Varieties of realism: aesthetics, politics, and philosophy

One of the most disputed questions regarding the politics of our times focuses on the questions of ‘truth’ , ‘facts’ , ‘objectivity’ and the NYU Liberal Studies challenge that a multitude of social and political forces present to the stability of these concepts in myriad ways, all within a novel media ecology. The question of ‘what is possible?’ for instance, often engenders the claim of ‘realism’ as a challenge to political projects perceived to be fantastic or utopian. But In aesthetics, the question registers in a different, though related, fashion with respect to the history of plastic arts. An issue that has only intensified with the introduction of accelerated forms of technology highlighting the contrast between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’. In philosophy the history of the question of reality and realism is as old as the practice itself in terms of the world we live in, the language we use to describe it, and how we understand ourselves and our individual experience. This conference gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars to rethink the question of realism in light of these various perspectives.

 Speakers 

Jocelyn Benoist (University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne), Andrew Brandel (University of Chicago), Michael Campbell (Kyoto University), Juliet Floyd (Boston University), Jeroen Gerrits (SUNY-Binghamton), Brendan Hogan (NYU), Sandra Laugier (University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne), Azadeh Nilchiani (University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne), Richard Shusterman (Florida International University), Martin Shuster (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), Yann Toma (University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne), Hent de Vries (NYU), Zed Adams (The New School for Social Research) and Nat Hanson (University of Reading), Tatsiana Zhurauliova (University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne).