Workshop
Ontological Pluralism International Workshop

Over the past two decades, Ontological Pluralism has become an influential idea across the social sciences, most visibly within anthropology, but increasingly beyond it. It argues that a single, unified ontology is insufficient to account for the multiplicity of human practices, knowledge systems, and forms of life. Instead, it suggests that different collectives may inhabit or enact distinct ontological configurations. This proposal has generated substantial debate within anthropology, but not so much in philosophy, despite the fact that it appears to challenge long-standing philosophical commitments to universality, objectivity, and shared categories of thought.

This workshop seeks to examine how Ontological Pluralism raises questions that extend well beyond disciplinary boundaries, in particular concerning the status and scope of philosophical inquiry itself. If empirical disciplines claim that multiple worlds are enacted rather than merely interpreted, what follows for metaphysics, phenomenology, or the philosophy of science? Can the proliferation of ontological claims be accommodated within existing philosophical traditions, or does it require a revision of classical philosophical concepts, or even constitute a challenge to philosophy's traditional authority over the question of what there is?
At stake is not only the validity of pluralist proposals, but also philosophy's own self-understanding: its aspiration to universal categories, shared standards of rationality, and a unified conception of reality. Does the rise of ontological pluralism signal a genuine transformation in philosophy's relation to the human sciences, or is it a moment of conceptual confusion?

The workshop addresses these questions by bringing together scholars to critically explore the philosophical stakes of the ontological turn. Possible approaches include, but are not limited to:

• conceptual analyses of ontological pluralism: its meanings, internal distinctions, and theoretical commitments
• the status of ontology in empirical inquiry: whether ontological pluralism entails metaphysical pluralism, methodological pluralism, or a revision of classical ontological categories
• the problem of nature, culture, and reality in pluralist frameworks: rethinking universality, objectivity, and ontological disagreement
• ontological conflict and incommensurability: how to understand disagreement, translation, and comparison between heterogeneous ontological claims
• normative and political implications of ontological pluralism: whether and how ontological claims ground critique, resistance, or emancipation
• the risk of relativism and the criteria of validity in pluralist ontologies: philosophical responses to internal and external critiques
• historical and genealogical perspectives on ontological pluralism: continuities and ruptures with classical metaphysics, phenomenology, and structuralism
• the future of philosophy after the ontological turn: does ontological pluralism transform philosophy's self-understanding or its relation to the human sciences?
• ontological pluralism and phenomenology: plurality of worlds, lifeworlds, or interpretations of being, and their limits
• relations between ontological pluralism and contemporary philosophical theories, including naturalism, new realism, speculative realism, and post-Kantian ontology