There is a broad consensus that Aristotle introduced the concept of matter in order to develop a consistent account of substantial change. However, it is disputed which role matter fulfills in substantial change. According to the traditional interpretation, matter persists while taking on or losing a substantial form. According to a rival interpretation, matter does not persist in substantial change; instead, it is an entity from which a new substance can emerge and which ceases to exist in this process. In my view, both interpretations are problematic in the light of Aristotle’s broader ontological project and are at odds with the way Aristotle describes the substantial generation of living beings. On the basis of Aristotle’s biological theory, I will suggest that Aristotelian matter is a continuant in substantial generation, but does not satisfy the common criteria for persistence that apply to individual substances.
Anna Schriefl
Anna Schriefl is Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin (assistant professor) at the University of Bonn, and currently a visiting scholar at the New School. She has published a book about Plato’s criticism of money and wealth, and most recently an introduction into Stoicism (both in German).
When is anxiety justified? When does anxiety cease to function as an effective and reasonable signal preventing imminent threats, and when does it become an invasive projection of our own ghosts? My talk is divided into three sections. First, I will emphasize the anthropological relevance of anxiety: in various theoretical frameworks, the difference between free-floating anxiety and fear directed at a specific danger even serves as a criterion for distinguishing human beings from animals. Second, I will conduct a phenomenological analysis of anxiety focusing in particular on the altered relationship between perception and imagination. Third, I will address a specific form of anxiety which is particularly dominant in the context of our post-disciplinary societies: the feeling of being left behind. My talk presents a philosophical inquiry into the affective phenomenon that can both protect us from danger and be a danger in itself.
Bio:
Stefano Micali is a Professor at the KU Leuven and the Coordinator of the Husserl-Archives: Centre for Phenomenology and Continental Philosophy. He has published over 60 articles in different languages (English, German, Italian, French, and Dutch) in various areas of research ranging from psychopathology to religion, from political philosophy to aesthetics. He is the author of four monographic books: Überschüsse der Erfahrung (2008), Esperienze temporali (2008), Tra l’altro e se stessi (2020) and Phenomenology of Anxiety (2022). Together with Thomas Fuchs, he has edited several volumes focusing on the relation between psychopathology and philosophy. He is also co-editor of the DGAP (German Society for a Phenomenological Anthropology) series and the Phaenomenologica series (Springer).
The virtually ubiquitous view of seeing-as experiences in Wittgenstein scholarship interprets them as conceptually-laden (with some exceptions, e.g. Travis 2016). The claim is that we can see the same image differently due to switching the conceptual filters, as it were, through which we experience the image (e.g. Schroeder 2010; Mulhall 2001). In this paper I focus on a specific kind of a seeing-as experience for which Wittgenstein’s example of suddenly noticing the similarity between faces is the paradigm. I argue that it is possible to have no concepts involved in this experience, and propose an understanding of what I call “the imagistic seeing-as” as a similarity association, of the kind that grounds poetic means of expression, such as metaphors. The associative nature of this imagistic seeing-as experience may also contribute to the understanding of biases – both personal (e.g. displaced offence) and social (e.g. sexism).
Serving as a response to Aimé Césaire’s call for a universal filled with particularity from his infamous resignation from the French Communist Party in 1956, I focus on the role of culture for a project of universal emancipation. To do so, I follow Sylvia Wynter’s statement that the Négritude movement is an example of a universal and cultural project. Recalling Césaire’s words in “Return to My Native Land,” culture that serves universal emancipation must be “free of the desire to tame but familiar with the play of the world.” To this end, I develop a conception of culture that is both local and universal, that centers on the importance of what it means to be human, as life, as being, and as experience by reading culture as necessarily local, collective, disenchanted, and related to play.
Bio:
Elisabeth Paquette is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her book, titled Universal Emancipation: Race beyond Badiou (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), engages French political theorist Alain Badiou’s discussion of Négritude and the Haitian Revolution to develop a nuanced critique of his theory of emancipation. Currently, she is working on a monograph on the writings of decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter. She is also the Founder of the Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop, which takes place annually during the summer.
What does it mean to be, appear, and act in public? These questions are rarely asked when it comes to the often-diagnosed “structural transformation” (Habermas) of the public sphere. Yet people have a wide variety of “public experiences” every day: from the simple experience of leaving the house and moving on the street to highly networked and technologically mediated public communication and concerted action. In the project I would like to present in its outlines, I try to shed light on the quality and structure of such “public experiences” using a phenomenological approach. In this way, I want to reclaim public space as an experiential space and argue that experiences matter for the constitution of different kinds of public spheres and public spaces.
How, for example, do phenomena like visibility, attention, relevance, reality, trust, or their opposites emerge in public contexts? And how can our individual and collective experiences of the public retain its high democratic ideals while facing the constant threat of superficial entertainment and self-commercialization? In contrast to theories that view the public sphere primarily as a system of information, coordination, or discourse, a phenomenological approach aims to reveal the ways in which experiences constitute spaces of meaning. Such a disclosure of the world-building function of experience is crucial if we are to understand how people can relate to their public existence and a public world, how they can integrate into it or fall away from it, gain or lose trust, and how a shared world is either built or destroyed.
Bio:
Sophie Loidolt is Professor of philosophy and Chair of Practical Philosophy at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. She is a recurrent visiting professor at Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen and the president of the German Society for Phenomenological Research. Most of her education took place at the University of Vienna. Research stays brought her to the Husserl-Archives in Leuven, St. Denis University in Paris, and the New School of Social Research in New York.
Her work centers on issues in the fields of phenomenology, political and legal philosophy, and ethics, as well as transcendental philosophy and philosophy of mind. Her book Phenomenology of Plurality. Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity (Routledge 2017) won the Edward Goodwin Ballard Book Prize in 2018. Other books include: Anspruch und Rechtfertigung. Eine Theorie des rechtlichen Denkens im Anschluss an die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls (Springer 2009), Einführung in die Rechtsphänomenologie (Mohr Siebeck 2010; Japanese translation will appear in 2024).
This paper explores the limits of philosophy of law in addressing the prevailing political crises of our time–the dissolution of the so-called “rules based liberal order” and the fascist underpinnings of “Western” politics–by considering an alternative approach to legal analysis grounded in a Foucauldian conception of nomos. To show how modern law serves to reproduce global inequalities and hierarchies by institutionalizing and naturalizing colonial relations of force, it reconsiders modern law through the framework of power. In doing so, it posits a new reading of modern law as a technology for upholding what Aníbal Quijano has called “the Eurocentered capitalist colonial/modern world power,” or what we can more simply understand as the colonial order of things.
Bio: Sabeen Ahmed is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College, where she works in the areas of social and political philosophy, philosophy of race, and anticolonial thought. Her teaching and scholarship take as their starting point the recognition that white supremacy is the defining political and existential problem of modernity, and that the discipline of philosophy has historically been implicated in this imperial reality. Her research and pedagogy are grounded in decolonial, antiracist, and anti-imperial commitments that bring global perspectives and historically marginalized voices to bear the major political (and thus philosophical) questions of our present.