SWIP-NYC Colloquium
The SWIP-NYC Colloquium showcases work by women philosophers in all areas of philosophy. Usually, there are two regular colloquia per semester plus a special colloquium featuring the winner(s) of our annual SWIP-NYC Graduate Student Essay Prize.
Spring 2024
Presentation by the Graduate Student Essay Prize Winner, May 14, 3:30-5:30.
Fall 2023
Wednesday, September 27, 12:00-1:50, Katherine Brading (Duke University), “Du Châtelet on the epistemology and metaphysics of motion,” NYU Philosophy Department, Room 302, and over Zoom
Abstract: There is a “Received View” of Du Châtelet’s Foundations according to which it presents a “marriage between Leibnizian metaphysics and Newtonian science”, with Leibnizian metaphysics providing “the metaphysical foundation which in her view was an essential pre-requisite for scientific thinking.” This interpretation persists into current scholarship. However, in my view it subtlely misunderstands Du Châtelet’s own philosophical goals and preoccupations in ways that are important for how we read and engage with her philosophy. The basic foundational issue addressed by Du Châtelet is the lack of an epistemically secure basis for physics. Time and again in the Foundations we see her turning our attention away from metaphysics and toward epistemology. The example I will use to illustrate this is her treatment of motion. I present her definitions of absolute, common relative, and proper relative motion and ask whether this account is adequate to respond to the conceptual, epistemological, and ontological challenges posed for the theory of motion by Newton’s Principia. I suggest that Du Châtelet’s account of motion enables her to meet the first two of these challenges, and that she rejected the third.
Friday, October 20, 3:30-5:30, Katja Vogt (Columbia University), hybrid event: in-person location, NYU, Philosophy Department, Room 202, “The Flaw of Generics”
Abstract: The truth of generics such as “ducks lay eggs” is often taken to be intuitive. For the Stoics, this intuition is flawed. Qua thoughts, they argue, generics are neither true nor false. Qua linguistic items, generics are not bivalently truth-apt. The Stoics ascribe the following flaw to generics: generics predicate something of a kind that is only true of some instances of the kind and that can only be predicated of “somethings.” Given the Stoic rejection of Forms, forms, and essences, kinds are not somethings. The paper explicates this proposal by comparison with some of today’s widely held premises and defends the Stoic concern with generics as a domain of flawed reasoning.