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Presentation of Book Project on Relations: Towards a Metaphysics of Politics
On the afternoon of 18 June 2025, Arindam Chakrabarti (Ashoka University) and Ralph Weber (EIB) presented the introduction and a draft chapter on “power” of their work in progress on a selection of fundamental relations in politics. The audience comprised a small interdisciplinary group of interested researchers from the Institute itself as well as distinguished guests Markus Wild and Manuel Fasko from the Philosophy Department and political theorist Linda Ludwig from FHNW.
The planned book, the authors explained, aims to discuss a set of political relations such as power, authority, ownership, participation, belonging, enmity, and representation. All these relations are omnipresent in politics across great ideological divides. They are to some degree regime-type-insensitive. To approach politics from such an angle, the authors argued, might be helpful in times when there is not only major contestation between democracies and autocracies, but when that distinction itself also has become a matter of contestation. The idea, they laid out, is to discuss these political relations by drawing on selected aspects from larger debates in metaphysics and logic, drawing on different philosophical ideas from India, China and Europe, both old and new.
During the discussion, participants raised a series of excellent criticisms. Is it really all that necessary or helpful to make long-winded arguments from discussions in metaphysics to discuss the set of political relations at the center of interest of this project? Why not draw from the apparently more relatable contemporary debates in social ontology? Or why not pitch the topic against the background of the many relational turns in disciplines such as sociology or international relations theory and the critical engagement of scholars there on the topic of relations?
As a productive meeting drew to an end, the exchange of arguments and counterarguments, and more counterarguments again, could have gone on for a long time. The good atmosphere and open debate helped refine the book project considerably, for instance, as to what its claims can and should be and how it could be organized in a manner more conducive to its professed aims. The event took place in the context of a six-week-long research stay by Arindam Chakrabarti at the EIB, facilitated by a SNSF Scientific Exchanges grant.
Ralph Weber is Professor for European Global Studies at the Institute for European Global Studies. He specialises on Political Theory, Chinese Politics and modern Confucianism. Currently, he is the President of the European Association for Chinese Philosophy and the Chair of the Section on Political Theory in the Swiss Political Science Association.
Prof. Arindam Chakrabarti is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Ashoka University and was Visiting Professor at the Institute for European Global Studies. He has earned a D.Phil from Oxford University. Philosophy of language and logic, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and Indian philosophy are his major areas of specialization. He has been a Visiting Professor at Institute of Advanced Studies in Edinburgh, UK, the Sanskrit University in Tirupati, India, at Trinity College Cambridge, and at the National Institute of Advanced Study, Bangalore, India.