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

Simon Critchley (New School for Social Research): Tragedy, the Greeks and Us

Response by Andrew Cooper (Warwick) and David Fearn (Warwick)

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

Title: 'Kant and Postmodern Aesthetics'

Tutors:

David Bather Woods

Mat Coakley

Lucy Campbell

Speaker: Stephen Houlgate (Warwick)

Title: Kant and Hegel on the Antinomies of Reason

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'.

Warwick PPL Society, Warwick Philosophy Society, Warwick Bio Society and Warwick PPE Society are delighted to host ‘Medicine or Murder: A Medical Ethics Panel’ with Professor Tom Sorell, Dr Amzy Birdi, Greg Moorlock and Dr Anne-Marie Slowther, all experts in their domain, who will be debating during this hour-long panel on controversial issues such as abortion, compulsory vaccination or even the right to euthanasia.

Speaker: Beatrice Han-Pile (Essex)

Title: 'The Doing Is Everything': A Middle-Voiced Reading of Agency in Nietzsche

A chance to meet your course rep for UG programmes and tell them what you think about the course: Philosophy, Philosophy and Literature, Philosophy with Psychology and Maths and Philosophy.

Struggling to finish an essay? Find it too easy to look for excuses?

Join us for a productive morning, stripped away from all distractions in the Cowling Room (S2.77) at 10.00am. Bring a goal with you: what do you want to accomplish in the next two hours? Be ambitious, while keeping it realistic - what can you do if you were in your top state of mind?

Imagine finishing that essay you've been dreading to write, in two hours, on a Monday morning! This is like a Library all-nighter, minus the noisy crisps and feeling of slight disgust.

A continental breakfast will be provided.

Speaker: Jeffrey A. Bell (Southeastern Louisiana University)

Title: 'Towards a Deleuzian-Humean Political Theory'

The Philosophy Department will be running an information session on the opportunities and attractions of postgraduate study in Philosophy on Wednesday 27 November 2019.

The session will provide detailed information on the various postgraduate degrees in Philosophy, or including a Philosophy component, that are available at Warwick, both immediately post-BA, and more advanced (doctoral degrees). In addition to information on the different postgraduate courses, the session will also provide guidance about deadlines, sources of funding (including Departmental scholarships), and the career advantages of postgraduate study in Philosophy.

Speakers will include members of the Philosophy Department involved in running postgraduate degrees, as well as students currently taking graduate degrees in the Department. A representative from the Careers Team will also be in attendance. There will be plenty of opportunity to ask questions. Wine and nibbles will be served. We hope to see many of you there!

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'

Warwick PAIS and Philosophy have organised a roundtable to discuss Martina Tazzioli's new book, The Making of Migration: The Biopolitics of Mobility at Europe's Borders (London: SAGE, 2019). The book addresses the rapid phenomenon that has become one of the most contentious issues in contemporary life: How are migrants governed as individual subjects and as part of groups? What are the modes of control, identification and partitions that migrants are subjected to? Bringing together an ethnographically grounded analysis of migration, and a critical theoretical engagement with the security and humanitarian modes of governing migrants, The Making of Migration pushes us to rethink notions that are central in current political theory such as multiplicity and subjectivity. This is an innovative and sophisticated study, deploying migration as an analytical angle for complicating and reconceptualising the emergence of collective subjects, mechanisms of individualisation, and political invisibility/visibility.

Contributors:

Stuart Elden (PAIS, Warwick)

Daniele Lorenzini (Philosophy, Warwick)

Vicki Squire (PAIS, Warwick)

Maurice Stierl (PAIS, Warwick)

and Martina Tazzioli (Goldsmiths, University of London)

This reading group, or 'communion', focuses on the work of Georges Bataille and his henchmen, including but not limited to Andre Masson, Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, Pierre Klossoski, Raymond Queneau. Alexandre Kojève and Lev Shestov, as well as literary figures including Colette Peignot, Jacques Vaché, Lautréamont, Marques de Sade, Baudelaire, Catherine of Siena and Meister Eckart.

A few key texts will be analysed:

Le Coupable (1944) Guilty

L'Erotisme (1957) Eroticism

La Haine de la Poésie (1947) The Hatred of Poetry

L'Impossible (1962) The Impossible

La literature et le Mal (1957) Literature and Evil

Open to all.

Contributors:

Alison Downham Moore (Western Sydney University)

Lisa Downing (University of Birmingham)

Stuart Elden (PAIS, Warwick)

Daniele Lorenzini (Philosophy, Warwick)

Federico Testa (Institute of Advanced Study, Warwick)

Supported by Centre Michel Foucault, Institute of Advanced Study, Warwick, and The University of Warwick.

Guest Speakers:

Daniele Lorenzini  (Warwick)

Title: Genealogy, Possibilization, and (Post-)Critique

 David Owen (Southampton)

Title: Genealogy as Re-Problematization: Autonomy, Aspect-Change and Limits