We are delighted to announce that Professor Rein Raud (School of Humanities, Tallinn University) will deliver a special lecture. Please find the details below.

Title: Time, power, values and agency: a processual view of ethics and politics

Abstract: One of the often-voiced criticisms of process philosophy is that it has not produced any original ethical or political thought of note. Indeed, most mainstream socio-philosophical theories usually rely on object-oriented ontological premises, taken as self-evident, which see social phenomena and political entities as “things” or “agents”, unitary, self-identical and continuous in time, and present their interactions as accidental additions to what they essentially are. I will try to reverse this position by putting situations and events first, by adding a temporal dimension to any political phenomenon, and by presenting a brief outline of a relational discourse for modelling and analyzing social processes based on this approach. This will include a process-ontological view of power, social institutions, and collective subjectivities. I hope to show that such a new paradigm may have far-reaching implications for our ethical reasoning and is well suited for moving beyond the habitual anthropocentric and individualistic view.

Date and Venue:
13:00 to 14:30, 9th April 2025
1st Floor Conference Room, Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University
* No Registration Required