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In 1804 Schelling diagnosed our impending “annihilation of nature” due to our conceptual detachment from and consequent economic exploitation of our natural world. His critique of Modernity’s Cartesian Idealisms, effected through his inversion of the Kantian categories, results in a philosophical project whose relevance to our ongoing climate crisis is difficult to overstate.

Bruce Matthews
Bard College/BHSEC, professor of philosophy, research in German Idealism and Romanticism, with a focus on life and thought of F.W.J. Schelling, whose recent work revolves around Schelling’s critique of modernity with its anticipation of, as he wrote in 1804, ‘the annihilation of nature,’ and its relevance to the Anthropocene.

“Schelling in the Anthropocene: A New Mythology of Nature,” (Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 2015), “Schelling: A Brief Biographical Sketch of the Odysseus of German Idealism,” in The Palgrave Handbook to German Idealism (2014), and “The New Mythology: Between Romanticism and Humanism,” in The Relevance of Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Books include the forthcoming intellectual biography, Schelling: Heretic of Modernity (2018), Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the Schema of Freedom (SUNY 2011).

Presented by the Philosophy Department at The New School for Social Research

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).

In this paper, I explore the role that metaphor plays in the development of new scientific models. My goal is to illustrate metaphor’s fecundity in this regard, the way in which it extends our understanding in surprisingly diverse ways. As Mary Hesse put this point, “it is precisely in its extension that the fruitfulness of the model may lie” (1980, 114).

The particular focus of my paper is on the history of what John Haugeland called mind design: the use of mechanical models to reverse-engineer how minds work (1997, 1). My history focuses on two such models: the clockwork model and the computer model. In each case, I show how a metaphorical understanding of the model led to conceptual innovation in two distinct ways. First, it provided an interpretive frame that guided new research by offering an abstract, hypothesized structure to be later filled in by empirical research (Camp 2020). Second, it provided a concrete exemplar to contrast with human minds (Daston 1994). For instance, while on the one hand Descartes invoked the clockwork model to explain how color vision works (Adams 2015), he also invoked it as a vivid illustration of how human reasoning does not work (Riskin 2016).

It is this second source of conceptual innovation that is the real core of the paper; it reveals what I call the dialectic of mind design. This dialectic is especially evident in our tendency to redefine what it is to be human in response to new technological developments. For instance, it is evident when we take something that was previously assumed to be paradigmatic of mental acuity, such as the ability to play chess, and redefine it as something merely mechanical (Ensmenger 2012). But it is equally well evident when we take something that was previously taken to be mechanical—such as color vision—and redefine it as paradigmatically mental (Chalmers 1997; cf. Adams and Browning 2020). The concept of mindedness is, in this sense, a constantly moving goalpost that is perennially being redefined in response to new technological developments.

The importance of incorporating value pluralism into a theory of justice is recognized in many conceptualizations of justice. This pluralism is often seen as a reason to attend to a range of perspectives, perspectives which can function as a source of information in determining which principles should guide justice. However, philosophy’s ability to properly attend to different perspectives has received extensive attention in the criticisms of various non-ideal theorists, who argue that ideal-theoretical philosophy runs the risk of excluding important aspects of actual social problems. Taking these criticisms on board, this paper builds on non-ideal theory by arguing for a Wittgensteinian family resemblance approach to justice. I will explain how this linguistic practice-embedded understanding of justice can be a helpful tool for non-ideal theory, as it can give us insight into why, in various similar but different cases, the notion of justice is seen as applicable. In light of this approach, I will suggest a reorientation of the pluralist demand towards an empirical starting point.

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.