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After completing this cours
- you will be familiar with central topics, theories, and concepts in contemporary metaphysical debates;
- you will have an overview of the link between these philosophical debates and contemporary environmental, political and epistemological problems;
- you will be able to read, analyze and comment upon philosophical texts, as well as to publicly present and discuss them;
- you can explain key philosophical theories and their main arguments in your own words and formulate your own position.
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New Ontologies for Mutable Worlds
In the wake of the so-called crisis of reason and modernity at the end of the XIXth century and in first half of the XXth, a certain classical ontological paradigm has been called into question. In the light of a critical and deconstructive reading of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes and Kant among many others, it has been claimed that the Western culture and the rationalist tradition developed a discriminatory ontology that enabled them to dismiss ambiguity, processes, and hybrids of all kinds (theory/practice, body/soul, nature/culture, real/imaginary, science/politics for instance) as illusionary and not worthy of the name "being". But beings are not so easily categorizable; many challenging phenomena and issues were persistent thorns in the side of Western philosophies (for instance: are we humans or animals? How can the body and the mind be connected? Is science politically neutral?).
In this course we will:
1) take a critical perspective on representative texts from the Western rationalist tradition and question their ontological premises: what is the worldview that they sustain? what are their blind spots? In what measure is their conceptual pattern still influential nowadays?
2) study primary texts from the contemporary continental tradition that analyzed and criticized or deconstructed modern ontologies and proposed alternative approaches (for instance: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Foucault, Latour, Haraway).
3) examine the implications of these debates for some of the most salient contemporary environmental, political, and epistemological issues.
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