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2012 Modern Conference
2012 Conference on Issues in Modern Philosophy
“Inequality”The Ninth NYU Conference on Issues in Modern PhilosophyNew York University, Kimmel Center, 60 Washington Square South, Room 914 November 9-10, 2012
Registration is available here.
The New York University
Department of Philosophy will host the ninth in its series of annual
conferences on issues in the history of modern philosophy on November 9
and 10, 2012. 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.
Friday, November 9
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| 1:00–2:00 |
Check-in |
| 2:00–4:00 |
First session: Locke
| Speaker |
Jeremy Waldron. "'Yet all this consists with the Equality, which all Men are in' —Locke's Egalitarian Arguments for Inequality".
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Sean Greenberg received his A. B. in French and philosophy from Amherst College in 1994 and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 2000. He taught at Johns Hopkins University from 2000-2007 before moving to the University of California, Irvine, where he is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy. His research focuses on early modern moral psychology, in particular, on early modern conceptions of the will, human freedom, and the passions. He has published articles on these and other topics in Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant. He is currently working on two long-term projects: the one treats early modern treatments of the will and human freedom from Hobbes to Kant; the other articulates a systematic interpretation of the philosophy of Malebranche. A translation of Leibniz’s Theodicy, undertaken collaboratively by him and R. C. Sleigh, Jr., will be published in both scholarly and student editions by Oxford University Press.
(NYU School of Law; University of Oxford)
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| Commentator |
Gopal Sreenivasan (Duke University).
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Gopal Sreenivasan is Crown Professor of Ethics at Duke University. He is the author
of LIMITS OF LOCKEAN RIGHTS IN PROPERTY (Oxford, 1995) and, in
political philosophy, of articles on topics such as rights; judicial review;
international agreements; and global distributive justice.
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| | 4:30–6:30 |
Second session: Rousseau
| Speaker |
Hide bio.
James Harris has taught philosophy at St Andrews since 2004. He is the author of *Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in 18th-Century British Philosophy* (Oxford, 2005), and has edited (with Knud Haakensson) Reid's *Essays on the Active Powers of Man* for the Edinburgh Edition of Thomas Reid (Edinburgh, 2010). He is writing an intellectual biography of Hume for Cambridge University Press.
Frederick Neuhouser (Barnard College/Columbia University). "Rousseau's Critique of Social Inequality".
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| Commentator |
Niko Kolodny.
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Niko Kolodny is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of
California, Berkeley. He works mainly in moral and political philosophy.
(University of California, Berkeley) |
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| 6:30–7:30 |
Reception |
Saturday, November 10
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| 10:00–12:00 |
Third session: Wollstonecraft
| Speaker |
Sylvana Tomaselli (St. John's College, Cambridge). "Inequality".
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| Commentator |
Eileen Hunt Botting (University of Notre Dame).
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I am a political theorist currently finishing my second book, Wollstonecraft,
Mill, and Women's Human Rights, for Yale Press (expected 2014). I
am also editing a scholarly edition of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman for Yale Press (expected 2013). My other
books are Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the
Transformation of the Family (SUNY, 2006); Feminist Interpretations of
Alexis de Tocqueville (Penn State, 2009), co-edited with Jill Locke; and
the first scholarly edition of Hannah Mather Crocker's Reminiscences
and Traditions of Boston, co-edited with Sarah L. Houser (NEHGS Press,
2011). I guest edited the January 2006 issue of American Behavioral
Scientist on "The End of Enlightenment?", a collection of recent essays
by political theorists and intellectual historians on the legacies of the
European Enlightenment for modernity. From 1989 to 1993, I studied for
my B.A. in Philosophy and English from Bowdoin College, where I had
the honor of taking philosophy courses from Denis Corish. A Marshall
Scholarship enabled me to study for a second B.A. in Philosophy at
Cambridge University from 1993 to 1995. While a student at Cambridge,
I had the exceptional luck of taking Dr. Sylvana Tomaselli's stellar lecture
course on Wollstonecraft. From 1995 to 2001, I was a doctoral student
in political theory at the Yale Department of Political Science, where
Steven B. Smith directed my dissertation on Wollstonecraft, Burke, and
Rousseau's views on the egalitarian transformation of the family. I have
been on the faculty of the Department of Political Science at the University
of Notre Dame since 2001, teaching political theory. Comments. |
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| 2:00–4:00 |
Fourth session: Marx
| Speaker |
Allen Wood (Indiana University). "Karl Marx on Equality".
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| Commentator |
Jonathan Wolff (University of College London).
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Jonathan Wolff is Professor of Philosophy, and Dean of the
Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College London. His
books include Robert Nozick (1991) An Introduction to Political
Philosophy (1996 and 2006), Why Read Marx Today? (2002)
Disadvantage (with Avner de-Shalit, 2007) Ethics and Public Policy
(2011) and the Human Right to Health (2012), He is the editor
of G.A. Cohen's Lectures on the History of Moral and Political
Philosophy (forthcoming), is a member of the Nuffield Council on
Bioethics, and writes a monthly column for The Guardian. |
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| 4:30–6:30 |
Fifth session: Contemporary Philosophy
| Speaker |
Thomas Pogge (Yale University). "Treating People as Equals".
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| Commentator |
Larry Temkin
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Larry S. Temkin is Professor II of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Specializing
in ethics, and social and political philosophy, he has published on equality, justice,
health inequality, enhancements, obligations to the needy, aggregation, practical
reasoning, intransitivity, and the good. He is the author of Rethinking the Good:
Moral Ideals and the Nature of Practical Reasoning (OUP, 2012) and Inequality
(OUP, 1993). The individualistic approach to inequality he developed in Inequality
has since been adopted by the World Health Organization and the Gates Foundation
in their measurements of the Global Burden of Disease. Temkin has received
fellowships from the Danforth Foundation, the National Humanities Center, Harvard
University's Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, All Souls College Oxford, the
National Institutes of Health, the Australian National University, and Princeton
University’s Center for Human Values, where he was the Laurance S. Rockefeller
Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching. He is also the recipient of eight major
teaching awards.
(Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey) |
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Conference attendees may click on the following link to reserve a room at the Paramount Hotel at a special NYU rate: Paramount Hotel.
Questions may be directed to: philo.modernconference@nyu.edu
Conference Directors: Béatrice Longuenesse, John Richardson, and Don Garrett.
Past conferences
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