PANEL 25 / SOCIAL ONTOLOGY AS A RESOURCE FOR POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
CONVENOR: BILL WRINGE (Bilkent University)
All enquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected].
Political philosophy is concerned, at its centre, with ways in which individual agents can act collectively, the opportunities that collective action affords, the obstacles that lie in its way and the promise and pathologies of forms of social organization that make collective action possible. The nature of collective agency has also played a key role in recent work in social ontology. One might therefore expect social ontology to provide an important resource for political philosophy.
However, although some authors have found it illuminating to consider whether the state might be a collective agent, and ideas about collective responsibility have played a significant role in discussions about reparations for past harms including those resulting from slavery, colonial injustice and war crimes and about our obligations in the face of the climate crisis, work informed by contributions to social ontology have played a less significant role than in political philosophy than one might hope.
The aim of this panel is to explore other ways in which social ontology might contribute to political philosophy, paying particular attention to social entities subsidiary to, beyond, or independent of the state. Although some recent work at the interface of social and political philosophy has addressed these issues, there is much fertile territory to explore here.
We also allow space for exploring the implications for political philosophy of a recent and important development within social ontology: namely the suggestion, prominent in the work of Brian Epstein, Asa Burman and Johan Branmark, among others that the collective agency perspective on social ontology unduly marginalizes a range of phenomena that should be of central interest to political philosophers such as class, power and gender.
All enquiries about the panel should be sent to [email protected].
Political philosophy is concerned, at its centre, with ways in which individual agents can act collectively, the opportunities that collective action affords, the obstacles that lie in its way and the promise and pathologies of forms of social organization that make collective action possible. The nature of collective agency has also played a key role in recent work in social ontology. One might therefore expect social ontology to provide an important resource for political philosophy.
However, although some authors have found it illuminating to consider whether the state might be a collective agent, and ideas about collective responsibility have played a significant role in discussions about reparations for past harms including those resulting from slavery, colonial injustice and war crimes and about our obligations in the face of the climate crisis, work informed by contributions to social ontology have played a less significant role than in political philosophy than one might hope.
The aim of this panel is to explore other ways in which social ontology might contribute to political philosophy, paying particular attention to social entities subsidiary to, beyond, or independent of the state. Although some recent work at the interface of social and political philosophy has addressed these issues, there is much fertile territory to explore here.
We also allow space for exploring the implications for political philosophy of a recent and important development within social ontology: namely the suggestion, prominent in the work of Brian Epstein, Asa Burman and Johan Branmark, among others that the collective agency perspective on social ontology unduly marginalizes a range of phenomena that should be of central interest to political philosophers such as class, power and gender.
