SG – Modal Philosophy: Nature

About Modal Philosophy: Nature

Sjoerd van Tuinen explores what a newfound existential pluralism means for our understanding, and imagination, of nature. Instead of distinguishing different cultures against the backdrop of a uniform nature known through the natural sciences, existential pluralism asks us to define cultures by their ‘cosmology’, by their way of dividing up the world among kinds of being. Accordingly, instead of multiculturalism, we are now facing multinaturalism: if the worlds of others do not revolve around ours, they must be treated as full-fledged realities without undergoing the truth tests of our own cosmology. How do the worlds of others reflect back on the self-understanding of Western science?

About lecture series Modal Philosophy: Nature, Politics, Technology

In three lectures Sjoerd van Tuinen explores what a newfound existential pluralism means for our understanding, and imagination, of nature, politics, and technological design. The notion of mode of existence is central in the newfound existential pluralism and has recently experienced a great diffusion in the critical humanities and social sciences associated with the ‘ ontological turn’ (science and technology studies, social geography, cultural anthropology, anticolonial thought, posthuman feminism etcetera). Speaking of modes of existence entails, firstly, that 'being' is not one mode. We not only speak of multiple beings or things, being also must be repopulated with multiple ways of existence. The mode of existence of a table is not the same as, or comparable to, that of electrons, languages, laws, artworks or gods. Secondly, individual things can exist in more than one mode at once. Contrary to Descartes' famous claim that 'I think, therefore I am', we rarely coincide with ourselves and instead find ourselves participating in different modes - thinking, feeling, strolling etc - to the point that sometimes we not even know if, or in what way, we exist. Thinking in terms of modes of existence thus goes against both the Aristotelian idea of a First Philosophy of being-qua-being, and against the modern idea of an ultimate reality, 'Nature', against which the other modes must be measured. Instead, it provides diplomatic tools for bridging the gaps between worlds without reducing one to the other.

About Sjoerd van Tuinen

Sjoerd van Tuinen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. After his PhD (Ghent 2009) on neo-monadological accounts of the production of subjectivity, he has had visiting affiliations with universities in London, Berlin, Vienna, New York, Princeton and Lisbon. His work is in social and political philosophy, metaphysics, aesthetics and the history of philosophy. Recent monographs: The Dialectic of Ressentiment: Pedagogy of a Concept (Routledge, 2023) and The Philosophy of Mannerism: From Aesthetics to Modal Metaphysics (Bloomsbury, 2022). Van Tuinen has edited over two dozen books, special issues, and films, including Deleuze and The Fold: A Critical Reader (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Speculative Art Histories (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), The Politics of Debt (Zero Books, 2020), and a series of interdisciplinary theory books with V2_Institute for Unstable Media (Rotterdam/NAi Publishers).