Expression and Self-knowledge

Warwick University, Friday 4^th October 2019

Humanities H0.03

Programme

11.00 – 12.30
Lucy Campbell (Warwick)
‘Self-knowledge: expression without expressivism’

12.30 – 2.00

Dorit Bar-On (University of Connecticut)
‘No ‘How’ Privileged Self-Knowledge’

3.00 – 4.30

Cristina Borgoni (Bayreuth University)

‘Primitive forms of first-person authority and expressive capacities’

Speaker: Andrew Patrizio (History of Art, Edinburgh College of Art)

Title: 'The Ecological Eye: Setting Agendas Across Art History, Theory and Politics'

Respondents: Olga Smith (IAS/Art History), Jonathan Skinner (ECLS), Nick Lawrence, Diarmuid Costello (Philosophy)

Co-sponsored by Warwick Environmental Humanities Network)

Followed by Drinks Reception at 7.30pm

Speaker: Ursula Renz (Klagenfurt)

Title: 'Socratic Self-Knowledge and the Concept of the Human Self: From Phenomenology to Metaphysics and Back Again'

Speaker: Serge Trottein (CNRS/École Normale Supérieure/PSL Research University)

Title: 'Kant and Postmodern Aesthetics'

Speaker: Sameer Bajaj (Philosophy, Warwick)

Title: TBC

Speaker: Joanna Zylinska (Department of New Media and Communications, Goldsmiths)

Title: 'Artificial Intelligence, Anthropocene Stupidity'

ABSTRACT

'My talk will engage with two defining apocalyptic narratives of our times: the Anthropocene and AI (Artificial Intelligence). Both of these narratives, in their multiple articulations, predict the end of the human and of the world as we (humans) know it, while also hinting at the possibility of salvation. Looking askew at the conceptual and aesthetic tropes shaping them, and at their socio-political contexts, I will be particularly interested in the way in which these two stories about planetary-level threats come together, and in the reasons for their uncanny proximity. Concurring with Marshall McLuhan that art works as a 'Distant Early Warning system' for all kinds of apocalypse, I will suggest that it can also serve as a testing ground for the making and unmaking of such apocalyptic scenarios. And it is in art that I will seek the possibility of envisaging a better and more prudent relationship with technology - and with the world - from within the Anthropocene-AI nexus. The talk will include a presentation of some visual work from my own art practice'.

Speaker: Sonia Sedivy (Toronto)

Title: 'Aesthetic Properties and Philosophy of Perception'

Speaker: Rachel Bowlby (Department of Comparative Literature, UCL)

Title: 'Unnatural Resources: Changing Arguments and Reproductive Technologies'

Speaker: Naomi Waltham-Smith (Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, Warwick)

Title: 'Homofaunie: Non-Human Tonalities of Listening in Derrida and Cixous'

Speaker: Josh Robinson (School of English, Communications, Philosophy, Cardiff)

Title: 'Crisis in Theory'

Josh Robinson teaches modern and contemporary critical theory in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at the University of Cardiff. Most recently, he is author of Adorno’s Poetics of Form, which appeared last year in SUNY’s Contemporary Continental Philosophy series): https://www.sunypress.edu/p-6556-adornos-poetics-of-form.aspx

Crisis in Theory: Beyond the Representational Paradigm

This paper aspires to offer a critical account of a set of assumptions that are widespread in literary and critical theory, both in its historical emergence (as seen primarily through its institutional histories) and in several more recent developments (including the various ‘turns’ that arise from time to time. My focus is on what I term the representational paradigm: in its simplest and broadest formulation, the assumption, explicit or otherwise, within literary studies that works of literature matter insofar as they are representative; that what matters about literary works is their representative character.

This paradigm persists in multiple, not always interdependent (or even necessarily compatible) manifestations, which include: an analytical focus on events represented within works of literature (what might be called a focus on content at the expense of form); a set of analytical procedures that rely on an implicit theory of allegory whereby readings are produced that see elements of a work as representing elements outside it; attempts to reconfigure the canon and/or redesign our curricula such that the works and authors within it are more representative of global society. I outline a tentative taxonomy of these different versions of representationalism, and relate them to a set of shared democratic assumptions about political representation—assumptions which have a tendency to place themselves beyond scrutiny. I argue that while the democratic aspirations expressed at least in progressive versions of representationalism paradigm constitute a commendable alternative to the (not only cultural) conservatism of the tendencies against which they are in many respects a reaction, these underlying assumptions ultimately overlook or even limit the potential of literature’s ways of thinking to contribute to a transformation of our understanding of the political. I thus set out some of the ways in which criticism and theory might move beyond the representational paradigm.

Speaker: Sophia Connell (Birkbeck)

Title: 'Aristotle on Animal Cognition: Contemporary Perspectives'

Wednesday 5 February 2020, 4.15pm-6pm, Room OC1.07, Oculus

Speakers:

Derek Attridge (English and Related Literature, York)

Esther Leslie (Political Aesthetics, Birkbeck)

Speakers:

Hartmut Rosa (Sociology, Jena University/Max Weber Kolleg Erfurt)

Daniel Hartley (World Literatures, Durham)

Irina Hron (German Studies, Vienna University/Gothenburg University)

Guest Speaker: Hartmut Rosa on the English translation of his publication Resonance.

“Resonance and Alienation. Two Modes of Experiencing Time in an Age of Acceleration”

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/academic/helmutschmitz/resonance/

German Social Theorist Hartmut Rosa and his publication Resonance.

Speaker: Kate Soper (Philosophy, University of Brighton/London Metropolitan University)

Title: 'The Dialectics of Progress: Towards a Post-Growth Aesthetic and Politics of Prosperity'

Speaker: Chris Janaway (Southampton)

Title: Schopenhauer

Speaker: Sameer Bajaj

Title: TBC

Speaker: James MacDowell (Department of Film and TV, Warwick)

Title: 'Regarding YouTube as Art'

Speaker: Alan Millar (Stirling)

Title: TBC

We hope to re-schedule this event. Contact Eileen John (eileen.john@warwick.ac.uk) for more information.

Guest Speakers:

Kate Soper (Philosophy, University of Brighton/London Metropolitan University)

Title: 'The Dialectics of Progress: Towards a Post-Growth Aesthetic and Politics of Prosperity'

James MacDowell (Department of Film and TV, Warwick)

Title: 'Regarding YouTube as Art'

Speaker: Richard Moore

The Communicative Foundations of Propositional Attitude Psychology

Abstract:

According to a widely held dogma, a developed propositional attitude psychology is a prerequisite of attributing communicative intent, and so a developmental prerequisite of natural language acquisition. This view is difficult to reconcile with developmental evidence, which shows not only that children do not develop propositional attitudes until they are four years old (e.g. Rakoczy 2017), but also that this development is parasitic upon natural language acquisition (de Villiers & de Villers 2000; Lohmann & Tomasello 2003; Low 2010), and that it recruits brain regions that do not exist in infancy (Grosse-Wiesmann et al. 2017). Against the received view, and building on my work on minimally Gricean communication (Moore 2017a), I sketch a developmental trajectory to show how propositional attitude psychology could be both invented and learned through communicative interaction. I finish by considering the conditions in which cultural tools for mental state representation might first have been developed in human history; and the extent to which our early human ancestors might have lacked propositional attitudes. The goal of the paper will not be to show that strong nativism about human mindreading must be false, but that there is no reason to take it for granted in considering the origins of the modern human mind.

Speaker: Carrie Figdor (University of Iowa)

Speaker: Sameer Bajaj (Warwick)

Title: "Democratic Mandates and the Ethics of Representation."

TBC