of the event

Gigapan

oftheevent — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 16:06:24 +0000

Katy and I saw this at the Sprout Fund’s summer party last night. For those of you familiar with Pittsburgh, this provides a different view of it than you may be used to. For those of you unfamiliar, this is what it looks like in an impressive nutshell. Make sure you zoom in.

Pli Call for Papers on “Contingency”

oftheevent — Fri, 21 May 2010 14:21:23 +0000

The folks over at Pli have recently put up a new call for papers on the topic of “Contingency”:

Call for Papers

Pli invites submissions for the next volume (22) on the topic of Contingency. Recently, contingency has been reassessed (Meillassoux, After Finitude) in ways which bring that notion back into the centre of the contemporary philosophical debate. For the next volume of Pli we welcome papers that aim to understand or shed new light on this important notion.

“The root of freedom in God is the possibility or contingency of things, by which it happens that innumerable things are found which are neither necessary nor impossible, from which God chooses those which do most to testify to his own glory.” Leibniz, Contingency and Necessity.

“In this externality, the determinations of the Notion have the show of an indifferent subsistence and isolation [Vereinzelung] in regard to each other, and the Notion, therefore, is present only as something inward. Consequently, Nature exhibits no freedom in its existence, but only necessity and contingency.” Hegel, s248, Encyclopedia.

“The Logos breaks up into hieroglyphics, each one of which speaks the transcendent language of a faculty. Even the point of departure – namely, sensibility in the encounter with that which forces sensation – presupposes neither affinity nor predestination. On the contrary, it is the fortuitousness or the contingency of the encounter which guarantees the necessity of that which it forces to be thought.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

Possible topics include:

Contingency, necessity and probability.

The necessity of contingency in Quentin Meillassoux.

Early modern understanding of contingency in Leibniz and/or Spinoza.

Contingency after Kant.

The Hegelian rehabilitation of the principle of sufficient reason.

Nietzschean becoming.

Contingency and Heideggerian ‘facticity’.

Contingency and the Event

Submissions should be articles no longer than 8,000 words, accompanied by an abstract, and sent by email to: plijournal@googlemail.com. Alternatively submissions can be sent in the form of a single hard copy plus a copy on disk as a Word, ODT or RTF file. Include an e-mail address for future correspondence. The deadline for submissions is the 30th of June 2010. Please refer to the ‘Notes for Contributors’ on the journal’s website.

Cantoring

oftheevent — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:15:00 +0000

Cantor is in the news. Well not really; but he is mentioned in this piece at the New York Times.

Hobbes and Bacon Workshop

oftheevent — Fri, 14 May 2010 14:45:33 +0000

I just received the following which may be of interest to you:

Bacon and Hobbes Workshop
WORKSHOPS IN POLITICAL THEORY,
SIXTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE, SEPTEMBER 1st – 3rd., 2010
MANCHESTER METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY (Manchester, England)
Contact Names: Brendan O’Byrne (Trinity College, Dublin) and Noel E. Boulting (Noboss, Kent)
Emails: obyrnes@iolfree.ie; nobossneb@clara.co.uk

Whilst attacking the Aristotelianism of their day both Bacon and Hobbes insisted that philosophical science was to the ultimate benefit of mankind. Both replaced a reverence for tradition by a belief in method. If, for Bacon, ambiguities in language generated the idols of the market place, for Hobbes words were too often the money of fools. This workshop is open to all topics related to the philosophies of Bacon and Hobbes, as well as the possible relationship between them. It is to be hoped that at least 12 papers can be given within four panels and contributors are expected to attend as many of these panels as possible. An effort will be made to organize the panels around particular topics, and presenters will be asked to read papers in advance, as well as provide written comments on the two other papers given during their respective panel. Since participants will have read one another’s papers in advance (thus making it unnecessary to read the papers aloud), longer, more developed work can be encouraged (20 pages and up). Please send a 300-word abstract to Dr. Brendan O’Byrne obyrnes@iolfree.ie. The abstract should include the title of the paper; the author’s name; and email address.Please note: subsidies are not available for the workshop; please be advised that all contributors will be expected to secure their own funding. An official invitation can be made available for those requesting funding from their respective institutions or from independent agencies.

Revised Deadline: Friday June 25th. 2010

Further details concerning the Sixth Annual Conference can be obtained from the website:
www.hlss.mmu.ac.uk/politicaltheory

Middlesex Shut Down

oftheevent — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:15:23 +0000

It looks as though Middlesex University has made the decision to eliminate the philosophy department there. Unbelievable, especially with respect to the line of reasoning that it has made no “‘measurable’ contribution to the university.” It will be interesting to see what impact this has on the philosophical community as a whole. Administration, how out of touch can you be?

Duquesne University Graduate Students in Philosophy Conference

oftheevent — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:09:00 +0000

It seems as though today is a day of announcements. The Duquesne University Graduate Students in Philosophy conference will be held this weekend, and there are some exciting looking papers on the conference program. I should be able to make it to most of the conference.

New Hire At Duquesne

oftheevent — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:54:46 +0000

It has been announced that Dr. Michael Marder is being hired as an assistant professor here at Duquesne starting 2011-12. His website can be found here.

Wave of Mutilation

oftheevent — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:13:10 +0000

Ahhhhhh. Comps are finished! I took them March 26th, and was really pleased at how the entire thing went. I had been studying since I returned from Paris last summer, and the work paid off. It is wonderful to no longer have that looming. Life now has a semblance of normalcy, and so I’m riding that wave.

I can now read what I want, purchase some books. How nice that is. I put in an order for Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, and Angelica Nuzzo’s Ideal Embodiment: Kant’s Theory of Sensibility, and finished the former last night. I will save my thoughts on it for a future post.

I’ve also got back to doing research and writing. I’m currently working on an article on Badiou’s reading of Spinoza in his “Spinoza’s Closed Ontology.” The general thrust of the argument has already been worked out in the form of a conference paper, but I now have to tighten it up and fill it out a bit. I also need to work out the implications of Badiou’s reading of Spinoza for his reading of Deleuze in Clamor of Being.

Copyright

oftheevent — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 18:02:24 +0000

I’ve noticed that a number of people are coming to my site because of the picture of Pittsburgh I used in a previous post (it is one of the first images that shows up on Google images). I have been unable to find where I got this image from, so if you own the rights to this image, please let me know, and I will put this in said post.

Nihil Unbound, Update

oftheevent — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:19:28 +0000

A while back I posted a link to a .pdf version of Brassier’s Nihil Unbound, due to the fact that the book was exorbitantly priced. It looks as though a paperback version is scheduled to come out, for much much less: Nihil paperback-bound. So if you benefited from that .pdf file, please think about purchasing this one.