Life and Matter - Duquesne Graduate Philosophy Conference 2027

The Duquesne Graduate Students in Philosophy (GSiP) Conference is an annual gathering dedicated to promoting the work of philosophy graduate students around the world. The eleventh edition will take place at Duquesne University on April 9 and 10, 2027. The theme of this conference is:

Life and Matter

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Kevin Thompson (DePaul University)

The opposition between inert, passive matter and life as active and self-organising is among the most durable dyads of modern thought. While we can trace its origins to the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century – which sought a totalising explanatory ground for the movements of animals, plants and inorganic bodies alike – to its denouement with the late-18th-century Lamarckian division between the organic and inorganic, which established biology as a science, the opposition has, since the twentieth century, morphed into a theoretical conjuncture. This is evident in Raymond Ruyer’s neo-finalism, Bergson’s élan vital, Canguilhem’s ‘organology’, which treated technics as an extension of life, and Simondon’s blurring of technical-natural worlds. Moreover, the vital and new materialisms that followed Deleuze’s “universal machinism” have gone further, exploring the assemblages (e.g., DeLanda) that trace self-organising processes, from geological strata to markets, generating form without design. Eco-feminism (Carolyn Merchant) and deep ecology (Val Plumwood) mobilised a feminist critique through the lens of life against passive matter. The dyad, in other words, has not so much dissolved as become increasingly cross-contaminated. In contemporary discourse, its terms continue to slide into one another. Matter is vitalised (e.g., Jane Bennett): things, networks, and markets are said to act, self-organise, and evolve. Life is materialised; organisms become code, tissue, data, disposed to extraction, and management (e.g., Foucauldian biopolitics) – at the limit, vast populations are subjected to conditions of life that confer the status of the living dead (i.e., Agamben’s bare life and Mbembe’s Necropolitics). 

This conference seeks to explore the life–matter dyad not only a metaphysical problem but as an ongoing theoretical conjuncture that shapes contemporary philosophical problems across a range of disciplines. Recent scholarship suggests that this conjuncture runs deeper in the philosophical tradition than its materialist inherits often allow – e.g., Karen Ng places life at the centre of Hegel’s account of self-consciousness; others (e.g., Adrian Johnston) have re-traversed Hegel’s philosophy of nature to discover a “re-vivified”, non-reductive materialist theory of subjectivity. Does a concept of lively matter advance political critique? Can we conceive, with Esposito, an affirmative biopolitics: a power of life able to resist a biopower that, at its limit, becomes thanatopolitics? Can we move beyond the binary of ‘lifeless’ mechanism, on the one side, and a valorised ‘lively’ materialism?