Zizek suggests during a dialogue with Alain Badiou, that 'philosophy hardly ever, and least of all in its most creative periods, plays a normal role in the sense that it is merely philosophy... Perhaps philosophy is abnormality par excellence...is by definition excessive; that it literally exists only through the excessive connection to external conditions, which are of either amorous, political, scientific , or artistic nature' [Badiou & Zizek, Philosophy in the Present]
In turn, Badiou responds that since Plato, 'philosophy has been faced with the inhuman, and that it is there that its vocation lies. Each time that philosophy confines itself to humanity as it has been historically constituted and defined, it diminishes itself, and in the end, suppresses itself...a capacity for the inhuman is ultimately what philosophy is concerned with? [ditto]
Deleuze, meanwhile, suggests that philosophy should be concerned with the creation of new concepts rather than applying itself to pre-existent thought and the "big questions" such as scepticism, for example,
So, how should we define the role of philosophy today? And, correspondingly, where does this leave the role of the philosopher?
Ruth
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
Is Evil Real?
Hannah Arendt in her psychosociological study of Adolf Eichmann famously claimed that ‘in certain circumstances the most ordinary decent person can become a criminal’. This echoed Eichmann’s defence at his trial where he declared ‘I am not the monster I am made out to be, I am the victim of a fallacy’. The idea here is that it is social, especially role-factors, that are the most important determinant of individual behaviour. Roles not only carry a certain weight of authority, but they are often overseen/controlled by relations of authority. This contests the common-sense view that assumes that if people know what is morally right about a situation they will act accordingly.
As many of you probably know, Stanley Milgram famously performed a series of experiments that tried to test the truth of these claims. And he ‘showed’ that by and large they were true – that in an experiment where the subject is asked to deliver lethal electric shocks to a stooge with a ‘heart condition’, 63% of all subjects complied. This was true for subjects from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds- and this was a shock for Milgram because he had expected that Germans would emerge as the most obedient subjects….
The question of evil in philosophy is of course an important question. Can we view evil as 'banal' - as the simple mechanism of a social routine? Is evil, in modern contexts, simple faceless bureaucracy left to expand without limit? Is evil simply a blind and impersonal mechanism?
Neil Turnbull
As many of you probably know, Stanley Milgram famously performed a series of experiments that tried to test the truth of these claims. And he ‘showed’ that by and large they were true – that in an experiment where the subject is asked to deliver lethal electric shocks to a stooge with a ‘heart condition’, 63% of all subjects complied. This was true for subjects from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds- and this was a shock for Milgram because he had expected that Germans would emerge as the most obedient subjects….
The question of evil in philosophy is of course an important question. Can we view evil as 'banal' - as the simple mechanism of a social routine? Is evil, in modern contexts, simple faceless bureaucracy left to expand without limit? Is evil simply a blind and impersonal mechanism?
Neil Turnbull
Monday, 19 April 2010
The Nature of Technology: The Central Question of Our Times?
The fields of social and cultural studies of technology were one of the spectacular academic growth areas in the 1980s and 1990s. Spurred on by a growing awareness that recent innovations in information and communication technologies were bringing about a new knowledge-based society, the academic community re-committed itself to understanding a classic philosophical question. This was the ‘question of technology’ made famous by Heidegger and others: the question of the relationship between technology and the wider culture and society in which it is embedded.
Consequentially, the recent upsurge of academic interest in contemporary technological innovations has primarily concerned itself with understanding technology’s role as a facilitator of underlying social and cultural changes. Technology’s involvement in the processes of ‘globalisation’, ‘aestheticisation’ and the emergence of ‘postmodern’ social forms has been foregrounded.
As such, the question of technology can be seen as having framed a new academic agenda in contemporary philosophy. This new ‘technology consciousness’ has provided a context and climate within which new questions about how people behave, organise and interact as the result of the implementation of a panoply of new technologies.
One of the pedagogic outcomes of this new consciousness has been the appearance of a new tributary in the philosophical curriculum; an interdisciplinary area that has become known as Science and Technology Studies (STS). STS aims to ‘prize open’ the ‘black box’ of science and technology in order to show how science and technology shape and are shaped by both society and culture. Big questions are at stake here; in particular the question of relation between the individual, culture and technology at gthe beginning of the 21st century.
Can we say that the question 'what is technology' is the ultimate question for our times?
Neil Turnbull
Consequentially, the recent upsurge of academic interest in contemporary technological innovations has primarily concerned itself with understanding technology’s role as a facilitator of underlying social and cultural changes. Technology’s involvement in the processes of ‘globalisation’, ‘aestheticisation’ and the emergence of ‘postmodern’ social forms has been foregrounded.
As such, the question of technology can be seen as having framed a new academic agenda in contemporary philosophy. This new ‘technology consciousness’ has provided a context and climate within which new questions about how people behave, organise and interact as the result of the implementation of a panoply of new technologies.
One of the pedagogic outcomes of this new consciousness has been the appearance of a new tributary in the philosophical curriculum; an interdisciplinary area that has become known as Science and Technology Studies (STS). STS aims to ‘prize open’ the ‘black box’ of science and technology in order to show how science and technology shape and are shaped by both society and culture. Big questions are at stake here; in particular the question of relation between the individual, culture and technology at gthe beginning of the 21st century.
Can we say that the question 'what is technology' is the ultimate question for our times?
Neil Turnbull
Karl Marx
Karl Marx was born in Trier, in what is now Germany, in 1818. He studied philosophy at the University of Berlin and was profoundly influenced by the materialist philosophy of the so-called young Hegelian movement; a movement that attempted to use Hegel’s essentially conservative philosophy as a tool of radical social criticism.
In 1844 Marx moved to Paris where he became acquainted with the radical politics of the new ‘working class movement’ and it was here that he wrote his definitive early philosophical work The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. In this work, Marx gives a basic account of his early philosophy; a philosophy that was profoundly humanist, concerned with how humans can develop their essential human powers through free creative activity.
Marx thought that the majority of Europe's labouring population was denied the opportunity to fully develop themselves as individuals because they were forced to sell their labour to exploitative capitalists who valued human beings as sources of profit rather than as human beings. Humans were thus reduced to being rather like any other product for sale on the market- commodities that could be exchanged for any other commodity of similar price. In this system, according to Marx workers are essentially alienated from their true selves. Their time is not their own and the efforts of their labour, the products that they produced, are not made available for their own use but for profitable sale on the open market.
Thus Marx was a political philosopher who sought to expose the injustices of modern capitalist societies. His idea of the ‘good society’ was derived from his idea of the nature of pre-modern forms of social life, where the dominant form of work was individual craft production for communal use not economic exchange. The fact that he was a passionate believer in human creativity and freedom, and that he saw the craft production of the past in essentially idyllic terms, makes the early Marx something of romantic philosopher.
However, Marx was to develop his critical insights still further. He left Paris and eventually returned to Germany, where he became heavily involved in working class politics. He founded, along with his life-long friend and colleague Friedrich Engels, the Communist League and in 1848 he wrote The Communist Manifesto; a pamphlet that was written more for the purposes of political agitation and propaganda than for philosophical enlightenment. In this work he claims that capitalism is really a kind of hell on earth, where ‘all that is sold melts into air’ and ‘everything sacred is profaned’. It is in this work that he introduces his philosophy of history for which he subsequently achieved world-fame. According to the mature Marx, all human history can be see as a consisting of a series of class struggles; political conflicts over the ownership and control of the means of production. The most significant class conflict of the mediaeval feudal world was that between a merchant class and the feudal aristocracy. The resolution to this conflict was a new social system - capitalism. But capitalism, although it pretended otherwise, was also class ridden, albeit in a different way. The progressive force of modern history ‘under’ capitalism, Marx believed, would be the political struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat - a struggle that would lead to the eventual demise of capitalism and the emergence of a communist society where everybody lived according to the maxim ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. Marx thus correctly foresaw that the twentieth century societies would be a conflict between workers and their bosses and so he was, along with Nietzsche, one of the chief prophets of the modern age.
To some extent, the mature Marx moved away from his Humanist and Hegelian roots and tried to construct a science of society. He thought that the fundamental level of all human societies is the economic level where goods are produced to satisfy human needs. In his view, in the last analysis, all human beings are driven by their material needs (for food, clothing, enjoyment) and so he attempted to found his new science upon an alternative economics to the one that had been invented by the classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo. These economists had claimed that modern capitalism was a free-market of selfish ‘profit maximising’ individuals and that free-markets were the most rational way of allocating resources. Marx tried to expose these theories as ideologies, that is as false accounts of the nature of human social life that mask the brutal truth of life for the majority of people in modern capitalist societies. He put forward his alternative economic theory, the so-called labour theory a value that claimed that the true value of thing was not given by its price but by the amount of socially useful time taken to produce it. He thus showed that it was the workers who were the true source of all value in the world and that they have been unfairly expropriated by the capitalist class. He went on to argue that as productive technologies become more sophisticated, less and less labour would be needed to produce things and that eventually more and more people would be reduced to lives of poverty and immiseration - an uncannily accurate prediction when we look at global poverty today.
Marx's entire approach to philosophy was captured in his famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, where he claimed that ‘philosophers only describe the world, the point is to change it’. It would seem then that in one sense Marx was not really a philosopher at all but a revolutionary committed to social and political change. But it is a mistake to understand Marx as a propagandist because his concern for social justice and the future development of modern society made him one of the most significant and interesting political philosophers in the history of philosophy.
Questions: to what extent is Marxism still a valid philosophy at the beginning of the 21st century?
In a era when most political commentators assume of romantic idea of the market as a rational self-equilibrating system, does Marxism offer a timely corrective to this?
Does Marx's vision of a society of a free association of producers provide an alternative to he neo-liberal orthodoxy that crudely asserts that the poor should 'pull themselves up by their own bootstraps'?
Can we have a society without a strong idea of property? In the era when we can see the basic problems with tbe very idea of a 'property owning democracy' could Marx's philosophy catch on?
Neil Turnbull
Neil Turnbull
In 1844 Marx moved to Paris where he became acquainted with the radical politics of the new ‘working class movement’ and it was here that he wrote his definitive early philosophical work The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. In this work, Marx gives a basic account of his early philosophy; a philosophy that was profoundly humanist, concerned with how humans can develop their essential human powers through free creative activity.
Marx thought that the majority of Europe's labouring population was denied the opportunity to fully develop themselves as individuals because they were forced to sell their labour to exploitative capitalists who valued human beings as sources of profit rather than as human beings. Humans were thus reduced to being rather like any other product for sale on the market- commodities that could be exchanged for any other commodity of similar price. In this system, according to Marx workers are essentially alienated from their true selves. Their time is not their own and the efforts of their labour, the products that they produced, are not made available for their own use but for profitable sale on the open market.
Thus Marx was a political philosopher who sought to expose the injustices of modern capitalist societies. His idea of the ‘good society’ was derived from his idea of the nature of pre-modern forms of social life, where the dominant form of work was individual craft production for communal use not economic exchange. The fact that he was a passionate believer in human creativity and freedom, and that he saw the craft production of the past in essentially idyllic terms, makes the early Marx something of romantic philosopher.
However, Marx was to develop his critical insights still further. He left Paris and eventually returned to Germany, where he became heavily involved in working class politics. He founded, along with his life-long friend and colleague Friedrich Engels, the Communist League and in 1848 he wrote The Communist Manifesto; a pamphlet that was written more for the purposes of political agitation and propaganda than for philosophical enlightenment. In this work he claims that capitalism is really a kind of hell on earth, where ‘all that is sold melts into air’ and ‘everything sacred is profaned’. It is in this work that he introduces his philosophy of history for which he subsequently achieved world-fame. According to the mature Marx, all human history can be see as a consisting of a series of class struggles; political conflicts over the ownership and control of the means of production. The most significant class conflict of the mediaeval feudal world was that between a merchant class and the feudal aristocracy. The resolution to this conflict was a new social system - capitalism. But capitalism, although it pretended otherwise, was also class ridden, albeit in a different way. The progressive force of modern history ‘under’ capitalism, Marx believed, would be the political struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat - a struggle that would lead to the eventual demise of capitalism and the emergence of a communist society where everybody lived according to the maxim ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. Marx thus correctly foresaw that the twentieth century societies would be a conflict between workers and their bosses and so he was, along with Nietzsche, one of the chief prophets of the modern age.
To some extent, the mature Marx moved away from his Humanist and Hegelian roots and tried to construct a science of society. He thought that the fundamental level of all human societies is the economic level where goods are produced to satisfy human needs. In his view, in the last analysis, all human beings are driven by their material needs (for food, clothing, enjoyment) and so he attempted to found his new science upon an alternative economics to the one that had been invented by the classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo. These economists had claimed that modern capitalism was a free-market of selfish ‘profit maximising’ individuals and that free-markets were the most rational way of allocating resources. Marx tried to expose these theories as ideologies, that is as false accounts of the nature of human social life that mask the brutal truth of life for the majority of people in modern capitalist societies. He put forward his alternative economic theory, the so-called labour theory a value that claimed that the true value of thing was not given by its price but by the amount of socially useful time taken to produce it. He thus showed that it was the workers who were the true source of all value in the world and that they have been unfairly expropriated by the capitalist class. He went on to argue that as productive technologies become more sophisticated, less and less labour would be needed to produce things and that eventually more and more people would be reduced to lives of poverty and immiseration - an uncannily accurate prediction when we look at global poverty today.
Marx's entire approach to philosophy was captured in his famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, where he claimed that ‘philosophers only describe the world, the point is to change it’. It would seem then that in one sense Marx was not really a philosopher at all but a revolutionary committed to social and political change. But it is a mistake to understand Marx as a propagandist because his concern for social justice and the future development of modern society made him one of the most significant and interesting political philosophers in the history of philosophy.
Questions: to what extent is Marxism still a valid philosophy at the beginning of the 21st century?
In a era when most political commentators assume of romantic idea of the market as a rational self-equilibrating system, does Marxism offer a timely corrective to this?
Does Marx's vision of a society of a free association of producers provide an alternative to he neo-liberal orthodoxy that crudely asserts that the poor should 'pull themselves up by their own bootstraps'?
Can we have a society without a strong idea of property? In the era when we can see the basic problems with tbe very idea of a 'property owning democracy' could Marx's philosophy catch on?
Neil Turnbull
Neil Turnbull
Wednesday, 14 April 2010
Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche was the first great philosopher after Darwin. Born in 1844 in Saxony, Nietzsche’s father was a Lutheran pastor. His philosophy was influenced by his Protestant religious upbringing and can be viewed as an attempt to find a way towards a new synthesis of Protestant Christianity with its belief in the heroic individual and classical paganism with its worship of the primordial power of nature.
Nietzsche took seriously the intellectual consequences of Darwin's evolutionary theories. In the Origin of Species, Darwin had claimed that humans, rather than being created in God's image, were in fact the evolutionary cousins of monkeys and apes. For Nietzsche this was devastating news. Rather than the universe being made for humans by God humans were now alone in a universe without any real significance at all.
Nietzsche’s whole philosophy can be seen as an attempt to answer this one question. How do we live in world without something (a God), that guarantees that life has meaning and purpose? In 1882 Nietzsche announced that is 'God is dead' and so began his long philosophical quest to find a non-religious answer to this question and to escape the feelings of despair and insignificance that followed his loss of faith in Christianity. This condition, what Nietzsche termed nihilism or the belief that everything is meaningless, was for Nietzsche the chief philosophical problem facing people in the modern world today.
Nietzsche was also, along with Karl Marx, one of the chief prophets of the modern age. He accurately predicted that life in the twentieth century would be a perilous time; in a world without God, people would follow anyone or anything that offered them some sense of personal significance in universe increasingly perceived to be devoid of any. The twentieth century would be, for Nietzsche, the age of the 'pale criminal'; the false prophet of who offers salvation but manipulates people to their doom. In the light of the atrocities committed by Hitler and Stalin, this is a truly remarkable prediction.
Nietzsche warned of the dangers that lay ahead in the future and urged us not to let them happen. But he harbored little faith in the abilities of the majority of ‘ordinary people’ and so, unlike Marx, denied that any hope for a better future lay with the proletariat. Like many German philosophers, he was something of an elitist and perceived the bulk of humanity as being rather like cattle; a mob who follow a ‘herd morality’. In contrast to the herd, there are, according to Nietzsche, a few ‘great men’ who can rise above the bovine world of common folk. These men live according their own values rather than follow those imposed by others and Nietzsche thought that if we are to avoid the horrors of nihilism we will all have to live like these great men and create our own values for ourselves. Nietzsche thought he was such a ‘great man’ - or übermensch - and believed that his philosophy would save future humanity from the horrors of nihilism.
Nietzsche's philosophy states that in a world without God-given values it is necessary to be creative and invent new values and new ways of living. For Nietzsche, then, the highest form of human life is art and the great artist is the true saviour of humanity. Nietzsche's philosophy is hence both egoistic, in that it values heroic individuals, and aestheticist, in that it values the artist's ability to create things from nothing.
Nietzsche attempted to invent a new kind of life-affirming spirituality based upon the worship of the Greek God of wine and intoxication - Dionysus. This form of spirituality would oppose life-denying and other-worldly forms of Christian spirituality. In his view, instead of allowing individuals to celebrate life Christianity made people hate themselves and hate life! In fact, Nietzsche believed the Christian worship of a dead God – who Nietzsche termed ‘the crucified’ - to be the major obstacle in the way of the attempt to ‘transvalue all values’; that is to rethink the nature of morality so that a new ethic of art and life could be liberated from religion's grasp.
Nietzsche increasingly came to see himself as a kind philosophical saint and he wrote the strange and aphoristic Also Sprach Zarathustra as a kind of ‘anti-bible’. This work amounts to an aestheticist answer to the New Testament. Here, Nietzsche tells the story of the hermit Zarathustra who decides to ‘go down’ from his mountain retreat into the world of ordinary mortals. He then decides to preach his new gospel, that man must be overcome and that we should all prepare for the immanent arrival of the übermensch.
By the late 1880s, Nietzsche started to believe that he was the first living example the übermensch and, partly as a consequence, his mind started to crack. He spent the last ten years of his life insane with only his mother to care for him. His death in 1900 marked the end of philosophical romanticism.
Neil Turnbull
Nietzsche took seriously the intellectual consequences of Darwin's evolutionary theories. In the Origin of Species, Darwin had claimed that humans, rather than being created in God's image, were in fact the evolutionary cousins of monkeys and apes. For Nietzsche this was devastating news. Rather than the universe being made for humans by God humans were now alone in a universe without any real significance at all.
Nietzsche’s whole philosophy can be seen as an attempt to answer this one question. How do we live in world without something (a God), that guarantees that life has meaning and purpose? In 1882 Nietzsche announced that is 'God is dead' and so began his long philosophical quest to find a non-religious answer to this question and to escape the feelings of despair and insignificance that followed his loss of faith in Christianity. This condition, what Nietzsche termed nihilism or the belief that everything is meaningless, was for Nietzsche the chief philosophical problem facing people in the modern world today.
Nietzsche was also, along with Karl Marx, one of the chief prophets of the modern age. He accurately predicted that life in the twentieth century would be a perilous time; in a world without God, people would follow anyone or anything that offered them some sense of personal significance in universe increasingly perceived to be devoid of any. The twentieth century would be, for Nietzsche, the age of the 'pale criminal'; the false prophet of who offers salvation but manipulates people to their doom. In the light of the atrocities committed by Hitler and Stalin, this is a truly remarkable prediction.
Nietzsche warned of the dangers that lay ahead in the future and urged us not to let them happen. But he harbored little faith in the abilities of the majority of ‘ordinary people’ and so, unlike Marx, denied that any hope for a better future lay with the proletariat. Like many German philosophers, he was something of an elitist and perceived the bulk of humanity as being rather like cattle; a mob who follow a ‘herd morality’. In contrast to the herd, there are, according to Nietzsche, a few ‘great men’ who can rise above the bovine world of common folk. These men live according their own values rather than follow those imposed by others and Nietzsche thought that if we are to avoid the horrors of nihilism we will all have to live like these great men and create our own values for ourselves. Nietzsche thought he was such a ‘great man’ - or übermensch - and believed that his philosophy would save future humanity from the horrors of nihilism.
Nietzsche's philosophy states that in a world without God-given values it is necessary to be creative and invent new values and new ways of living. For Nietzsche, then, the highest form of human life is art and the great artist is the true saviour of humanity. Nietzsche's philosophy is hence both egoistic, in that it values heroic individuals, and aestheticist, in that it values the artist's ability to create things from nothing.
Nietzsche attempted to invent a new kind of life-affirming spirituality based upon the worship of the Greek God of wine and intoxication - Dionysus. This form of spirituality would oppose life-denying and other-worldly forms of Christian spirituality. In his view, instead of allowing individuals to celebrate life Christianity made people hate themselves and hate life! In fact, Nietzsche believed the Christian worship of a dead God – who Nietzsche termed ‘the crucified’ - to be the major obstacle in the way of the attempt to ‘transvalue all values’; that is to rethink the nature of morality so that a new ethic of art and life could be liberated from religion's grasp.
Nietzsche increasingly came to see himself as a kind philosophical saint and he wrote the strange and aphoristic Also Sprach Zarathustra as a kind of ‘anti-bible’. This work amounts to an aestheticist answer to the New Testament. Here, Nietzsche tells the story of the hermit Zarathustra who decides to ‘go down’ from his mountain retreat into the world of ordinary mortals. He then decides to preach his new gospel, that man must be overcome and that we should all prepare for the immanent arrival of the übermensch.
By the late 1880s, Nietzsche started to believe that he was the first living example the übermensch and, partly as a consequence, his mind started to crack. He spent the last ten years of his life insane with only his mother to care for him. His death in 1900 marked the end of philosophical romanticism.
Neil Turnbull
A Society of Creatives?
According to the sociologist Richard Florida, the romantic opposition between the bourgeois and the bohemian no longer applies today. This is because bohemia has been appropriated by capitialism and its formerly antagonistic values have been assimilated into the system .
As a result, he suggests that we moving towards a new 'creative society'.
Who/what are ‘creatives’ exactly? According to him they are a new type of individuals who:
1. are not interested in pay
2. are content-oriented and and for whom job and work environment matter more
3. seek intrinsic rewards
4. seek latitude to use work time and resources to engage in community building and civic action.
What do you think constitutes a creative person? What attitudes, values and dispositions do creative people exhibit?
Neil Turnbull
As a result, he suggests that we moving towards a new 'creative society'.
Who/what are ‘creatives’ exactly? According to him they are a new type of individuals who:
1. are not interested in pay
2. are content-oriented and and for whom job and work environment matter more
3. seek intrinsic rewards
4. seek latitude to use work time and resources to engage in community building and civic action.
What do you think constitutes a creative person? What attitudes, values and dispositions do creative people exhibit?
Neil Turnbull
Another conference of Interest for our Speculative Realism Reading Group.
Warwick Transcendental Realism Workshop
Time: Tuesday 11th of May, 12:00pm (registration) - 7:00pm
Location: University of Warwick, LIB2 and S0.11
Organised by Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, in conjunction with the Research Group in Post-Kantian European Philosophy
The purpose of the workshop is to examine the arguments underlying the increasing push towards realism in parts of modern continental philosophy, along with approaches that bridge the analytic/continental divide, and to assess the possibility of transcendental approaches to realism within this context. Particular themes that we be focused upon include:-
- The arguments of Quentin Meillassoux, and the possibility of transcendental responses to the problems he raises.
- The relation between epistemology and ontology.
- The relation between philosophy and the natural sciences.
The event will be split into two parts. The first part will take place in LIB2 (in the university library building) from 12:30pm to 5:00pm, which will consist in five papers presented by graduate students on matters relevant to the topic, along with discussion. The second part will be the headline talk, given by Ray Brassier, which will take place in S0.11 (in the social studies building) from 5:30pm to 7:30pm, under the auspices of the department's regular Colloquium in European Philosophy.
Speakers
Ray Brassier (Philosophy, American University of Beirut) - 'Kant and Sellars: Nominalism, Realism, Naturalism'
James Trafford (Philosophy, Unaffiliated) - 'Follow the Evidence: Realism, Epistemology, Semantics'
Reid Kotlas (Philosophy Grad Student, Dundee) - 'From Transcendental to Abstract Realism: Epistemology after Marx'
Nick Srnicek (Politics PhD Student, LSE) - 'Extending Cognition: Bridging the Gap between Actor-Network Theory and Scientific Realism'
Tom O'Shea (Philosophy PhD Student, Sheffield) - 'On the Very Idea of Correlationism'
Pete Wolfendale (Philosophy PhD Student, Warwick) - 'Objectivity, Reality, and the In-Itself: From Deflationary to Transcendental Realism'
Patrick
Warwick Transcendental Realism Workshop
Time: Tuesday 11th of May, 12:00pm (registration) - 7:00pm
Location: University of Warwick, LIB2 and S0.11
Organised by Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, in conjunction with the Research Group in Post-Kantian European Philosophy
The purpose of the workshop is to examine the arguments underlying the increasing push towards realism in parts of modern continental philosophy, along with approaches that bridge the analytic/continental divide, and to assess the possibility of transcendental approaches to realism within this context. Particular themes that we be focused upon include:-
- The arguments of Quentin Meillassoux, and the possibility of transcendental responses to the problems he raises.
- The relation between epistemology and ontology.
- The relation between philosophy and the natural sciences.
The event will be split into two parts. The first part will take place in LIB2 (in the university library building) from 12:30pm to 5:00pm, which will consist in five papers presented by graduate students on matters relevant to the topic, along with discussion. The second part will be the headline talk, given by Ray Brassier, which will take place in S0.11 (in the social studies building) from 5:30pm to 7:30pm, under the auspices of the department's regular Colloquium in European Philosophy.
Speakers
Ray Brassier (Philosophy, American University of Beirut) - 'Kant and Sellars: Nominalism, Realism, Naturalism'
James Trafford (Philosophy, Unaffiliated) - 'Follow the Evidence: Realism, Epistemology, Semantics'
Reid Kotlas (Philosophy Grad Student, Dundee) - 'From Transcendental to Abstract Realism: Epistemology after Marx'
Nick Srnicek (Politics PhD Student, LSE) - 'Extending Cognition: Bridging the Gap between Actor-Network Theory and Scientific Realism'
Tom O'Shea (Philosophy PhD Student, Sheffield) - 'On the Very Idea of Correlationism'
Pete Wolfendale (Philosophy PhD Student, Warwick) - 'Objectivity, Reality, and the In-Itself: From Deflationary to Transcendental Realism'
Patrick
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