Philosophy and Crisis: Perspectives from Critical Phenomenology

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1. Welcome and Introduction

Niclas Rautenberg (Universität Hamburg)

26/06/2026, 14:00

2. ‘The Coloniality of International Law: A Critical Phenomenology’

Prof. Lisa Guenther (Queen's University, Canada)

26/06/2026, 14:15

Peruvian scholar Aníbal Quijano coined the term coloniality to name the deep imbrication of colonial violence with modernity itself. In this paper, I examine the coloniality of international law, which emerged in the early modern period as a legal framework for managing European colonial exploits. Drawing on Vitoria’s 1539 lecture, De Indis, and Merleau-Ponty’s 1959-60 lecture notes on the...

3. Democracy, Sustainability, and Climate Disobedience—Refracted Through Sophocles’ Antigone

Prof. Matthias Fritsch (Concordia University, Canada)

26/06/2026, 15:40

This talk argues that Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone can help our times respond to ecological destabilization and the associated injustices between generations. I suggest that the play centrally revolves around civil disobedience in the face of a political power that that does not fully recognize obligations to non-present generations despite its constitutive dependence on ancestors and...

4. Walking-with in Public Spaces in Times of Political Crisis: Phenomenological Reflections

Dr Marieke Borren (Open University, Netherlands)

26/06/2026, 17:05

In this paper, I explore the contours of a phenomenology of walking-with that addresses the transformation of collective embodied movement in public urban space under current conditions of political crisis, particularly the erosion of radical democratic possibility. Revisiting the alleged tension between so-called political and critical phenomenology, I bring into dialogue accounts of...

5. Concluding Remarks

26/06/2026, 18:15