The Philosophy Master’s Programme: Ciencia, Sociedad, Tecnología is organizing the event ‘Inteligencia Artificial y Materialismos’. As part of this event, IAS is organizing the talk by Charles Wolfe. The event will take place at the Sala de Juntas on Thursday May 30th starting at 11.00

Program:
11:00 Jorge Linares (UNAM) Los desafios de la inteligencia artificial. (Seminario Abierto)
13:00 Cat Moir (University of Sydney) Freudo-Marxist materialism. (Seminario Abierto)
16:00 Charles Wolfe (University of Toulouse) Taking the side of things, with a side order of agency: on some ontological aporias of New Materialism. (IAS-Seminar)

Abstract from Charles Wolfe’s talk:
The theoretical movement known as New Materialism, which emerged in the early 2000s, saw not only the return of ontology, but also the affirmation of a materialism in which all oppositions and contradictions would dissolve. New Materialist trends take the agency of non-humans, as suggested by Haraway and Latour in particular, a step further, and come to regard all the material components of our societies as active agents endowed, to varying degrees, with a form of vitality. (Traditional terms like ‘animism’ and ‘vitalism’ are of limited use here as they seem to confuse the issue further without adding precision.) In this paper I return to what I call the ‘ontologism’ of New Materialism in relation to vital, mechanistic and dialectical forms of materialism, commenting on authors such as Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and Elizabeth Grosz.