Offerings, Plans, Reflections
The new philosophy of science; What is mental illness?; Frantz Fanon; In-person events
Dear all,
This week we are hosting two awesome events, as well as our first “informal post-event chat with the speakers” thing (in this case, with Lewis Gordon and Brad Evans on Tuesday). We have also just uploaded Mel Andrews’ superb pragmatist manifesto for philosophy of science. And information on a couple of forthcoming in-person events in the UK for those of you who live in or near London and Newcastle. More on all this below! Finally, I take inspiration from Helen De Cruz to offer a short reflection on the many forms that philosophical writing can take.
Offerings
Your Sunday Read
“Philosophy in the Trenches and Laboratory Benches of Science”. Mel Andrews is a powerful emerging voice in the new philosophy of science. Her compelling essay/manifesto argues that philosophy has a responsibility to intervene on broken scientific practices and broken supportive infrastructures for science. For Andrews, “every laboratory needs a philosopher” and “the philosopher’s role is not only to philosophise on behalf of scientists, but to re-educate scientists in how to philosophise for themselves.”
This week, we also uploaded historian Daniel Woolf’s rich and entertaining review of François Hartog’s “romp through twenty-five hundred years of the human sense of time”. You can read it here.
Event #1: Monday 17th at 11am PST/2pm EST/7pm UK
“What is Mental Illness?”: In conversation with Yale School of Medicine’s Kendall Atterbury, Justin Garson (philosopher), Nev Jones (community mental health researcher), and Marco Ramos (psychiatrist/historian) will aim to offer a sense of the scope of what is at stake in our understanding of mental illness, considering the place of biology, society, histories of oppression, evolution, and lived experience in such an understanding.
Event #2: Tuesday 18th at 11am PST/2pm EST/7pm UK
“Frantz Fanon and The Wretched of the Earth” (plus informal post-event gathering with speakers): This conversation with the renowned Fanon scholar Lewis R. Gordon will reflect upon the impact and continued relevance of his book, attending to dialectical logic of colonialism, the question of revolutionary violence, and the poetry that permeates Fanon’s unique thinking, while asking why Fanon’s question of “who actually constitutes the wretched of the earth?” remains as important as ever.
If you’d like to join the post-event chat with the speakers, please email me at: thephilosopher1923@gmail.com. This will take place 10 minutes after the end of the event and will last for around an hour. Places are v. limited, so don’t delay!
If you missed Tuesday’s event, “How to Think Like a Woman”, you can watch a recording of it here.
The Philosopher and the News - New Episode
“The AI Hype”: How concerned should we be by the alleged “existential risks” posed by AI system? Is Chat GPT, for example, really a kind of intelligence? And if so, are governments capable of taming it and channelling its capabilities for the benefit of humanity, rather than its destruction? Join host Alexis and guest Cambridge professor John Naughton to find out…
Plans
Following a hiatus of more than three years, we have now organised two exciting in-person events in the UK!
Thursday 18th May: Conway Hall, London from 6.30pm.
Speakers = Finn Mackay, Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed, and Lani Watson.
Wednesday 7th June: Lit and Phil, Newcastle from 6.30pm.
Speakers = Ian James Kidd, Michael Bavidge, and more TBC
Full details on both of these, including ticket options, to follow shortly…
Reflections
I am currently running a group called “Writing for the Public”. One of the topics that has repeatedly come up is the question of how much freedom we have when writing philosophy. While public philosophy need not be tied to the formal expectations of academic publishing, but how far can someone “stray” from this norm while still doing philosophy? It dawned on me this week how little I have really thought about this question. Organisations like oxford public philosophy (opp) have been thinking about these questions far more expansively than we have here at The Philosopher. So, it was with great interest that I read a recent Twitter thread by the wonderful Helen De Cruz who asks: “What are the literary forms philosophy can come in?” I’d really recommend reading the thread as it goes into all the interesting details, but to summarise it, here are her answers:
Parables/stories
Poems
Sayings/aphorisms
Dialogues
Letters
Autobiography
Demonstrations in geometric order (admittedly this is just Spinoza, but why not!?)
Meditations
Inquiries
Manifestos
Genealogies
Pensées
Summae
Prolegomena
Revelations
Commentaries
Confessions
Allegories
Plays
Psychoanalysis
Outlines
Tractatus
Essays
Guidebooks
Utopias
Orations
Trial reports/histories
Philosophical encyclopedias
Apologies
Postscripts
Treatises
Blog posts
Engravings and other visual media
Discourses
Video essays
Philosophical novels
Grammars
Memoirs
Speeches
Rules
Reflections
Disputations
Pamphlets
Helen has done us a great service with this thread. While I can’t see too many people dabbling in some of the literary forms she lists any time soon, it gave me a dizzying sense of the creative reach of philosophy beyond “8000-word journal articles, monographs, the occasional op-ed”. If you have any other suggestions to add to Helen’s list, please post them below…
Ending
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Wishing you all a lovely Sunday, wherever you are.
Anthony Morgan
Editor
With the mention of psychoanalysis as a philosophy it makes me think of how much do we consider the works future of the illusion or totem and taboo a work of philosophy or more a work of psychoanalysis per se as understanding current human psychology?because you can't have totem and taboo or future of illusion without the understanding of human psychology of the time that freuds work focused on.chicken and eggs of thought and could one exist independently of the other?
Looking forward to the what is mental illness event