海外讲座 | How to Do Things with a Social Contract（莫纳什大学社会契约系列讲座第三讲）

How to Do Things with a Social Contract

讲座形式：Zoom线上

讲座注册链接：

https://monash.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEpcu2tqj4uG9LJQw5zIjDS7H5RP-ZVSDxA

会议时间：Tuesday 22 March 2022, 8-9.30pm Melbourne time (9-10.30am UK)

主讲人：Peter Gratton (Memorial University of Newfoundland, Philosophy)

具体信息：

Social contract theory begins in Hobbes in modernity in a Real Politik attempt to negotiate political difference and delineate a politics capable of dealing with human being, and it comes to be summed up in Rawls by a very different attempt to remove any metaphysics or ontology from its account, all the better to detail abstracted norms that could be universalized for any given community. Born as something of a stopgap measure in Hobbes—better to accede to the sovereign than the brutal life we would have otherwise—by Rawls’ time, the contract no longer answers to base human instincts and drives, but is a means of enjoining a reconciliation with the state of things. If the contract’s philosophical status has been at issue for centuries—is it ontological or normative, metaphysical or metatheoretical?—its linguistic status has been just as puzzling. Most books on the matter call the contract a “metaphor,” but in fact the contract, as guaranteeing all other contracts, plays no such role. Nor is it a constative utterance, since, of course, that the social contract exists is less than clear anytime one states the fact. What I want to show is that hidden behind the rationality of every contract is the structure of a Leviathan found in Hobbes and then brought all through social contract theory. No matter their differences, since social contracts are performative and since they must have force of law, there is no contract theory that does not, in the end, provide ample place on the stage for performance of sovereignty, which, as we’ve seen time and again, is no giant to be tied down by lilliputian laws and rules. Rawls is correct when he says rationalist philosophers look for rationality in political institutions and find them mirrored back at them, since the contract ultimately is a rationalist fable disavowing the continuing Leviathans whose existence has been the real story of political modernity. Key thinkers discussed will be Rousseau, Arendt, and Mbembe.

Peter Gratton is in the Dept of Philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He has published numerous articles in political and Continental philosophy and is the author of The State of Sovereignty: Lessons from the Political Fictions of Modernity (SUNY Press, 2012) and Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2014). An area editor for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Peter has also edited three works: Traversing the Imaginary (Northwestern University Press, 2007), co-edited with John Mannousakis, and Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking: Expositions of World, Politics, Art, and Sense (SUNY Press, 2012), co-edited with Marie-Eve Morin, and  The Meillassoux Dictionary, co-edited with Paul Ennis (Edinburgh University Press, 2014).  Peter is also a board member of Society and Space (Environment and Planning D), book editor and board member of Derrida Today, and executive board member and treasurer for the International Association for Philosophy and Literature.

详情请见：

https://www.monash.edu/arts/languages-literatures-cultures-linguistics/social-contract-research-network/media-and-events

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