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Colloquium (Jocelyn Benoist, Sorbonne)
Thursday March 13, 2025, 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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As speaker for our first Spring 2025 colloquium, the department is delighted to welcome Jocelyn Benoist, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He works in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind and is the author of, most recently, Toward a Contextual Realism (Harvard University Press, 2021). He is also a recipient of the Gay-Lussac Humboldt Prize.
Talk Title
A Plea for Reality
Talk Abstract
I’d like to open a discussion on the concept of reality. I will argue against its dismissal by some postmodern thought. I will contend that while “reality” can be an uncomfortable concept, we cannot do without it. I will distinguish the usage of “reality” as a general concept and as applied in specific instances (e.g., “a real duck”). I will criticize Markus Gabriel’s “New Realism,” which focuses on “existence” rather than “reality,” and by so doing possibly blurs crucial ontological lines. From Gabriel’s criticism of the concept of reality I will return to Austin’s work on the adjective “real” that emphasizes the contextual relativity of this concept to a particular class of things. Ultimately, I will show the limits of such an approach and argue that the question of reality does not come down to the mere belonging of something to a definite class of things. Thus, I will argue for the metaphysical irreducibility of this notion.
