Philosophy

I. OVERVIEW

II. DIALOGUES

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Philosophy Overview

Immerse yourself in an atmosphere of exploration and inquiry. The New School for Social Research (NSSR) has always attracted renowned scholars from around the world who foster an engaging and thoughtful environment through their teaching and research. The eminent philosophers who have helped create and sustain an intellectually vibrant department of philosophy include Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Aron Gurwitsch, and Reiner Schürmann.

The focus of study in the Department of Philosophy is the history of Western philosophical thought and the European philosophical tradition, particularly contemporary Continental philosophy. The graduate curriculum consists of two components. The first is the study of major figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Freud, Gadamer, Adorno, Benjamin, Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Derrida. The second is the study of the movements, schools, branches, and ideas associated with those figures. Philosophy at The New School is thus the study of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and pragmatism; political and social thought; ethics, critical theory, and aesthetics; epistemology, metaphysics, and ontology; logic and language; rationality, methodology, and naturalism within the social sciences; truth, nature, culture, beauty, tragedy, and goodness; unconscious and conscious processes; and contingency, necessity, and human freedom. Faculty and students have explored these philosophers and their ideas in depth through research and dissertations, the topics of which have recently included:

Ethical modernism and political atrocity The nature of poetry and ethics The ethico-political ground of ancient Greek thinking Religiosity in John Dewey

The Department of Philosophy reflects the interdisciplinary tradition of its original faculty through the research and writing of its members as well as its distinctive collaborative courses.

Degrees Offered

The Department of Philosophy offers MA and PhD degrees. Students who complete MA requirements with sufficient distinction may be considered for admission to PhD study. In rare cases, the department grants direct PhD admission to applicants who have completed a comparable MA in Philosophy at another institution. MA students can also complete a concentration in Psychoanalytic Studies.

Recent Courses

Philosophy and Images Modern Aesthetics Gender and Its Discontents The Animal Question in Ethics and Politics American Pragmatism

Recent Outcomes

Joseph Lemelin (PhD ’18): Berggruen Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University Jordi Graupera (PhD ’17): Postdoctoral Scholar, Princeton University Daniel Esparza (MA ’16): Doctoral Student, Columbia University Eric Godoy (PhD ’15): Assistant Professor, Illinois State University

Thinking and Writing Beyond the Academy: Philosophy and the Real World

Simon Critchley Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy

Simon Critchley defines who he is and what he thinks by the books he writes. As a writer who prefers to publish with commercial rather than academic presses, he sees his work as both serving the academy and reaching beyond it to connect with other parts of the world. Critchley says that he often can’t explain what he is going to do before he does it. Instead, he spends months reading what interests him until ideas begin to take shape. Only then does he begin writing, keeping the process loose and discovering new avenues along the way.

Critchley forged an unusual path to becoming a renowned philosophy professor. Never planning to become an academic, Critchley left school at 16 and played in bands until he entered college at 22. This background has led Critchley to continually try to do things—like writing books or giving lectures—in a new way. His need to explore different directions means he and his work are constantly evolving.

The ideas about which Critchley writes inform the ideas he teaches and vice versa. Often lecture notes become the basis for Critchley’s next book. Not one to maintain a rigid relationship with his students, Critchley welcomes their book and music recommendations, which often influence his own writing. His most recent books have covered topics as diverse as David Bowie, soccer, and ancient Greek tragedy.

Critchley states that only by truly listening and interacting with students can one discover their interests and thought processes. Critchley’s mission— to uncover the “legitimate strangeness” in each student—marks the first step in helping students find their own voice, one unconstrained by popular ideas of the ways in which a student is supposed to write. He works to curb students’ perfectionism by deflating their idea of him. As Critchley shows students early drafts of his work and they see the multiple revision processes he goes through, they begin to understand that everyone needs time to shape his or her ideas, including Critchley.

To become Critchley’s student, though, you first have to get through his gauntlet of dissuasion. He feels that one should always try to discourage people from studying philosophy in graduate school and present them with the worst possible outcome. If a prospective student remains interested after being presented with bleak prospects, Critchley feels that one should welcome that student with open arms and do everything to help them. He believes it’s his job to prepare students for lives both within and outside of academics after they graduate, noting that a philosophy education has just as many applications in mainstream society as it does in the academic world.

Interrogating the Philosophical Canon: A Conversation with Chiara Bottici

Chiara Bottici Associate Professor of Philosophy

[00:00:00] Interviewer: What are your intellectual interests? And what led you to be interested in those particular topics? Where do you see your work going in the future?

[00:00:20] Chiara Bottici: I would characterize my work as being at the crossroads of critical theory and history of philosophy. And I think that to a large extent this defines our profile as a department. I always say that it’s an irony of our world that in order to do European philosophy, I had to come to The New School, which is on the other side of the Atlantic. But that’s largely true in the sense that it’s really one of the best departments—if not the best—in this country to do European philosophy. Despite its location in the United States, NSSR tries to merge European and American traditions in a truly unique way.

Now within this general profile, my work is specifically devoted to the questions of imagination, myth, and memory and the way in which they influence our politics. Behind this lies a more fundamental interest in the problem of political emancipation. To put it bluntly: In a time that is so dominated by images, can we think of a use of images and imagination that actually paves the way for some form of emancipatory politics, as opposed to a repressive one? All my work—whether it’s about myth or about memory or about imagination or images in general—revolves around the questions: Where is the new coming from? What are our possibilities to get out of a mechanism of domination?

What I think is specific to my area of scholarship (and I would say of our department in particular) is the fact that the history of philosophy, which we take pretty seriously, is always done from the perspective of a critical theory of society. So we look at the past, but not with a contemplative attitude toward what has been. We look at the past from the point of view of our being situated in the present and looking at the future. In this sense, a critical theory of society and history of philosophy are two sides of the same coin. We are the result of where we’ve come from, but at the same time, the way in which we look at our past is always situated in the present.

When I teach, I always say to students, this is what I am, this is where I stand, and this is why I’m interested in these particular philosophers. Having said that, I’ve also had strong training in the historical method for doing European philosophy, and I do believe that it’s not my task to tell students what they should think. What I always try to provide in classes is the tools for reading texts independently. I’m also very well aware that the choice of a certain author also reflects a certain identity or position in the present. But I always make this awareness explicitly clear.

And I would say it’s quite extraordinary how many different readings can come out of the classes. I’m always impressed by how students manage to cultivate views that are so different from what I think, which is a good sign.

[00:07:37] IN: What particular philosophers do you study or teach?

[00:07:43] CB: I usually teach central figures in the so-called philosophical canon. I think that our students should have the professional tools needed to read philosophical classics. Unfortunately, the canon is largely geared towards white male philosophers. So I try to compensate by also teaching more marginal figures, that is, people who are not usually included in the canon and who can throw a different light

on the canon itself. Now, for instance, I’m teaching a class on gender and domination where we read not only mostly female philosophers but also texts that not everyone would classify as canonical philosophical texts. We read texts that question the typical way of doing philosophy, texts that parody or reverse the canon.

[00:09:54] IN: Can you talk a little bit more about how you help students find their own voice and how you help them work on their own projects?

[00:10:07] CB: Actually in this sense, I have to say that our students don’t need much help from us. I don’t think students need help finding their own voices and projects. What you need to do is build an environment where they have the tools for doing so in a professionally recognizable way. I provide my students with the technical skills as well as interpretative skills for doing their projects, and then their own voice automatically speaks through.

[00:11:38] IN: Can you describe how you work across disciplines within the context of being in the philosophy department and how you encourage students to do work across disciplines if they are interested?

[00:12:17] CB: Most of my students do interdisciplinary work. Since I work at the crossroads of philosophy, social science, and aesthetics, I have a lot of students who are interested in either social science issues or aesthetic problems. I think that philosophy is particularly well equipped to travel across disciplines because of its very nature. So a lot of our students actually work in an interdisciplinary fashion. I have students working on myths and ideology who are using both historical and philosophical tools. I have students working on aesthetics who are artists themselves but still intermix their art practice with philosophical reasoning. I have students working on gender issues, which is one of the most multidisciplinary fields of research one can imagine. If what you’re interested in is the way in which gender and the body are dominated, you must have a multidisciplinary approach to unpack those forms of domination. I have to say that I’m becoming more and more interested in gender issues, as I see them as one of the crucial places for understanding the mechanism of domination more in general.

[00:16:30] IN: And what would you tell prospective students about the philosophy department specifically and NSSR as a whole?

[00:16:59] CB: I would say that it’s a unique place. NSSR has a strong grounding in the Continental tradition, which is rare in the United States, but it is also a department that tries to combine it with the U.S.-based philosophical tradition. In that respect, the program is unique because it displays an open approach that is hard to find anywhere else. Most of the U.S. graduate philosophy departments are either Continental or analytic, which means more European– or U.S.–oriented. Our department stands out for being truly open to conversations happening on both sides of the divide. I think you also see this openness reflected in NSSR overall. As I said before, it’s a special place, which merges different cultural traditions in a way that is not so easy to find elsewhere. It was not by chance that NSSR began as the University in Exile.