Debate
Centre for Contemporary European Philosophy, Radboud University x Leiden Centre for Continental Philosophy Research Day.
- Date
- Thursday 3 April 2025
- Time
- Series
- Centre for Continental Philosophy 2024-2025
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.23
On April 3, 2025 LCCP will host the first joint Research event in Continental Philosophy. During this day, researchers from both Leiden and Radboud will showcase their ongoing work. We hope this day will be an occasion for a lively and fruitful philosophical conversation between staff and students of our respective institutes. Please find the programme and the abstracts of the talks below.
Programme
11.15-11.30 Coffee and word of welcome
11.30-12.30 Marie Louise Krogh. “Emprire among the German Idealism Idealists”
12.30-13.30 Tim Miechels. “Nature as Phusis”
13.30-14.30 Lunch
14.30-15.30 Bart Zantvoort.“Falling into inertia: Sartre, Slime and the Vampiric Energy of Institutions”
15.30-15.45 Coffee break
15.45-16.45 Arjen Kleinherenbrink. “Continental Dispositionalism”
17.00-19.00 Drinks in café de Keyzer (Kaiserstraat 2-4, Leiden).
Abstracts
Marie Louise Krogh. (Leiden) “Empire among the German Idealists”
The colonial heritage of Western Europe’s global empires is not only reflected in the artifacts that populate museums or the fortunes that were amassed. It is also an institutional and intellectual heritage, one that increasingly has come under scrutiny. But what does it mean to look at the history of philosophy through this lens? In this presentation, I will discuss that question specifically in relation to the German Idealist tradition. With reference to the works of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, I explore how – and why – we might reframe their political philosophies by viewing them through the lens of empire, imperialism, and colonisation.
Tim Miechels. (Radboud) “Nature as Phusis”
Abstract: What is the operative idea of nature in a naturalized phenomenology? The main problem for the naturalizing phenomenology project has been the incommensurability of nature as it is understood by natural science, and the subject as it is understood by phenomenology. This talk will explore Heidegger’s understanding of nature as phusis as a candidate for a phenomenological understanding of nature that is helpful to the debate concerning naturalizing phenomenology.
Bart Zantvoort. (Leiden) “Falling into inertia: Sartre, Slime and the Vampiric Energy of Institutions”
According to Merleau-Ponty, the problem with dialectical materialism from Marx to Trotsky was that it was insufficiently attentive to the inertia of institutions and the real weight of history: it ‘lacked a means of expressing the inertia of the infrastructures, the resistance of economic and even natural conditions, and the swallowing-up of “personal relationships” in “things.”’ In response, Sartre tried to show in his Critique of Dialectical Reason how the world that we create starts to exercise power over us in the form of ‘practico-inert’ structures and institutions. However, these inert institutions do not confront us as passive blocks of objective reality that are simply too difficult to change, as the classic Hegelian notion of social reality as ‘second nature’ would suggest. Instead, they suck us in and suck us dry, absorbing our energies with a kind of vampiric force. Already in Being and Nothingness, Sartre described the way we get enmeshed in material reality like dealing with slime: the more you struggle to free yourself, the more stuck you become. In general, inertia for Sartre is not passive objectivity; rather, we are constantly ‘falling into inertia’. But what is the nature of this inertia, what is the vampiric or ‘slimy’ force of institutions, and how can we resist it?
Arjen Kleinherenbrink. (Radboud) “Continental Dispositionalism”
"Dispositionalist terminology permeates everyday speech: every language uses countless words to characterize persons and things in terms of what they might do rather than what they are actually doing. Do dispositional terms refer to really existing properties that exceed the current interactions of things? This talk discusses how Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and Gilles Deleuze each tried to answer that question (and came up with wildly different answers)."