2025 EVENTS
DEPARTMENTAL SEMINARS:
Dr Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh from UCT speaking on "Ubuntu in AI Ethics: From Cultural Representation to Political Resistance": The global prominence of artificial intelligence (AI) has intensified debates on ethics, often reducing Africa’s contributions to a singular invocation of Ubuntu. Ubuntu, a relational philosophy emphasizing interdependence and communal harmony, has been positioned as a corrective to the perceived individualism of Western ethical frameworks. While this rhetorical deployment may serve to offer African epistemic legitimacy in AI ethics, it risks tokenism if uncritically applied. In this talk, I interrogate how Ubuntu is mobilized in AI ethics and explore its potential to go beyond cultural representation toward shaping substantive ethical and political engagements with AI systems. Rather than merely inserting Ubuntu into AI ethics, I advocate for leveraging Ubuntu to shift power, interrogate systemic inequities and advance an African-centered relational ethics that critically engages with AI’s worldmaking power.
Dr Schalk Gerber from SU speaking on "Beyond Prediction: On the Limits of AI, Spontaneity, and the Ontological Demand in Kant, Heidegger, and Nancy": In this talk, I explore the ethical limits and ontological implications of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT through a philosophical trajectory from Kant to Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy. While AI was not a concern for Kant, his account of reason, spontaneity, and the classification of knowledge offers a critical lens for examining how AI models process and predict language. Heidegger’s critique of Kant highlights the temporal and finite conditions of understanding, pointing to the limits of calculative thought. Building on this, Nancy’s ontology of being-with focuses on the irreducible plurality and unpredictability of human existence, contrasting sharply with the predictive logic of AI. I argue that Nancy’s emphasis on relationality and spontaneity offers a vital resource for rethinking ethical responsibility beyond algorithmic determination.
Prof Lucy Allais from Wits/ Johns Hopkins University speaking on "An Antinomy of Agency": My aim in this lecture is to present the first part of a three part account of human free agency that I’m currently working on. The idea of the book project is to sketch a picture of human free agency that brings together its metaphysical, rational/moral, and political aspects. This talk concerns the first part of the picture: the metaphysics of agency. I approach this through considering an antinomy which I take to apply to both human agency and the agency of other animals. I argue that agency cannot be understood as compatible with metaphysical determinism, but could be compatible with deterministic laws. I argue that the causality of agency requires that an agent can do something or not do it, and that whether they do it is not a determined function of previous states of the universe. Through situating human agency in relation to the agency of other animals, I present the denial of metaphysical determinism as part of a (relatively) naturalistic understanding of the world.
Dr Emre Çetin Gürer from Koç University in Turkey speaking on "University as a Space of Resistance: The Case of the Boğaziçi University Resistance in Turkey": The social and political role of universities in a neoliberal society has become a contentious issue since the late 1960s. On the one hand, these are institutions that are meant to facilitate the education of independent and critical citizens are restructured to produce neoliberal subjects and qualified cheap labor. Instead of pursuing research aiming to broaden scientific knowledge and humanities, universities are pressured to become profit-making think tanks addressing the needs and greed of corporations and increasingly authoritarian state agendas. Thankfully, such neoliberal and authoritarian policies transforming universities are not left unchallenged . On the other side of these forces stand significant resistance practices, including labor movements, student movements, feminist, anti-racist, and LGBTQIA+ movements, as well as those defending academic freedom and freedom of speech. In this presentation, I will explore how the Boğaziçi University campus has been turned into a space of resistance and evaluate the transformative political potentials of such space-making.
Dr Hugo Uys from UWC speaking on "Theorizing the Vulnerability of Animal Bodies Before the Law": This paper offers a sympathetic critique of contemporary animal advocacy, showing that its limited impact stems partly from the law’s complicity in enabling and sustaining animal subjugation. It thus asks whether a legal theory grounded in the intercorporeal vulnerability of human and nonhuman animal bodies might displace anthropocentrism as a limit of law and legal discourse. Reading critical legal theory through the emerging posthumanities, I pursue a posthuman legal theory to challenge the structures sustaining human exceptionalism. By adopting a post-disciplinary, poethical method – a method at once critical and creative – I weave together insights from decolonial thought, critical animal studies, feminist theory, post-phenomenology, Black radical traditions, and environmental humanities. Through these weavings, the project composes new conceptual tools – such as ‘animal flesh’, the ‘(e)rectitude of the (hu)man’, and ‘juridical economies’ – with which to de/re-compose our prevailing juridical imaginary. Ultimately, the work calls for a renewed post-anthropocentric ethico-onto-epistemology through which to reimagine the entanglement(s) of bodiment, animality, and law – that is, the very World as we know it.
Prof Philip Kitcher of Columbia University speaking on "Scientific Progress and the Search for Truth": Although some people express scepticism about the concept of progress, there are many mundane instances in which talk of progress appears justified. I distinguish two forms of progress: teleological progress achieved by diminishing the distance to some fixed long-term goal, and pragmatic progress consisting in overcoming problems and transcending limits. Science is one form of human inquiry (there are many others), and I argue that its progress is pragmatic. Recognizing this focuses attention on how problems are identified as significant, and reveals the entanglement of science with values. Progressive sciences make contributions to human lives and to human societies. The most obvious such contributions are practical. This approach to scientific progress appears to slight the ideal of knowing truths about the natural world “for their own sake”. The lecture attempts to show that this ideal is more problematic than usually appreciated. I consider how the idea of seeking truth might have emerged, and suggest that the “world” about which investigators attempt to learn is one thoroughly structured by human decisions and human values, thus dependent on the problems we have attempted to solve during the long history of our species. Wanting “truth for its own sake” is a latecomer in a process of inquiry primarily dominated by the practical.