This event will also be streamed live here!

This event will also be streamed live here!

In his famous deduction of intersubjectivity, Fichte argues that we could not become aware of ourselves as particular individual beings without the experience of being ‘summoned’ (‘aufgefordert’) to free activity through another person. In my talk I want to bring light to this idea by arguing for the following two claims.

1. Fichte’s account of summoning as a particular form of reciprocal rational causal influence bears a remarkable and hitherto unnoticed similarity to Grice’s theory of meaning.

2. Fichte is interested in the phenomenology of being causally influenced in this particular way because it provides the resources to combine two essential features of the empirical self that seem incompatible in a Kantian account of self-consciousness: freedom and givenness

This talk synthesizes recent historical research demonstrating the close relationship between developments in statistical methods and debates over racial categories and racial admixture in human genetics. I focus on three temporal snapshots, beginning with the early 20th century peak in the collection of quantitative data by physical anthropologists for the purpose of classifying racial groups and detecting histories of human migrations and admixture. In this period, Indian statistician P. C. Mahalanobis formulated his famous distance function—still in use today for applications ranging from finance to machine learning—in order to answer questions about racial admixture in colonial India. By the postwar period, human geneticists collected different kinds of data and developed new statistical approaches, but still largely aimed to address similar questions about “populations” or “ethnic groups” shaped by concepts of racial difference. For example, major scientific disputes emerged between the 1950s and 1970s about the validity of statistical methods used to estimate racial admixture in communities of African Americans and Ashkenazi Jews. I conclude with a reflection on recent computational methods used to analyze “biogeographical ancestry” and the enduring problem of categorizing populations in human genetics.

This event will also be streamed live here!

This event will also be streamed live here!

There is a rich philosophical literature on skills (e.g., chess, ballet, cricket) which focuses both on the mental states of performers (e.g., what is the phenomenology of doing something well?) and on the evaluative dimension of skill and talent (e.g., what makes skilled achievements valuable?). Within this literature, there is a glaring omission of any discussion of skills acquired and expressed in standard workplace contexts, from cafés to warehouses. This talk considers the significance of that omission, both for our philosophical conception of skill and our understanding of action in the workplace. I argue that the phenomenology of workplace skill (which should account for feelings like boredom and fear) complicates our evaluative notions about skill and talent, mainly because it elucidates and reveals as untenable certain assumptions within the philosophy of skill about the evaluative implications of phenomenological states.

This event will also be streamed live here!

In a moment in which anti-migrant rhetoric, ethnonationalism, and authoritarian populisms are on the rise, it becomes increasingly important that political theorists do more than offer a moral indictment of racism and xenophobia. In this talk, I contend that Frantz Fanon’s sociogenic approach to the critique of ‘race’ and racialization makes a valuable contribution, even in postcolonial conjunctures that have moved beyond colonialism’s crude Manichean binaries. I read Fanon as a diagnostician of the social pathologies produced by colonialism and white supremacy, showing how he worked from the colonized subject’s experiences of inferiorization and the colonizer’s experiences of racial superiority and self-mystification to advance a negative critique of racial hierarchies.