The event will take place on the 11th of December, 7.30 PM (Moscow time).
Please, register in advance to receive your Zoom link via Timepad, or please write us via email at stasis@eu.spb.
Speakers: Oxana Timofeeva, Ben Woodard, Michael Marder, Vadim Kvachev, Benjamin Norris, Artemy Magun.
Simultaneous interpretation (from Russian to English and from English to Russian respectively) will be provided. One of the most important moments of today’s theory is a closer interaction of the humanities, social, and natural sciences against a backdrop of the extensively proclaimed materialist turn. Philosophy brings a new agenda to this dialogue of sciences and disciplines, one that attempts to bridge the gap between scientific ontology and philosophical epistemology. The bridging of this gap brings together recent investigations in science and technology with a rethinking of historical process from the nonhuman perspective: the history of humankind must be brought into correlation with the history of things, and world history with the history of the earth. The classical concept of nature, whose criticism stems from its being rooted in the idealist tradition characterized by a system of opposites and general anthropocentric presumptions, is now subject to serious discussions: perhaps, in the contemporary context, it is more expedient to speak of geophilosophy as a point of contention of various kinds of materialisms.
Albeit based on a radical critique of the classical philosophy of nature, New Materialist approaches do not, however, cancel it out (some authors try to do that, indeed, but, in their Oedipal frenzy, they remain blind to the fact that they simply bite the hand that feeds them). On the contrary, one of the most distinctive recent trends is the return of the philosophy of nature, which acquires new meanings in the course of its critical re-evaluation and reveals the possibility of alternative progressive readings. There are non-trivial connections and parallels found between the new materialisms and the philosophy of nature—from the atomism of Democritus and Epicurus or Lucretius, the natural philosophy of Schelling, and Hegel’s philosophy of nature, to the new materialism of Marx, calling for a shift from the criticism of heaven to the criticism of Earth. In this intellectual exchange between historical and recent concepts, new political theories arise or old ones—theories of the republic, democracy, or communism—are transformed. Such connections and parallels are the main topic of this special issue.