Fall 2023

September 28 – Luc Bovens – professor of philosophy, politics and economics, UNC Chapel Hill

“What is This Thing Called Love?”

What accounts for the constancy of love? What explains the pangs of love lost? How might one overcome the pangs of love lost?  I try to offer answers to these question within feature-based, feature-free, and connection-based models of love and distinguish between reflectively endorsable and irreverent variants of these models. The talk builds on the material in Chapter 3 on Love in my book Coping: A Philosophical Guide (OpenBook Publishers, 2021).

October 19 – Sabeen Ahmed – assistant professor of philosophy and peace & conflict studies, Swarthmore College

“Empire of White Supremacy”

Given its resurgence in public discourse, the inconsistency of its deployment, and, most importantly, its status as the defining existential problem of modernity, the current ubiquity of the discourse of ‘white supremacy’ renders the term an especially urgent subject for philosophical interrogation. In lieu of liberal frameworks which would reduce white supremacism to a species of racism, however, I develop and deploy the lens of empire to reveal white supremacy as a historically-specific, racialized configuration of power.

November 9 – Carlos Sanchez – professor of philosophy, San Jose State University

“Accidentality, from Mexican Philosophy to the Aztecs and Back Again”

Central to Aztec/Nahuatl teaching is the reminder that “the earth is slippery.” This means to convey the notion that regardless of how stable you think you are, your stability depends on the earth itself–the earth on which you stand and which moves about the universe. If the earth is slick, slippery, shaky, and slipping about the darkness of space, then everything you know rests on an insecure foundation. The Aztecs insist that if the earth can fall from its orbit, so can you. This idea of an irremediable precariousness makes its way into Mexican existentialism, or Mexistentialism, 400 years later. Emilio Uranga calls it “accidentality.” This talk is primarily about accidentality and what it means for Uranga—how he thinks it defines the Mexican existential condition. In a secondary sense, the talk is also about existentialism and Mexistentialism, how they’re the same and how they are different. I make a point about decolonization, as well, although I will not insist on it.