Event overview
Part of the Pluralistic Variations Lecture Series
Discussant: Prof Jennifer Gabrys (Sociology)
Organiser: Dr Martin Savransky (Sociology)
Didier Debaise is a permanent researcher at the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) and the director of the Center of Philosophy at Free University of Brussels (ULB) where he teaches contemporary philosophy. He is the co-founder, with I. Stengers, of the Groupe d’études constructivistes (Geco). His main areas of research are contemporary forms of speculative philosophy, theories of events, and links between American pragmatism and the French contemporary philosophy. Two of his books appeared in English in October : Nature as Event (Duke University Press) and A Speculative Empiricism (Edingburgh University Press). He is currently working on a new book titled Pragmatique de la terre.
My starting assumption in this lecture is the following: The moderns have invented a concept of nature in order to inhabit the earth, thus identifying two things that should without a doubt have been strictly separated. It seems to me that this hypothesis can serve as a guide which allows accentuating an ensemble of transformations which have been developing over the past decades, starting with operations of reciprocal capture between anthropology and metaphysics concerning the subject of the various ways of inhabiting the earth. It has today become paramount to question the particularly modern invention of nature not only because it defines the status and the function of the main categories at the basis of modern thought and its contemporary heritage – even where they are not explicitly concerned with nature – , but also because it constitutes a necessary condition for reflecting upon the consequences linked to the “new climatic regime”. I will proceed in two steps: first of all I will establish a genealogy of the constitution of nature and its effects; secondly I will proceed to setting up another manner for the articulation of beings, another metaphysics that takes as its starting point the concept of precarity.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 25 Jan 2018 | 4:30pm - 6:30pm |
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