Visiting Speaker Series
This year, talks take place at UWE City Campus at Arnolfini
All talks are open to the public
All talks are open to the public
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1 November 2023 (Arnolfini, 4AF013, 4-6pm)
German Idealism on Worth and Usefulness: A Critical Appraisal Brian O’Connor (University College Dublin) Being a useful person means that one has the capacity, if not the developed skills, to act to meet the needs of others. A useless person has neither that capacity nor even the ability to recognize that others have needs. The problematic nature of usefulness begins to appear only when work is conceived as something more than a necessity of self-preservation. This occurs when the primary emphasis placed on work is that it is a capacity that socially developed human beings are supposed to have. The specific problem examined here is that arguments for usefulness are levered against non-useful properties: morality, ethics, altruism being the cases in point. Philosophy attempts, in short, to find reasons from outside the space of natural necessity or of expedience for the necessity of usefulness. The paper focuses mainly on Kant, though the relevantly similar efforts of Hegel and Marx to defend usefulness in non-utility terms are also considered. |
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11 October 2023 (Arnolfini, 5Af005a, 4-6pm)
The Dark Knight and the rebirth of tragedy out of the spirit of cinema David Deamer (Independent Scholar) Face daubed carelessly in white paint, now flaking. Red gloss smeared over mouth, accentuating a rather nasty Glasgow grin. Eye sockets painted as black as the abyss. Such is the figure cut by the Joker in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan 2008). The Clown Prince of Crime, the Harlequin of Hate, the Jester of Genocide. Virtuoso thief. Merciless killer. Yet whenever this monster is in camera we hang on every chewed-up word, every furtive dart of the eyes, every glissade through the mise-en-scène. The Joker is joyful. ‘How can things which are ugly and disharmonious,’ asks Nietzsche ‘induce aesthetic delight?’ (BT §24). His response lies in a form of art known as tragedy. Tragedy goes beyond the idea of art as the perfection of representation and the representation of perfection by incorporating what he names Dionysian drives. And it is in this way that the Joker is the essence of Nietzsche’s Dionysus. Accordingly, we can trace the forces of tragedy in The Dark Knight back to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which – in turn – traces these forces back to Greek drama… and beyond. However, Nietzsche is not simply concerned with the birth of tragedy, but also its death, then rebirth in the ‘present’ (§16). In this way, The Dark Knight is a lens on The Birth of Tragedy and an exemplar par excellence of the rebirth of tragedy through cinema. Thus proving Nietzsche’s first book to be of the utmost relevance today. Art is more than ‘jingling of fool’s bells’ (§F). Rather, proclaims Nietzsche, ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified’ (§5). |
previous seasons:
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31 January 2023 Beyond the Touching-Touched: Perception, Sensibility, Phenomenology Ida Djursaa (Kingston College) In Ideas II, Husserl writes that what constitutes the body as a living body - or Leib - rather than a mere material thing - or Körper - is its capacity for double sensation. When my hands touch one another, each at once feels itself touching and being touched. The touching-touched thus describes a reflexivity of the body with itself, designating its double ontological status as at once a subject that can touch and an object that can be touched. Whilst phenomenological analyses of the body generally privilege the touching-touched, in this paper, I challenge such privileging by showing that this model itself presupposes the existence of an irreducible gap in between the touching and the touched. Through Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, I conceptualise this gap concretely in terms of a pre-reflective and pre-perceptual sensibility which is, I argue, tied to movement rather than touch. Finally, in a move towards a critical phenomenology of sensibility, and in dialogue with some of the feminist literature, I address the cultural and historical structuring of the ways in which bodies come to move, as well as outlining some challenges that this notion of sensibility poses to ‘classical’ phenomenology. |
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14 March 2023
Vital Technologies in Foucault and Canguilhem Federico Testa (University of Bristol) The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has once again placed life at the centre of our ethical debates and political dilemmas. The experience of the pandemic has shown that we can no longer think of forms of ‘living together’ and democratic participation without considering the materiality and precarity of our own biological life. Our reflection on social and collective norms must take into account the potentialities and limits of our biological existence. Michel Foucault’s thought can provide useful tools for understanding this turbulent and changing context. Indeed, Foucault’s work centres on the notion of life in its ambiguous and diverse meanings. From his 1960s reflection on the emergence of life as a biological concept in modernity, to its construal as bios, the ethical material of the technologies of the self in his 1980s books, passing through the investigation on normalization and biopolitics (especially in 1970s), life appears as a multifaceted and homonymic concept expressing different contents. What is the convergence between these biological, political, and ethical meanings of life? This presentation seeks to explore the intricacies of the notion of life in Foucault’s work, by comparing it to the articulation of this concept in Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological. Canguilhem has proposed an understanding of life from the perspective of the experience of disease, exploring what this experience reveals about the creative and normative aspects of life. By comparing Foucault and Canguilhem, I will propose a work hypothesis according to which both authors conceive of the notion of life – both in its biological and ethical dimensions – as intimately related to the human technical adventure. This technical or technological conception of life will help us understand the way in which the vital appears as a normative or nomological phenomenon in Canguilhem, and how this conception sheds light upon the homonymy of the notion of life in Foucault’s work. In order to discuss this convergence, I will focus especially on Canguilhem’s notion of ‘collective techniques’ and Foucault’s idea of the ‘bio-technique’ or technē tou biou, showing how, in both cases, life cannot be separated from social investments and ethical choices. Drawing on this, the paper seeks to show that a proper understanding of the notion of life presupposes an inquiry on the modes human beings develop in order to apply ‘norms’ to life by means of technical activity. |
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28 March 2023
What is Integrity? Why does it Matter Jonathan Webber (Cardiff University) Integrity is an ethical virtue central to public discourse. It is one of the UK's seven Nolan Principles of Public Life and it features in the mission statements of many organisations. But what is it? And why does it matter? I argue that integrity is fundamentally a concern with promoting worthwhile and fulfilling lives. This concern for ethical accuracy motivates and warrants respect for one's own existing ethical commitments, since these are repositories of prior ethical reasoning. However, if this ethical confidence is not to be mere arrogance or intransigence, then it must be tempered by a receptivity to other people's ethical reasoning and a responsiveness to changing circumstances and new information. Finally, although this is a form of ethical seriousness, it includes acceptance of some degree of ambivalence. Once we have this complex picture in view, we can see why integrity matters. Integrity is what a genuine commitment to ethics looks like. Its responsiveness fosters an appropriate evolution of one's commitments and behaviour as the world develops. And its receptivity to other people's reasoning, which incorporates an openness about one's own, is essential to peaceable collective decision making and contributes towards ethically good collective decisions. |
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18 April 2023
Playing with Things — Lyotard’s Childhood Antics Keith Crome (Manchester Metropolitan University) Contemporary discourse on the state of things oscillates between celebrating the seemingly limitless possibilities generated by the viral explosion of things, and condemning the existential impotence attendant upon it. My aim is to move beyond this oscillation, by showing how it is grounded in a certain conception of possibility. To do this it will be necessary to confront our contemporary nihilism as what determines the possibility of possibility. To facilitate this confrontation, I will draw on Jean-Francois Lyotard’s writings on infancy (conceived here as a state of radical impotence) as entailing a paradoxical rethinking of the essence of possibility itself. I will then turn to the phenomenon of play to argue that it opens upan alternative, playful experience of possibility. |
2nd Term (2019-20)
19 February | Searching for Work
Darian Meacham (Maastricht University)
The ways that we work (or don’t) give shape to most aspects of our lives: when we wake, eat, sleep, use the toilet, have children, and, for many, die. Work, in other words, is the central category of our social and political lives. Work also sits at the core of contemporary liberal political thinking. it Is work that brings us together into the communities of strangers that exemplify modern-society and requires principles or rules for regulating the distribution of the risks and benefits of productive cooperation (work). Yet, as Elizabeth Anderson has recently pointed out, work, or what happens at work, has strangely fallen into the background of much contemporary political theorizing. This talk looks at work as a sociological, philosophical, anthropological concept. I will discuss examples from James C. Scott’s recent Against the Grain to argue (with Scott, I think) that the state must be understood in terms of technological assemblages for the organization and exploitation of work.
26 February | From Jean-Paul Sartre to Critical Existentialism: Notes for an Existentialist Ethical Theory
Maria Russo (San Raffaele University, Milan)
The aim of this paper is to sketch an existentialist ethical theory based on a Kantian interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ethics of authenticity. Between 1947-1948, Sartre wrote several notebooks on the possibility to elaborate an existentialist moral philosophy. These notes are unfortunately incomplete and have only been published posthumously, but they do offer a starting point, which has to be re-evaluated in order to finish the job Sartre started. At this stage, it is important to link this proposal to the contemporary metaethical and normative debate, clarifying what could be the ground of this theory and why we need to use Kantian criticism in order to overcome several hurdles. First of all, I am going to assess the moral problem in Sartre’s existentialist overview starting from Being and Nothingness. Then, I will present the incomplete moral philosophy of authenticity outlined in Notebooks for an ethics as well as his last interview. Finally, I will try to go one step further by sketching what I have called Critical Existentialism, an existentialist version of Kantian formal ethics.
11 March | After Post-Modernism: A Neo-Modern Utopia
Roberto Mordacci (San Raffaele University, Milan)
Utopian thought has a specific role in modern political thought. When Thomas More published his Utopia (1516), he was creating a method to devise the principles of justice by way of imagining a fictitious but realistic happy and just state. This method has been often understood as the application of an ideal model based on abstract principles, as it happens in Plato’s Republic, but it rather works the other way around. The idea of Utopia has become a commonplace in political thought, but it has undergone a number of modifications that made it suspect to many, who argue that the utopian ideal hides a dystopian reality. Many critiques of utopia have led to the refusal of any political project, which is connected with the post-modern refusal of philosophical normative thinking in general. We have to restate the original form and method of utopian thinking and use it to face the challenges of our present Neo-modern condition.
18 March | Pathology as Philosophical Method
Havi Carel (Bristol University)
22 April | Noxiogenesis: Asystatic Ontology of Noise
Miguel Prado Casanova (UWE Bristol)
19 February | Searching for Work
Darian Meacham (Maastricht University)
The ways that we work (or don’t) give shape to most aspects of our lives: when we wake, eat, sleep, use the toilet, have children, and, for many, die. Work, in other words, is the central category of our social and political lives. Work also sits at the core of contemporary liberal political thinking. it Is work that brings us together into the communities of strangers that exemplify modern-society and requires principles or rules for regulating the distribution of the risks and benefits of productive cooperation (work). Yet, as Elizabeth Anderson has recently pointed out, work, or what happens at work, has strangely fallen into the background of much contemporary political theorizing. This talk looks at work as a sociological, philosophical, anthropological concept. I will discuss examples from James C. Scott’s recent Against the Grain to argue (with Scott, I think) that the state must be understood in terms of technological assemblages for the organization and exploitation of work.
26 February | From Jean-Paul Sartre to Critical Existentialism: Notes for an Existentialist Ethical Theory
Maria Russo (San Raffaele University, Milan)
The aim of this paper is to sketch an existentialist ethical theory based on a Kantian interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ethics of authenticity. Between 1947-1948, Sartre wrote several notebooks on the possibility to elaborate an existentialist moral philosophy. These notes are unfortunately incomplete and have only been published posthumously, but they do offer a starting point, which has to be re-evaluated in order to finish the job Sartre started. At this stage, it is important to link this proposal to the contemporary metaethical and normative debate, clarifying what could be the ground of this theory and why we need to use Kantian criticism in order to overcome several hurdles. First of all, I am going to assess the moral problem in Sartre’s existentialist overview starting from Being and Nothingness. Then, I will present the incomplete moral philosophy of authenticity outlined in Notebooks for an ethics as well as his last interview. Finally, I will try to go one step further by sketching what I have called Critical Existentialism, an existentialist version of Kantian formal ethics.
11 March | After Post-Modernism: A Neo-Modern Utopia
Roberto Mordacci (San Raffaele University, Milan)
Utopian thought has a specific role in modern political thought. When Thomas More published his Utopia (1516), he was creating a method to devise the principles of justice by way of imagining a fictitious but realistic happy and just state. This method has been often understood as the application of an ideal model based on abstract principles, as it happens in Plato’s Republic, but it rather works the other way around. The idea of Utopia has become a commonplace in political thought, but it has undergone a number of modifications that made it suspect to many, who argue that the utopian ideal hides a dystopian reality. Many critiques of utopia have led to the refusal of any political project, which is connected with the post-modern refusal of philosophical normative thinking in general. We have to restate the original form and method of utopian thinking and use it to face the challenges of our present Neo-modern condition.
18 March | Pathology as Philosophical Method
Havi Carel (Bristol University)
22 April | Noxiogenesis: Asystatic Ontology of Noise
Miguel Prado Casanova (UWE Bristol)
1st Term (2019-20)
2 October | On Learning to Laugh at Oneself - A Critical Approach
Katia Hay (University of Lisbon)
In this paper I use Hannah Gadsby’s stand-up comedy film ‘Nanette’ to question the teachings of Nietzsche/Zarathustra that claim that we must learn to laugh-at-oneself. This transforms into the question: from which perspective are we supposed, according to Nietzsche, to laugh at ourselves? The answers that we find in Zarathustra itself seem rather esoteric and mysterious. Thus, in order to address these questions, I propose to analyse the different forms in which ‘laughter’ appears in Nietzsche’s texts.
16 October | The Hidden Nature of Plotinus' Forms
Lynn Hubbard (UWE Bristol)
Plotinus, like Plato, has a theory of forms; however, it is a subject that has proved challenging for scholars of the Enneads due to perceived ambiguities in the text. The lack of clarity about the nature of Plotinus’ forms impacts upon all aspects of his philosophy, therefore many issues remain unresolved. In this paper I explain how ambiguities in the text of the Enneads are due to the tradition of secrecy and concealment in ancient philosophy and that Plotinus hides his theory of forms behind a metaphor of seeing and a psychology of thinking. I argue that an analysis of the text of the Enneads reveals that Plotinus’ account of the generation of Being and the forms integrates the dynamics of a vibrating string with the cosmology of the Pythagoreans who considered musical harmonics to be the a priori structure for the generation of, and order in, the universe. Furthermore, I explain that as this interpretation unites Plotinus’ cosmology and psychology it makes sense of Plotinus’ philosophy as a complete and rational system. It therefore provides a solution to many of the other dilemmas that challenge Plotinian scholars, such as the integration of soul and body, sense perception, memory, reason, and freedom. While science did not understand the physics of a vibrating string until the seventeenth century, I argue that Plotinus understood it in the third century A.D. and by applying it to his metaphysics it represents an important and previously unrecognised development of Pythagorean philosophy. My argument raises the question of whether Plotinus offers a metaphysical system because it is based on physics, and furthermore, whether it contributes to the debate about what defines metaphysics in general.
6 November | The Absolute and the Event
Emilio Carlo Corriero (University of Turin)
It is known that Heidegger dedicated a seminar to Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom already in Marburg in 1927-28, immediately after the publication of his masterpiece Being and Time. He then returned to Schelling’s work during the course he taught in 1936 and again in 1941-43, with lectures dedicated to the Metaphysics of German Idealism, at a time when the theoretical foundations of what was known as the Kehre (the 'turn') with respect to the existentialist theories of the 1920s were being laid. The intention of my presentation is not to trace the various stages of Heidegger’s readings of Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations, but rather to highlight the theoretical affinity between the results of Schelling’s speculations and Heidegger’s later theories. Thanks to the Ereignis (Event), a concept of “being” intimately linked to that of “time”, Heidegger’s theories culminate in a form of “positive”, “historical” philosophy as well as in the definition of a post-metaphysical Absolute beyond any form of onto-theology.
13 November | Aristotle on Language and Political Life: A Reappraisal
Claudio Majolino (University of Lille)
27 November | Emotion, Magic and Practical Metabolism: Sartre & Collingwood
Thomas Greaves (University of East Anglia)
2 October | On Learning to Laugh at Oneself - A Critical Approach
Katia Hay (University of Lisbon)
In this paper I use Hannah Gadsby’s stand-up comedy film ‘Nanette’ to question the teachings of Nietzsche/Zarathustra that claim that we must learn to laugh-at-oneself. This transforms into the question: from which perspective are we supposed, according to Nietzsche, to laugh at ourselves? The answers that we find in Zarathustra itself seem rather esoteric and mysterious. Thus, in order to address these questions, I propose to analyse the different forms in which ‘laughter’ appears in Nietzsche’s texts.
16 October | The Hidden Nature of Plotinus' Forms
Lynn Hubbard (UWE Bristol)
Plotinus, like Plato, has a theory of forms; however, it is a subject that has proved challenging for scholars of the Enneads due to perceived ambiguities in the text. The lack of clarity about the nature of Plotinus’ forms impacts upon all aspects of his philosophy, therefore many issues remain unresolved. In this paper I explain how ambiguities in the text of the Enneads are due to the tradition of secrecy and concealment in ancient philosophy and that Plotinus hides his theory of forms behind a metaphor of seeing and a psychology of thinking. I argue that an analysis of the text of the Enneads reveals that Plotinus’ account of the generation of Being and the forms integrates the dynamics of a vibrating string with the cosmology of the Pythagoreans who considered musical harmonics to be the a priori structure for the generation of, and order in, the universe. Furthermore, I explain that as this interpretation unites Plotinus’ cosmology and psychology it makes sense of Plotinus’ philosophy as a complete and rational system. It therefore provides a solution to many of the other dilemmas that challenge Plotinian scholars, such as the integration of soul and body, sense perception, memory, reason, and freedom. While science did not understand the physics of a vibrating string until the seventeenth century, I argue that Plotinus understood it in the third century A.D. and by applying it to his metaphysics it represents an important and previously unrecognised development of Pythagorean philosophy. My argument raises the question of whether Plotinus offers a metaphysical system because it is based on physics, and furthermore, whether it contributes to the debate about what defines metaphysics in general.
6 November | The Absolute and the Event
Emilio Carlo Corriero (University of Turin)
It is known that Heidegger dedicated a seminar to Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom already in Marburg in 1927-28, immediately after the publication of his masterpiece Being and Time. He then returned to Schelling’s work during the course he taught in 1936 and again in 1941-43, with lectures dedicated to the Metaphysics of German Idealism, at a time when the theoretical foundations of what was known as the Kehre (the 'turn') with respect to the existentialist theories of the 1920s were being laid. The intention of my presentation is not to trace the various stages of Heidegger’s readings of Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations, but rather to highlight the theoretical affinity between the results of Schelling’s speculations and Heidegger’s later theories. Thanks to the Ereignis (Event), a concept of “being” intimately linked to that of “time”, Heidegger’s theories culminate in a form of “positive”, “historical” philosophy as well as in the definition of a post-metaphysical Absolute beyond any form of onto-theology.
13 November | Aristotle on Language and Political Life: A Reappraisal
Claudio Majolino (University of Lille)
27 November | Emotion, Magic and Practical Metabolism: Sartre & Collingwood
Thomas Greaves (University of East Anglia)
2nd Term (2018-19)
30 January | How Common is Common Human Reason? The Plurality of Moral Perspectives and Kant’s Ethics
Martin Sticker (University of Bristol)
In his ethics, Kant claims to systematize and ground a conception of morality that every human being is already supposedly committed to in virtue of her common human reason. In this paper, I have two goals.Firstly, I argue that Kantians should be much more concerned than they currently are about the possibility that common human reason is, in fact, not common or universally shared across all cultures and historical epochs. Secondly, I present six considerations that can help Kant to take the edge of this concern. I will explain what Kant commits himself to concerning a universally shared moral perspective when he claims that his ethics is one of common human reason, and I argue that his commitments are, in fact, more modest than we might expect.
13 February | Unfathomable Complexity: Bergson and the Problem of Physical Reductionism in Biology
Wahida Khandker (Manchester Metropolitan University)
This paper compares certain insights yielded from the perspectives of quantum physics and Henri Bergson’s metaphysical project that seeks to establish new, anti-reductionist foundations for the analysis of life. The particular focus for the comparisons with Bergson’s thought will be on a number of works by the physicist Walter Elsasser, who is distinctive both for his forays outside the bounds of his own discipline into biology, and for his largely positive references to Bergson’s work. Elsasser, commenting on the focus of his own 1958 book, The Physical Foundation of Biology, expresses his indebtedness to Bergson’s Matter and Memory for its analysis of a key feature that distinguishes living organisms from mere mechanisms, that is, the irreducibility of their functions to physical structures or storage devices. To conclude, the paper follows Erwin Schrödinger’s interpretation of the application of the laws of thermodynamics to living processes with brief comparisons with Bergson’s use of the ‘imprecision’ of this principle in Creative Evolution, and with biologist Lynn Margulis’ more modern speculations on symbiosis as the basis for the evolution of multicellular life. This closing comparison will indicate some of the ways in which we might read the tradition of process philosophy together with physics and contemporary biology to find alternative approaches to the study of life, sensitive to its complex modes of being, and to the fragility and precariousness of its processes.
15 February | Nomadic Future: Cinematographic Temporalities from the Suburbs
Cristina Voto (University of Buenos Aires)
How does cinema work when it comes to create images of the future? What power relations are implied by the future when it becomes the subject of a film? And, finally, how do we understand relations of subalternity with regards to the future? To answer these questions, I will use resources drawn from semiotics, postcolonial studies, and film studies. The main contention of this talk is that cinema is a world-shaping activity - Far from imitating the world, cinema establishes images that materialize in multiple geographic spaces. Its inherent spatiality is what determines which realities cinema can frame and which others are beyond its grasp; which narratives it can recount and which others it has to dismiss. The spatial and geographic aspect of cinema is also what makes the image of a film an aesthetic and political construct - An instrument that people use to question their own age as well as their possible future. Tackling the theme of future from this cinematographic angle will allow me to set aside three traditional notions of future: (1) Future as projection; (2) Future as reality-to-come; (3) Future as time ahead of us. I will challenge these notions by introducing a 'nomadic' perspective (Braidotti 2012) whereby the future is understood as a figurative virtuality that is not simply detached from the present but rather continuously challenges it. I will argue that this idea of nomadic future, which emerges in cinema and allows viewers to watch over their present, reach a new sensitivity, and construct new temporalities, can help deconstruct any hegemonic future.
13 March (in room 3C001) | Original Forgiveness
Nicolas de Warren (Penn State University)
An assumption that unites various conceptions of forgiveness is the thought that forgiveness is a response to something that first incites it: something must have been done against me in order to find myself in the situation of (possibly) granting or refusing forgiveness. Likewise, you must first have done something against me in order to find yourself in the position of (possibly) receiving or not receiving forgiveness. Whether for the aggrieved person who forgives or for the aggrieving person who seeks forgiveness, forgiveness is understood as a encounter in the aftermath of a determinate past: an original sin, an archaic offense, a primordial fall, an act of violence. This assumption seems commonsensical enough, that forgiveness is only called onto the scene, only enters into question, once a specific harm has been done against me. I would like to challenge this assumption—commonsensical, theological, philosophical—and with this challenge suggest that one cannot arrive at a genuine grasp of the ontological significance of forgiveness for the human condition without a proper revision of this assumption. Instead of considering forgiveness as solely a reactive power, I shall propose a conception of “original forgiveness” as an original availability to the possibility of forgiveness inscribed within the fundamental bonds of trust without which, as I argue, human life cannot truly be said to belong to a shared world of agency, responsibility, and narrative.
27 March | Desire and the Platonic Tradition
Fiona Ellis (University of Roehampton)
How are we to comprehend Plato's conception of desire? What is its relation to reason? And is the position defensible? I shall respond to some familiar objections, and argue that there are good reasons for taking seriously his idea that desire is a mode of cognition. I shall draw out some implications for an understanding of the 'ladder of love', and the nature of the envisaged spiritual ascent.
10 April | Rethinking Existentialism: From Radical Freedom to Sedimentation
John Webber (Cardiff University)
30 January | How Common is Common Human Reason? The Plurality of Moral Perspectives and Kant’s Ethics
Martin Sticker (University of Bristol)
In his ethics, Kant claims to systematize and ground a conception of morality that every human being is already supposedly committed to in virtue of her common human reason. In this paper, I have two goals.Firstly, I argue that Kantians should be much more concerned than they currently are about the possibility that common human reason is, in fact, not common or universally shared across all cultures and historical epochs. Secondly, I present six considerations that can help Kant to take the edge of this concern. I will explain what Kant commits himself to concerning a universally shared moral perspective when he claims that his ethics is one of common human reason, and I argue that his commitments are, in fact, more modest than we might expect.
13 February | Unfathomable Complexity: Bergson and the Problem of Physical Reductionism in Biology
Wahida Khandker (Manchester Metropolitan University)
This paper compares certain insights yielded from the perspectives of quantum physics and Henri Bergson’s metaphysical project that seeks to establish new, anti-reductionist foundations for the analysis of life. The particular focus for the comparisons with Bergson’s thought will be on a number of works by the physicist Walter Elsasser, who is distinctive both for his forays outside the bounds of his own discipline into biology, and for his largely positive references to Bergson’s work. Elsasser, commenting on the focus of his own 1958 book, The Physical Foundation of Biology, expresses his indebtedness to Bergson’s Matter and Memory for its analysis of a key feature that distinguishes living organisms from mere mechanisms, that is, the irreducibility of their functions to physical structures or storage devices. To conclude, the paper follows Erwin Schrödinger’s interpretation of the application of the laws of thermodynamics to living processes with brief comparisons with Bergson’s use of the ‘imprecision’ of this principle in Creative Evolution, and with biologist Lynn Margulis’ more modern speculations on symbiosis as the basis for the evolution of multicellular life. This closing comparison will indicate some of the ways in which we might read the tradition of process philosophy together with physics and contemporary biology to find alternative approaches to the study of life, sensitive to its complex modes of being, and to the fragility and precariousness of its processes.
15 February | Nomadic Future: Cinematographic Temporalities from the Suburbs
Cristina Voto (University of Buenos Aires)
How does cinema work when it comes to create images of the future? What power relations are implied by the future when it becomes the subject of a film? And, finally, how do we understand relations of subalternity with regards to the future? To answer these questions, I will use resources drawn from semiotics, postcolonial studies, and film studies. The main contention of this talk is that cinema is a world-shaping activity - Far from imitating the world, cinema establishes images that materialize in multiple geographic spaces. Its inherent spatiality is what determines which realities cinema can frame and which others are beyond its grasp; which narratives it can recount and which others it has to dismiss. The spatial and geographic aspect of cinema is also what makes the image of a film an aesthetic and political construct - An instrument that people use to question their own age as well as their possible future. Tackling the theme of future from this cinematographic angle will allow me to set aside three traditional notions of future: (1) Future as projection; (2) Future as reality-to-come; (3) Future as time ahead of us. I will challenge these notions by introducing a 'nomadic' perspective (Braidotti 2012) whereby the future is understood as a figurative virtuality that is not simply detached from the present but rather continuously challenges it. I will argue that this idea of nomadic future, which emerges in cinema and allows viewers to watch over their present, reach a new sensitivity, and construct new temporalities, can help deconstruct any hegemonic future.
13 March (in room 3C001) | Original Forgiveness
Nicolas de Warren (Penn State University)
An assumption that unites various conceptions of forgiveness is the thought that forgiveness is a response to something that first incites it: something must have been done against me in order to find myself in the situation of (possibly) granting or refusing forgiveness. Likewise, you must first have done something against me in order to find yourself in the position of (possibly) receiving or not receiving forgiveness. Whether for the aggrieved person who forgives or for the aggrieving person who seeks forgiveness, forgiveness is understood as a encounter in the aftermath of a determinate past: an original sin, an archaic offense, a primordial fall, an act of violence. This assumption seems commonsensical enough, that forgiveness is only called onto the scene, only enters into question, once a specific harm has been done against me. I would like to challenge this assumption—commonsensical, theological, philosophical—and with this challenge suggest that one cannot arrive at a genuine grasp of the ontological significance of forgiveness for the human condition without a proper revision of this assumption. Instead of considering forgiveness as solely a reactive power, I shall propose a conception of “original forgiveness” as an original availability to the possibility of forgiveness inscribed within the fundamental bonds of trust without which, as I argue, human life cannot truly be said to belong to a shared world of agency, responsibility, and narrative.
27 March | Desire and the Platonic Tradition
Fiona Ellis (University of Roehampton)
How are we to comprehend Plato's conception of desire? What is its relation to reason? And is the position defensible? I shall respond to some familiar objections, and argue that there are good reasons for taking seriously his idea that desire is a mode of cognition. I shall draw out some implications for an understanding of the 'ladder of love', and the nature of the envisaged spiritual ascent.
10 April | Rethinking Existentialism: From Radical Freedom to Sedimentation
John Webber (Cardiff University)
1st Term (2018-19)
3 October | Schelling’s Question Quid Juris
G. Anthony Bruno (Royal Holloway, University of London)
For the German idealists, moving beyond Kant means supplying ‘premises’ for his conclusions, typically in the form of a first principle from which to deduce the conditions of experience. Their main question is what this principle is and in what deduction properly consists. Schelling initially addresses just this question. So why, in his Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, does he say that philosophy’s ‘last great question’ is ‘to be or not to be’? How could its answer provide premises for Kantian conclusions? A clue lies in Kant’s question quid juris regarding our right to the categories, of which Schelling’s strange question is, I argue, a radical form.
31 October | Kant and Nietzsche on First and Last Things
Andrea Rehberg (Newcastle University)
In recent decades the connections between Kant and Nietzsche have increasingly become objects of scholarship, but this tends to focus either on the epistemological and/or moral issues that arise from Nietzsche’s responses to the issues of the first and second Critiques, or more generally on the effects of any of Kant’s three Critiques on Nietzsche’s thought. But only rarely have philosophers juxtaposed Kant’s and Nietzsche’s thoughts on the issue of God, their theological and post-theological reflections. To address this lacuna in the scholarship, the present paper offers a detailed examination of the trajectory from Kant’s critical curbing of speculative reason when it claims knowledge of the supersensible, the immortality of the soul and the existence of God (in the Critique of Pure Reason), via his late essays, “The End of All Things” (1794) and “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy” (1796), against Schwärmerei (enthusiasm or exaltation), to Nietzsche’s thought of the “only possible way of maintaining a meaning for the concept ‘God’”. Having set out the Kantian background to the question of our access to the nature of God, the paper traces the continuities and contrasts between Kant and Nietzsche on these points. Amongst Nietzsche’s great achievements, the most relevant for this paper is that, without going back on Kant’s Copernican turn, i.e., he makes space for an a-rational sense of God, namely in the thought experiment and test of the eternal recurrence, i.e., God not as ens realissimum, cause or ground of the world, but as the sense of the world, and as the deification of all that is.
14 November | What is Wrong with Common Sense?
Emanuele Caminada (KU Leuven)
What is common sense, or, better, what is common sense used and abused for? In order to understand the rhetoric behind current populistic slogans, I propose a philosophical reading of this concept. Firstly, I will give a brief historical introduction into the different concepts and philosophical traditions related to common sense (and the cognates common ground, certainty and self-evidence), which converged in the 20th century phenomenological debate (koiné aísthesis, sensus communis, common sense, bon sens, senso comune, gesunder Menschenverstand, das Man, Lebenswelt, Gemeinsinn). Secondly, I will show how common sense became in modernity the leading transformative force towards the establishment of constitutional democracy as the power of public spirit and public opinion (Rosenfeld, Habermas). At the beginning of the 20th century, the general expectations raised by the normative claims “of the people” were reflected both in revolutionary (Gramsci) and counter-revolutionary (Heidegger) attitudes, sharpening the intrinsic tension between doxa and episteme, a tension which has political relevance even for the actual crises of liberal democracy (Urbinati). Finally, I will argue that this line of philosophical reflection could help us in addressing current populism forces in Western country as forms of common sense politics.
28 November | The Aesthetics of Temporality in Heidegger’s Kant
Clive Cazeaux (Cardiff Metropolitan University)
Heidegger’s Kant book, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, from 1929, sees Heidegger explore the relationship between Kant’s schematism and time. The study is a development of the fundamental ontology that Heidegger presents in Being and Time in 1927. As is well-known in Kantian scholarship, the schematism is ultimately dismissed by Kant as ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human soul’ (A141, B180–1). However, Heidegger finds that pursuing the significance of time for the schematism can not only produce insight for his interpretation of Kant, but can also help to clarify the foundational role that temporality plays in his own fundamental ontology. One element that is decisive in his reading of Kant is the idea that a schema is a transcendental determination of time which brings a category into line with intuition by presenting an ‘image’ for the category. It is the work to which the notion of ‘image’ is put in making sense of the schema as a transcendental determination of time that I focus upon in this paper. The examples given by Heidegger, I suggest, draw heavily upon qualities of sensory and aesthetic experience, and in particular, their seemingly contradictory tendencies of inviting yet frustrating categorization. This paper establishes the extent to which aspects of aesthetic experience play a role in enabling a coherent reconstruction of the schematism and of advancing Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, and identifies the kind of role (e.g. analogical, illustrative, or other) they play.
12 December | Heidegger’s Critique of Technology
Christos Hadjioannou (University of Sussex/University College Dublin)
We live in a world where technology reaches into every aspect of our lives. Technological devices are with us from the minute we wake up until the moment we fall asleep. We trade digital information with a host of individuals at a rate that was inconceivable just a generation ago. Despite the impact technology has on our daily life, relatively little philosophical reflection has gone into explaining what draw us into technology’s embrace. Beginning in the mid-30s, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) turned his attention to the framework in which technological devices are understood. His critique of technology is based on the key concepts of Gestell, often translated as “enframing” or “positionality”, and it indicates the way we frame, position, and ultimately reduce the world to resources for production and consumption. Gestell refers to our tendency to make everything, including ourselves, a resource ready to be called on in the service of a technological system. According to Heidegger, reducing the world to readily available resources is dangerous because it undermines our creative engagement with reality, alienates us from ourselves and each other, and leads to the destruction of our habitat. In this talk, I will focus on the ways Heidegger’s critique of technology is not really a critique of technological apparatuses and machines, but rather a critique of the ways techno-science represents the world in a reductive manner. I will hence focus on techno-science as a mode of revealing that needs to be overcome.
3 October | Schelling’s Question Quid Juris
G. Anthony Bruno (Royal Holloway, University of London)
For the German idealists, moving beyond Kant means supplying ‘premises’ for his conclusions, typically in the form of a first principle from which to deduce the conditions of experience. Their main question is what this principle is and in what deduction properly consists. Schelling initially addresses just this question. So why, in his Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, does he say that philosophy’s ‘last great question’ is ‘to be or not to be’? How could its answer provide premises for Kantian conclusions? A clue lies in Kant’s question quid juris regarding our right to the categories, of which Schelling’s strange question is, I argue, a radical form.
31 October | Kant and Nietzsche on First and Last Things
Andrea Rehberg (Newcastle University)
In recent decades the connections between Kant and Nietzsche have increasingly become objects of scholarship, but this tends to focus either on the epistemological and/or moral issues that arise from Nietzsche’s responses to the issues of the first and second Critiques, or more generally on the effects of any of Kant’s three Critiques on Nietzsche’s thought. But only rarely have philosophers juxtaposed Kant’s and Nietzsche’s thoughts on the issue of God, their theological and post-theological reflections. To address this lacuna in the scholarship, the present paper offers a detailed examination of the trajectory from Kant’s critical curbing of speculative reason when it claims knowledge of the supersensible, the immortality of the soul and the existence of God (in the Critique of Pure Reason), via his late essays, “The End of All Things” (1794) and “On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy” (1796), against Schwärmerei (enthusiasm or exaltation), to Nietzsche’s thought of the “only possible way of maintaining a meaning for the concept ‘God’”. Having set out the Kantian background to the question of our access to the nature of God, the paper traces the continuities and contrasts between Kant and Nietzsche on these points. Amongst Nietzsche’s great achievements, the most relevant for this paper is that, without going back on Kant’s Copernican turn, i.e., he makes space for an a-rational sense of God, namely in the thought experiment and test of the eternal recurrence, i.e., God not as ens realissimum, cause or ground of the world, but as the sense of the world, and as the deification of all that is.
14 November | What is Wrong with Common Sense?
Emanuele Caminada (KU Leuven)
What is common sense, or, better, what is common sense used and abused for? In order to understand the rhetoric behind current populistic slogans, I propose a philosophical reading of this concept. Firstly, I will give a brief historical introduction into the different concepts and philosophical traditions related to common sense (and the cognates common ground, certainty and self-evidence), which converged in the 20th century phenomenological debate (koiné aísthesis, sensus communis, common sense, bon sens, senso comune, gesunder Menschenverstand, das Man, Lebenswelt, Gemeinsinn). Secondly, I will show how common sense became in modernity the leading transformative force towards the establishment of constitutional democracy as the power of public spirit and public opinion (Rosenfeld, Habermas). At the beginning of the 20th century, the general expectations raised by the normative claims “of the people” were reflected both in revolutionary (Gramsci) and counter-revolutionary (Heidegger) attitudes, sharpening the intrinsic tension between doxa and episteme, a tension which has political relevance even for the actual crises of liberal democracy (Urbinati). Finally, I will argue that this line of philosophical reflection could help us in addressing current populism forces in Western country as forms of common sense politics.
28 November | The Aesthetics of Temporality in Heidegger’s Kant
Clive Cazeaux (Cardiff Metropolitan University)
Heidegger’s Kant book, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, from 1929, sees Heidegger explore the relationship between Kant’s schematism and time. The study is a development of the fundamental ontology that Heidegger presents in Being and Time in 1927. As is well-known in Kantian scholarship, the schematism is ultimately dismissed by Kant as ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human soul’ (A141, B180–1). However, Heidegger finds that pursuing the significance of time for the schematism can not only produce insight for his interpretation of Kant, but can also help to clarify the foundational role that temporality plays in his own fundamental ontology. One element that is decisive in his reading of Kant is the idea that a schema is a transcendental determination of time which brings a category into line with intuition by presenting an ‘image’ for the category. It is the work to which the notion of ‘image’ is put in making sense of the schema as a transcendental determination of time that I focus upon in this paper. The examples given by Heidegger, I suggest, draw heavily upon qualities of sensory and aesthetic experience, and in particular, their seemingly contradictory tendencies of inviting yet frustrating categorization. This paper establishes the extent to which aspects of aesthetic experience play a role in enabling a coherent reconstruction of the schematism and of advancing Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, and identifies the kind of role (e.g. analogical, illustrative, or other) they play.
12 December | Heidegger’s Critique of Technology
Christos Hadjioannou (University of Sussex/University College Dublin)
We live in a world where technology reaches into every aspect of our lives. Technological devices are with us from the minute we wake up until the moment we fall asleep. We trade digital information with a host of individuals at a rate that was inconceivable just a generation ago. Despite the impact technology has on our daily life, relatively little philosophical reflection has gone into explaining what draw us into technology’s embrace. Beginning in the mid-30s, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) turned his attention to the framework in which technological devices are understood. His critique of technology is based on the key concepts of Gestell, often translated as “enframing” or “positionality”, and it indicates the way we frame, position, and ultimately reduce the world to resources for production and consumption. Gestell refers to our tendency to make everything, including ourselves, a resource ready to be called on in the service of a technological system. According to Heidegger, reducing the world to readily available resources is dangerous because it undermines our creative engagement with reality, alienates us from ourselves and each other, and leads to the destruction of our habitat. In this talk, I will focus on the ways Heidegger’s critique of technology is not really a critique of technological apparatuses and machines, but rather a critique of the ways techno-science represents the world in a reductive manner. I will hence focus on techno-science as a mode of revealing that needs to be overcome.