metaphysical conclusions about colour and belief from some epistemological commonplaces. It turns out that this requires us to challenge orthodoxy on the causal efficacy of mental properties and to rewrite the standard argument against dualism, but in a way which is good news for functionalists about the mind.
Under what conditions is P evidence for Q? A comprehensive answer to that question is hard and inevitably controversial. We can however say three things that are, it seems to me, uncontroversial. Whether or not P is evidence for Q depends on i) what Pis, ii) what Q is, and iii) the background evidence. The details of how one might enlarge on these three observations will inevitably be controversial but the basic thought behind each is close to a truism.
The essay is about how to deploy these observations, along with some equally commonsensical observations about when we are entitled to believe that one or another property is instantiated, to reach conclusions in the philosophy of mind on subjects that have been much debated. You might describe this essay as an exercise in using the noncontroversial to adjudicate the controversial. I expect that it will, in its turn, be controversial.
Much of the argumentation will employ Leibniz’s law in epistemic contexts. I know from experience that this worries people. We all know that epistemic contexts are opaque. This, perhaps understandably, suggests that using Leibniz’s law in epistemic contexts involves a fallacy of the famous masked man variety. This means it is sensible (essential?) to take a moment to review why it is fine to use Leibniz’s law in epistemic contexts. Our review will be conducted as a short commentary on an issue that Quine most especially put on the table many years ago, in for example (1966).

Frank Jackson is a regular visiting professor at Princeton University and holds fractional research positions at The Australian National University and La Trobe University. He is a Corresponding Fellow of The British Academy. His publications include: Perception (Cambridge UP 1977), Conditionals (Blackwell1987), The Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, co-authored with David Braddon-Mitchell (Blackwell, 1996), From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford UP 1998), Language, Names, and Information (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Professor Jackson has held a number of visiting positions, most recently as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Cambridge University in 2011.

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