Reimagining a World for Tomorrow and an Onto-Epistemological Ethics of Remembering

The Discipline of Philosophy is delighted to welcome back one of its PhD graduates

Dr. Roisín Lally of Gonzaga University

speaking on:

Reimagining a World for Tomorrow and an Onto-Epistemological Ethics of Remembering

Abstract

Time is behind our reality structuring. Physicist/philosopher Karen Barad urges us to think about time differently. In Meeting the Universe Halfway, she offers us the theoretical tools such that we can return to earlier times and reimagine life differently. To do this requires an ontological shift in perspective which we get with Gilbert Simondon in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Based on the logic of transduction, ontogenesis claims that all states of being including time, space, and matter exist in excess in each potential being. Similarly, Karen Barad’s entangled intra-relations emerges as spacetimematterings. There are no subjects as such, only intra-actions between agents. Agential beings are always already entangled in material practices. Entangled beings make it impossible to differentiate absolutely between human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, subject and object, nature and culture, fact and value, epistemology and ontology. This paper will excavate Barad’s theory of diffraction in light of Gilbert Simondon’s ontogenesis to offer an onto-epistemological ethics that re-configures how we imagine deep time, both past and future, and take responsibility for the world we have created, and will create in the future.

Rόisín Lally teaches philosophy at Gonzaga University. Drawing on the traditions of phenomenology and metaphysics, she works at the intersection of the philosophy of technology, feminism, and sustainability. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Being, Time, and Technology and co-editing a book with Daniel Bradley entitled Irish Phenomenology.