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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).

The violence already systematically inflicted on other earth beings (animals and the environment), and intensifying today intensified through ecological collapse and climate change, is ‘in plain sight’. Yet entrenched epistemic and institutional barriers impede its being registered in ways proportionate to its gravity. While in recent years, philosophers and social theorists have done a good job at explaining why, to use two familiar example, glass walls to abattoirs don’t stop people eating meat, and data on climate change does not catalyse mass mobilization, we have been less adept at delivering our analysis in ways that both illuminate and transform the many sites of dangerous inertia.

Through the experience of living through the Black Summer wildfires, Danielle Celermajer decided to philosophize the impact of climate catastrophe on animals and the environment through the genre of creative non-fiction. The result was Summertime; Reflections on a Vanishing Future, a book that grounds arguments about what ethics and responsibility to other earth beings means in the era of climate catastrophe in the immediate experiences of the members of the multispecies community with whom she lives. In this conversation, Celermajer and Professor Alice Crary will take Summertime as their starting point to reflect on questions of ethics, language, and the responsibility of theorists in the midst of ecological collapse.

Bios:

Danielle Celermajer is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney, Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute and leads the Multispecies Justice project. Her books include Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology and The Prevention of Torture, A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age, The Subject of Human Rights, and Institutional Transformations. Through the experience of living through the black summer bushfires with a multispecies community, she began writing about a new crime of our age, Omnicide. Her book Summertime; Reflections on a Vanishing Future (Penguin Random House, 2021) considers the more-than-human experience of climate catastrophe.

This talk reads contemporary debates about structural racism and US history from the perspective of philosophical questions about identity and difference. While many people have argued that America needs to come to terms with or “work through” the racism in its history that has shaped and continues to shape its present structures, it remains difficult to explain what connects this past and the present. Are we talking about one racism with many different past and present forms? Or are there multiple racisms that only share some similar features? In this talk, I draw attention to how these divisions play out particularly in contemporary Black Studies and argue that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze can offer us resources for thinking about these questions through his discussions of repetition. I argue that understanding our conversations about structural racism and history as conversations about a racism that repeats, can help us to better understand why racism seems to reappear, how to think its disparate forms together, and what presuppositions operate in many attempts to “work through” the past.

Bio: Eyo Ewara is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. His teaching and research explores the relationships between 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Queer Theory.  His work has appeared in Theory and Event, Puncta, Philosophy Today, Critical Philosophy of Race, Political Theology, and other venues. His current research project is particularly interested in engaging work in Continental Philosophy, Queer Theory, and Black Studies to address questions of identity and difference amongst concepts of race, forms of racism, and forms of anti-racism. How can we better account for the relations between at times radically disparate concepts, structures, and practices such that they can all specifically and recognizably be called racial? What might our account of these relations say about our ability to address racism’s harms?

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).