Isabelle Stengers, Marisol de la Cadena and Mihnea Tanasescu make us rethink the Western idea of personhood.
During this evening, we will explore how human personhood has been constructed, and how it can be decentered and made to expand into different ways of seeing and being. Through critical anthropology and the philosophy of science, we will pick through the rich epistemological and ontological heritage of different ways of being in the world, and different ways of building knowledge. The rational, universal individual has violently suppressed mutable persons existing at the intersection of multiple beings, as well as collective and interspecies ways of building knowledge that persist in the sciences, though often unrecognized. Underneath the steamroller of modernity, we will discover many possibilities for a more convivial future.
The person is first and foremost an idea; to think of it in terms of a particular embodiment is to be within a tradition that forces the idea of personhood into a particular shape. In the western world, this has been an imagined rational, individual human of a particular class. This way of thinking is neither the only one, nor the most fruitful; it hides the different ways of knowing inherent within multiplicity.
PROGRAM
20:00 – Introduction by Mihnea Tanasescu
20:10 – Online Keynote Lecture by Marisol de la Cadena : ‘Runa, human but not only.’
20:40 – Introducing the work of Isabelle Stengers, through a Q&A with Isabelle Stengers and Mihnea Tanasescu
20:50 – Q&A with Isabelle Stengers and Marisol de la Cadena, moderated by Mihnea Tanasescu
