News
For more information and to register, please see this page.
March 13, 2025 | 4:30-6 pm
A panel discussion with Prabhat Patnaik, and Siddharth Varadajan. Moderated by Akeel Bilgrami.
Speakers
Akeel Bilgrami is the Sidney Morganbessor Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University.
Prabhat Patnaik is one of India's most eminent economists and taught for many years at Cambridge University and Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Siddharth Varadarajan is a journalist and editor in India, who was the founding editor of The Wire and the former editor of The Hindu.
Christia Mercer will receive the 2025 Stefanopoulos Philosophical Society Award on Friday, February 7 at Marist University. For more information, please see this page.
Christia Mercer is the Gustave M. Berne Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, editor of Oxford Philosophical Concepts, and co-editor of Oxford New Histories of Philosophy, a book series devoted to making philosophy more inclusive. In 2019-20, she served as president of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. She has published op-eds in the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, and other prominent news sources on the importance of prison justice reform, access to higher education, and the need to diversify philosophy. Her work was highlighted in a CBS News report on prison education. She has published widely in the history of philosophy and has been honored with Columbia's two most prestigious teaching awards. She studied art history in New York and Rome before earning her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University.
Aristotle’s Practical Epistemology presents a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s influential account of practical wisdom (phronēsis) by situating the topic within his broader theory of ethical knowledge. Interpreters have long struggled to make sense of the disparate features Aristotle seems to attribute to practical wisdom, particularly its role in bringing about individual choices and actions that fulfill the demands of the virtues of character and its status as an intellectual excellence or virtue of thought that is the analog, in the domain of ethical action, of theoretical wisdom (sophia) and craft (tekhnē), in their respective domains. The main contention of the book is that these features can be united when we see that phronēsis is a distinctively practical form of understanding. The book begins from the idea that Aristotle first establishes that we have ground-level ethical knowledge, described in the Nicomachean Ethics as ethical experience (empeiria), as a result of a decent upbringing, before identifying practical wisdom as a deeper form of understanding. This understanding involves a grasp of explanations, just as theoretical wisdom and craft do, yet it does not consist in a form of scientific or theoretical knowledge, which would be detached from practice. Rather, the understanding of the personal of practical wisdom involves grasping the goals that are characteristic of the several virtues of character—justice, courage, generosity, and the like—in such a way that they can be brought to bear on particular contexts of deliberation. That comprehensive perspective is why Aristotle thinks of practical wisdom as the same understanding as political wisdom.
About the Author
Dhananjay Jagannathan is an assistant professor of Philosophy and the director of Graduate Studies in the Classical Studies Program at Columbia University. He specializes in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, the history of ethics and political philosophy, medieval philosophy (especially Aquinas), and the intersection of philosophy and literature. Much of his recent work has focused on two strands of Aristotle's thought: ethical knowledge and practical wisdom; and justice and political community. His book Aristotle's Practical Epistemology was recently published by Oxford University Press. Other research interests include neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, tragedy as a literary and a moral concept, and the role of news journalism in democratic life.
About the Speakers
Michele Moody-Adams is Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University, where she served as Dean of Columbia College and Vice President for Undergraduate Education from 2009-2011. She has published on equality and social justice, moral psychology and virtues, and the philosophical implications of gender and race. She is the author of Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination and Political Hope (2022). She is also the author of a widely cited book on moral relativism, Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy (1997) and a co-author on the multi-author work Against Happiness ( 2023).
Hendrik Lorenz is Professor and Director of the Program in Classical Philosophy at Princeton University.
John Ma is a Professor of Classics at Columbia University. He is the author of Statues and Cities: Honorific Portraits and Civic Identity in the Hellenistic World, Antiochos III and the Cities of Western Asia Minor, and numerous articles on ancient history. His main interests lie in the history of the ancient Greek world and its broader context (including the ancient near-east). Within Greek history, he is particularly interested in the handling of epigraphical and archaeological evidence, historical geography, and the complexities of the Hellenistic world.
Katja Vogt is a Professor of Philosophy, Affiliate of Data Science Institute, and Director of the MA Program in Philosophy at Columbia University. She is a specialist in ancient philosophy, ethics, and normative epistemology, and a recipient of the Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award. Professor Vogt joined the Philosophy Department in 2002. She is interested in questions that figure both in ancient and contemporary discussions: What are values? What kind of values are knowledge and truth? What does it mean to want one's life to go well? Currently, she is working on the role of knowledge in ethics, generics, and generalizations, and on a book entitled The Original Stoics.
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Professor Michele Moody-Adams will deliver the Presidential Address at the upcoming 2025 Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Please see this page for more information.
Organized Amusement
with Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, A. S. Hamrah, Blair McClendon, Lydia Goehr & Ciarán Finlayson
November 2, 2024
A discussion about the twilight of the culture industry eighty years after the publication of Adorno and Horkeimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Roulette
509 Atlantic Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11217
“The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry,” Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote in 1944, introducing a term that continues to define the production of art and media. Eighty years later, Organized Amusement revisits the question: what is the place of culture in the “administered world”? Revolutions in finance, telecommunications, and computing have transformed how culture is produced and consumed. Cinemas are giving way to streaming, and mass culture is yielding to algorithmic personalization. The Frankfurt School’s concerns—the prospect of mass murder facilitated by a malign system of “film, radio, and magazines”—are back in the news, and the scale and power of the culture industry have only grown. Given all that counts as (and all who labor in) culture, how might we respond to Adorno and Horkheimer’s injunction to take the industry “more seriously than it might itself wish to be”?
This event is part of the 2024 Triple Canopy Symposium, presented in partnership with Critical Minded.
The Department of Philosophy at Columbia University invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position beginning July 1, 2025. For full details and to apply, please see this page.
The 2024 Ambedkar Law Lectures will take place on Tuesday 24 September (JGH 104) and Wednesday 25 September (JGH 106) from 5.00-6.30 PM.
The lectures, titled Reading Fanon, will be delivered by Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) and will focus on the writings of Frantz Fanon, one of the twentieth century’s most important theorists of colonialism, revolution, and freedom. On each day, the lectures will have two commentators: Jeremy Kessler (Columbia Law School) and Aslı Ü. Bâli (Yale Law School) on 24th September, and Kaiama L. Glover (African American Studies, Yale University) and Michele Moody-Adams (Philosophy, Columbia University) on 25th September.
For Registration: https://tinyurl.com/5n8ww64j
Funded by the Office of the Executive Vice-President of the Arts & Sciences, the Heyman Center Fellowships provide four junior and four senior Columbia faculty. During his time as a Heyman Centre Fellow, Prof. Peacocke plans to complete an interdisciplinary book presenting a theory of the nature of the perception of Western music. The theory aims to explain what it is for such musical experience to have the rich emotional and other content it is capable of possessing. He is the recipient of the Jean Nicod Prize for 2024, and the material on music perception is based on the lectures associated with the Prize.
Christopher A.B. Peacocke has been awarded the Prix Jean Nicod 2024 and will give a series of lectures at the École normale supérieure, Paris in May and June 2024. More information can be found here.
The Department of Philosophy congratulates its BA, MA, and PhD graduates for all their hard work and achievements.
Departmental Honors:
Peter Guo (GS)
Soham Mehta (CC)
Rebekah Seow (GS)
Kyla Tang (CC)
April Wang (CC)
Adam Leroy Jones Prize:
Zimu Zhang (CC)
James Gutmann Prize:
Cassady Marion (CC)
This award is funded by the Mellon Foundation for the support of an exceptional graduate student during their last dissertation year, in the subspecialty of science within the fields of history, philosophy, or sociology.
The award honors alumni of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for exceptional work in scholarship, public service, teaching, or academic administration.
Four alumni of the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) were recently awarded Wilbur Lucius Cross Medals in recognition of their outstanding work and service.
Awarded annually by the GSAS Alumni Association, the Wilbur Cross Medal honors exceptional work in scholarship, public service, teaching, or academic administration. It is the highest honor that GSAS bestows on alumni.
This year’s recipients are:
- Elizabeth Bradley ’96 Ph.D. (Public Health) for her leading scholarship in public health, and her unwavering commitment to the health and well-being of local and global communities;
- Robert Gooding-Williams ’75 ’82 Ph.D. (Philosophy) for his significant contributions to the fields of philosophy, political theory, and race theory;
- James M. Jones ’70 Ph.D. (Psychology) for his transformative scholarship in the study of race, racism, and diversity in the last 50 years; and
- Che-Chia Wei ’85 Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering) for technological innovation, including the miniaturization of integrated circuits, and leadership in the semiconductor industry.
For additional information, please visit YaleNews.