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).
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.
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.