Can Metaphysics Break Bricks? A Workshop on Social Metaphysics, Social Construction, and Social Change

The question “Can metaphysics break bricks?” has already been asked, albeit in a slightly different form. In the film “Can Dialectics Break Bricks?”, the situationists, members of the international and revolutionary art movement Internationale situationiste, reflect upon whether dialectics can make changes in the material world.

During this reading workshop, we will adapt this unusual question to ongoing debates in analytic philosophy, specifically social metaphysics. In this sense, the aim of this workshop is to consider the power of metaphysics in the fight for social justice. At first glance, this goal is controversial since metaphysics is traditionally conceived as a discipline that deals with the fundamental forms of reality while being allegedly politically neutral. In this workshop, we will critically approach these assumptions. We will consider what metaphysics can tell us about social forms of reality like gender or race, and why and how engaging with social metaphysics can contribute to grasping real, tangible, and concrete changes in the social world. To achieve this, we will deal with social construction, ameliorative analysis, and new approaches to the metaphysics of the social.