2021-22 Department Activities and Events
Critical Theory in Critical Times (Cristina)
Sixth “Critical Theory in Critical Times” Annual Workshop: Me the People. A Conversation with Nadia Urbinati on Populism
The department of philosophy together with the Center for Global Culture and Communication, the Critical Theory Cluster and other sponsors, hosted the sixth Critical Theory in Critical Times Annual Workshop: A Conversation with Nadia Urbinati on Me the People. How Populism Transforms Democracy. on April 1st, 2022. This workshop series aims to bring to Northwestern the most distinguished critical theorists who have recently published a major work in the area for an in-depth discussion with experts in the field, interested faculty, and students. In preparation for the workshop a reading group with faculty and students from several departments (philosophy, political science, communication studies, German, etc.) met to discuss Nadia Urbinati’s book Me the People, in which she argues that populism should be regarded as a new form of representative government, while populist governments remain importantly distinct from dictatorial or fascist regimes, their dependence on the will of the leader, along with their willingness to exclude the interests of those deemed outside the bounds of the “good” or “right” people, stretches constitutional democracy to its limits and opens a pathway to authoritarianism. At the workshop, four commentators were invited to discuss his work: William Mazzarella (University of Chicago), Paulina Ochoa Espejo (Haverford College), Dilip Gaonkar (communication, NU) and Axel Mueller (philosophy, NU). After two years of interruption due to the pandemic, we were glad that the workshop could be organized again as an in-person event.
Chicago-Area Consortium in German Philosophy (Mark)
In the Spring, the Chicago-Area Consortium in German Philosophy attempted to step back into the real world after its brief foray into the virtual one. On March 11th, we had our annual workshop—this one revisiting several great representatives of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (a term the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur used to designate the shared critical project of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud). Sarah Johnson (University of Chicago) gave a talk entitled “History and Critique in Marx’s Brussels Manuscripts.” Jaqueline Scott (Loyola) gave a talk on “Profundity as a Tool in Nietzschean Overcoming of Morality and Instilling Great Health.” Freud was represented by Elizabeth Rottenberg’s “Freud’s Jewish Jokes: The Case of Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious.” Partly because no year is permitted to go by without an event on Kant, we also sponsored a talk in April at Loyola University by Thomas Teufel entitled “Kant’s Critical Teleology.” So far as I know, neither of these were designated as super-spreader events, so we hope to continue with in person events next year.
NUSTEP (Kyla)
This year saw the welcome return of the Northwestern University Society for the Theory of Ethics and Politics (NUSTEP) conference after a two year pandemic-induced hiatus. The 14th annual conference, held on campus June 23-25, 2022. Keynote speakers Cora Diamond (Virginia) and Gavin Lawrence (UCLA) joined us remotely, but the rest of the conference participants were gathered in Evanston for what many said was the most fruitful and inspiring experience of philosophy in community that they had had since the pandemic began.
The program, originally put together in the winter of 2020 and scheduled for the following spring, included many high-quality talks by faculty and graduate students. Papers considered how we come to know about moral reasons, what it would mean to treat someone like an animal, the place of choice and the place of relationships in contractualist moral theory, the significance of trauma for responsibility and how to find meaning in life. The conference was organized by faculty members Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Richard Kraut, and our late—and deeply missed—colleague Stephen White, along with the invaluable help of many graduate students and the department staff. To see the full schedule for this and past years’ conferences visit https://philosophy.northwestern.edu/community/nustep/index.html.