News
Professor Mann's research project is titled "Strengthening Global Networks on Ancient Greek Philosophy." Through the Columbia Global Scholars-in-Residence program, faculty and researchers spend time at one of the 11 Global Centers around the world, seeing first-hand how their innovative studies could impact communities.
Congratulations to Prof. Russell! Established at Barnard in 1989 by the Gladys Brooks Foundation, this award recognizes considerable individual achievements of tenure-track/tenure-eligible assistant professor. Please see this page for more information.
The Department of Philosophy is proud of our Class of 2025 majors, concentrators, and recipients of MA and PhD degrees. We warmly congratulate them on their accomplishments and hard work. We also congratulate the following students for earning the following prizes and distinctions.
Departmental Honors
Nathan Darmon (GS)
Varun Mandgi (GS)
Oliver Rice (CC)
Elias Wachtel (CC)
Adam Leroy Jones Prize
Zimu Zhang (CC) - "Why nonlocality and nonseparability does not suggest monism."
Honorable Mention, Shanley and Chamberlain Essay Competition
Nathan Darmon (GS) - "Big Tech as Emerging Company-States"
James Gutmann Prize
Oliver Rice (CC) - "Pragmatic Efficacy as Mereological Criterion: A Madhyamaka Solution to a Vaiśeṣika Problem"
Elias Wachtel (CC) - "Reasons, Conversions, and Mistakes: A Response to Bernard Williams' Internal and External Reasons"
Jonathan Lieberson Memorial Prize
Helen Luo (GSAS) - "A Role Ethics of Truthfulness"
Lina Kahn Prize
Artha Yau (GSAS) - "Vague Identity: Evans Extended"
The faculty mentoring award is presented annually to two faculty of Columbia University to recognize excellence in mentoring PhD and MA students during their graduate careers. We congratulate Professor Honneth on receiving this award and for all his work in advising our students. Honneth, whose words were read by Professor Christopher Peacocke, wrote of mentorship, “What is needed is not a specific kind of theoretical knowledge or expertise, but a mixture of empathy, good will, and an abundance of patience.” For more information, please see this page.
Once one of the ranching and mining heartlands of the United States, New Mexico no longer has the workforce nor environmental conditions to support its dwindling number of cattle ranchers. Those who remain recognize ranching’s importance, seeking to continue tending the land in the face of encroaching subdevelopment. Land With No Rider captures the transcendent New Mexican skies, illustrating with pastoral breadth why these ranchers remain.
The screening will be followed by a talkback with the director Tamar Lando, moderated by filmmaker and cinematographer Kirsten Johnson.
For more information, please see this page.
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Humanities category has gone in this seventeenth edition to the Anglo-American philosopher Philip Kitcher, described by the committee as a “humanistic intellectual” whose trailblazing work addresses a broad spectrum of the core questions of our time. For the full story, see this page.
Callia Fielding spoke with Gadfly editors Aharon Dardik and William Freedman. Read the full article here.
Prof. Achille Varzi is a participant of the Biennale Architettura 2025 in Venice, Italy (May 10-November 23, 2025). He helped organize the "Archive and the City" project. For more information, please see this website.
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.
NOTE: If you are a Columbia/Barnard affiliate with campus access, please use your Columbia/Barnard email when registering.
All external guests must have their OWN registration and email address.
Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.
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.