Life Problems: Ambivalence, Valorization, Validation

In order to thematize the import of this ambivalence and explore its potential we, the Masters students of the School of Philosophy, organize an international symposium and aim to publish its outcomes in a special issue of the Erasmus Student Journal of Philosophy.

We wish thus first to examine and valorize the under-determination of life within various discursive
contexts. By weaving together different approaches to life within a single project, we seek both to
concretize and extend discussions within these discourses, as well as tease out the commonalities
and disjunctions between them, in order to open new paths of knowledge.

We wish also to take transdisciplinarity to its limit and show how ultimately, every object within
philosophical discourse, becomes in its relation to the question of life, itself a question of ‘life and
death’, demanding a valiant validation of the inherent and existential value of every question. By bringing life to the center of philosophical discourses, the latter must assume the responsibility of cultivating forms of knowledge whose value is centered around lived life.
Biopolitical questions of race and market practices, the potential of categories such as
‘bare-life’ and ‘form-of-life’ in reconfiguring contemporary practices, the ethico-political significance of the epistemological boundary between life and death, the scope of biosemiotics in making sense of the world, and the fraught relation between viral life and technics which will undoubtedly determine much of the future are thus some of the dimensions that we set out to explore.