Event Detail

Beyond the Economics of Alterity: Al-Fārābī, Foucault, and Self-Formation in Islamic Philosophical Ethics

Dr. Mohammad Azadpur, SFSU

Friday, May 1, 4:30 pm - 6 pm

What if one of the most important sources of feminist critique in Islamic philosophy has been hiding in plain sight—not outside the tradition, but within its ambitious account of rational self-formation? This paper reconsiders Islamic philosophical ethics (‘ilm al-akhlāq) through the conjunction of Zahra Ayubi’s feminist critique, Michel Foucault’s genealogy of ethical subjectivity, and Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī’s account of rational-spiritual flourishing. I argue that the exclusion of women and non-elite men from the practices of ethical cultivation in the akhlāq tradition is not merely a contingent social defect, nor simply a uniquely Islamic one. Rather, it reflects the inheritance of an older Mediterranean configuration of ethical life in which leisure, household authority, and public visibility were secured for a few by assigning others to the sphere of necessity. In this respect, Islamic philosophical ethics reproduces a structure already visible in the Greek distinction between oikos and polis, even as it universalizes the aspiration to human perfection. Against this background, I turn to al-Fārābī as a pivotal figure. He offers not only an account of felicity grounded in the coordinated cultivation of theoretical, practical, and imaginative faculties, but also a rational hermeneutics in which philosophy and religion share the same objects while differing in demonstrative and symbolic modes of access. This yields a form of critical self-formation in which no inherited prejudice or exclusion is immune from rational scrutiny, even if the historical conditions of philosophical life remained restrictive. I conclude by bringing al-Fārābī into conversation with Foucault’s account of biopower and feminist and necropolitical revisions of it. If modern inclusion is itself ambivalent, then al-Fārābī’s rational anthropology offers a distinctive normative resource for reconstructing ethical life beyond both ancient patriarchal enclosure and modern regimes that render some lives governable, others extractable, and still others disposable.

Emotional Dominance and Psychic Fragmentation in Nietzsche

Dr. Kaitlyn Creasy, California State University, San Bernardino

Saturday, May 2 , 4 pm - 5:30 pm

Throughout his work, Nietzsche evinces a keen interest in the psychosocial mechanisms through which our psychic and affective lives are transformed. In this talk, I begin by describing a selection of these mechanisms, focusing especially on the way in which Nietzsche thinks both (1) our assimilation of dominant social norms and values and (2) our deployment of emotion concepts and narratives to make sense of our affective lives fragment and complicate the human psyche. While Nietzsche typically focuses on the negative effects of such mechanisms (resulting from their ability to produce psycho-physiological “decadence” and weaken the will more generally), he also recognizes their positive potential. First, Nietzsche thinks that the psychic tension such mechanisms produce can be generative, facilitating the individual’s long-term growth. Second, since Nietzschean “greatness [Größe]” involves becoming “just as multiple as whole, just as wide as full” (BGE 212), such mechanisms potentially conduce to greatness of soul. Ultimately, this talk highlights what I take to be some of Nietzsche’s most interesting and distinctive contributions: the psychosocial analysis at the heart of his philosophical psychology, his picture of the psychic and emotional conditions of contemporary forms of agency, and the nuanced and deeply ambivalent perspective he inhabits regarding the social shaping of our psychic lives.