DFG-Network Change and Change-Maker (Fl 2377/2-1) April 2020 — March 2023
Project Description Change and Change-Maker will be a research network consisting of 15 philosophers working together over a period of three years. During this time the network will conduct six workshops. The overall output will consist in joint publications of the network members and the external speakers of the workshops. On top of that the network will be employed to establish the infrastructure for a larger third party funded project.
The network strives to enrich the contemporary debate about persistence by including powers. Recent work has revealed that the debate focuses solely on a negative point (namely, avoiding the threatening contradiction in the context of Leibniz’s Law) while disregarding the possibility of a positive account of persistence. We are convinced that the debate about persistence would greatly benefit from a discussion of what we would like to call change-makers, i.e. those entities which bring about the changes in the world.
Our hypothesis is that including powers, as change-makers, into the picture will lead to a more exhaustive account of persistence. In alignment with this, the network enables the exchange of philosophers of time and philosophers of powers. Hence,Change and Change-Maker will not only improve the debate about persistence but also the debate about powers as a synergy effect: the expertise of the philosophers of time enables a much more fine-grained examination of the dynamics of the manifestations of powers.
Workshops
# 1 Persistence in Stability [Postponed due to Corona]