Past Events

"Why was Spinoza Excommunicated? by Steven Nadler (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

In July 1656, Bento (Baruch) de Spinoza was given the harshest herem (ban or ostracism) ever issued by the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community. The text of the ban rains curses down upon the young man, for his “abominable heresies and monstrous deeds”. Unlike other bans issued…

"Can Kant's Cognitive Architecture Be Embodied Within the Whole Person? by Kenneth R. Westphal (Academia Europaea)

Abstract: Kant’s key question driving his Critique of Pure Reason is, as he wrote to Herz, ‘On whatground rests the relation of that in us which is called representation to the object?’ Kantidentified key problems about sensation, perception and cognition, which ultimately…

Selfridge 2024 College Talk: "Becoming One: Theology and Philosophy, Will and Intellect, Finite and Infinite in Spinoza" by Michael Della Rocca

Professor Michael Della Rocca is Sterling Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. A rationalist, monist, skeptic, and renegade analytic philosopher, Michael Della Rocca is the author of The Parmenidean Ascent, of two books on Spinoza's philosophy, and of many…

Selfridge Lecture 2024: The Original Sin of Analytical Philosophy

In this lecture, Professor Della Rocca will examine five crucial and influential episodes from early analytical philosophy in which Frege, Russell, Moore, and others play key roles.  In each episode, the debate is, he argues, structurally analogous to the debate over…

"Social Robots with AI: Last Call for Robophilosophy" by Johanna Seibt

Never in its history has philosophy been as socially relevant as today: we are blindly entering the “automation age” (McKinsey) without any reliable means of risk calculation: the creation of intelligent embodied artificial ‘social’ agents, increasingly equipped with generative…

Philosophy Seminar Series: Lorraine Juliano Keller, "Polysemy, Analogy, and Ineffability"

Contemporary linguists have been impressed by the pervasiveness of polysemy, the sort of lexical ambiguity that goes beyond mere homonymy, whereby the distinct meanings of words are related. For example, instances of ‘bark’ in ‘dogs bark’ and ‘tree bark’ are mere homonyms, while…

Silvia Federici: Feminism and the POlitics of the Common