Nature and Culture - an International Conference (Ontario, May 5th and 6th, 2016)

Keynote Speaker

Prof. Dr. Hartmut Rosa, Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena and 
Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt (Germany)

The conference will be held over two days, on May 5th and 6th on the campus of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton and will bring together senior scholars from Canada, Germany, Mexico and the United States with junior colleagues and graduate students who will present papers on their work in the areas covered by Lawrence Krader’s major work, Noetics and related fields.

The main reference work for the background to the conference is: Lawrence Krader (2010). Noetics: The Science of Thinking and Knowing. (C. Levitt, ed.). Peter Lang: New York. Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Bern, Frankfurt, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, Oxford.

An intellectual biography of Krader and an overview of Noetics, are contained in the Preface and Introduction to that work, written by C. Levitt and can be downloaded from the website:http://lawrencekrader.com/content/noetics.

If you are interested in working on any of the unpublished manuscripts in conjunction with the project, please contact one or the other of the conference organizers.

Conference Outline

The conference will aim to take up a number of themes developed in Krader’s Noetics that bear a relationship to many aspects and lines of development in a variety of intellectual traditions including: Pragmatism, Critical Theory, Symbolic Interactionism, and Anthropology. Krader maintained a correspondence with John Dewey in the late thirties and engaged in discussions with Sidney Hook around the same time. In 1957 he was offered a job by Adorno and Horkheimer at their Institut für Sozialforschung which he declined. His development of a theory of self, person and persona has significant points of contact with that of George Herbert Mead and like Mead, Krader was concerned with the human being’s place in nature. One of Krader’s major points of emphasis in Noetics is related to a new theory of nature and the role of culture within it. Having won the coveted Ketchum Prize in the history of philosophy at CCNY as a senior undergraduate, and having begun a study of the philosophical implications of quantum theory along with developments in the history of mathematics, Krader argued that nature is not reducible to matter but rather contains within it – and there is nothing beyond nature – different orders which vary according to their different systems of space-time. In theory there may be n-orders of nature, but Krader identified three: the material order, the quantum order and the human order. These three orders of nature are related by nexus and difference and their interrelations are to be understood in terms of Leibniz’s theory of passage. Whereas the material order of nature is concrete, ‘thingly’ and direct, the human order is abstract and concrete, objective and subjective, and in which relations are mediate and immediate. In Noetics Krader takes up the dualisms of German Idealism, which include along with those mentioned above: thinking and knowing, theory and practice, mind and body, structure and agency, activity and passivity, among many others, and integrates them into his theory of the human order, arguing that they constitute the differentia specifica of the human order of nature. With Krader’s theory one can read the history of the relationship between nature and culture in a different light. Durkheim, especially in the The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, struggled to understand sociology as a natural science of culture, but he was faced with a nature that was homogenous and dominated by the materialist model. George Herbert Mead in his posthumously published work, Mind, Self and Society began with Darwin and argued that out of the biotic social organization of the gregarious animals a symbolic social order was extruded which could not simply be reduced to the material-biotic order. Krader systematizes this view and argues that whereas we can talk of evolution in the material order, we speak of development in the human order of nature. By means of this international conference and workshop, we will examine the relationship between nature and culture in the approaches of Pragmatism, Symbolic Interactionism, and Critical Theory.

The presentations during the conference will take in aspects of the following areas and theoretical approaches: Symbolic Interactionism, Cultural Theory, Sociology of Knowledge, Arts and Aesthetics, Language and linguistic theory, and Neuroscience.

On the second day of the conference, a workshop will be held at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre featuring an exhibition of biographical material related to a number of New York Jewish intellectuals who participated in the passionate Alcove One debates at City College during the late 1930s, and a panel discussion based on the book and documentary Arguing the World (1998) will be led by Prof. Dr. Neil McLaughlin, from McMaster University. In addition, a presentation of material from Krader’s period at CCNY in relation to his interactions with the other budding New York intellectuals will be on display. Theoretical or empirical papers that relate their data or theoretical reflections back to one of these traditions, or to the various fields covered by Noetics (2010) are welcome. One of the key concerns of the conference is to take one of the two days into the community as a key element of outreach as part of the university’s mandate. The conference aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed edited volume.

Lawrence Krader was born in New York City on December 9, 1919. Although not a famous public intellectual, he was offered appointments to America’s top-ranked universities over the years. He began his studies at the City College of New York (CCNY) in 1937 where he studied philosophy with Morris Raphael Cohen, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1941. His excellence in the area of the history of philosophy won him the covered Ketchum Prize in that field.

In 1939 he spent a year at the University of Chicago with Rudolf Carnap, after which he returned to CCNY to serve as Alfred Tarski’s research assistant. (Tarski came to CCNY after Bertrand Russell’s appointment was blocked by the NYC administration of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Krader was to have served as Russell’s research assistant). At City Krader helped Tarski translate his book Introduction to Logic from Polish into English, an effort which Tarski acknowledged in the Introduction to this translation.

Krader was appointed to a position at the Far Eastern Institute at the University of Washington in 1947 by Karl August Wittfogel. It was there that Krader met and befriended Karl Korsch who had come to visit his old friend Wittfogel. Korsch and his wife Hedda were then domiciled in Cambridge, MA and Krader continued his friendship with Korsch when he moved to Cambridge to begin his doctoral studies at Harvard University in 1949. It was at Korsch’s behest that Krader transcribed, edited and introduced The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (1972).

Krader turned down several offers of appointment to Harvard University where he completed his doctoral dissertation in 1954 on “The Kinship Systems of the Altaic-speaking Peoples of the Asiatic Steppe.” Just prior to completing his doctorate, he married Dr. Barbara Lattimer, an accomplished linguist and ethno-musicologist, whom he had met while attending Roman Jakobson’s graduate linguistic seminar at Columbia University where his future wife served as Jakobson’s research assistant.

Krader taught anthropology at the University of Ohio, the University of Syracuse and the City University of New York, as well as linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he was offered a position in linguistics by Ithiel de Sola Pool. From 1969-1972 he was the Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

His last academic appointment was as Professor and Director of the Insitut für Ethnologie at the Freie Universität Berlin from 1972 to 1982. As Professor Emeritus he composed more than 150 manuscripts on a wide variety of topics in philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, history and related disciplines until his death on November 15, 1998.

He endowed The Lawrence Krader Research Project at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario under the direction of Prof. Cyril Levitt. The Project has been functioning since May 2008 having published two of Krader’s collections of manuscripts including Labor and Value (2003) and Noetics (2010).