Invitation to CAPPE Workshop and Lecture 

with Alison Stone (Lancaster University) 

on Being Born: Birth and Philosophy, Wednesday 19^th May.

Workshop: 2-5.30pm, on Microsoft Teams

Lecture: 6.30-8pm, on Microsoft Teams

CAPPE is very pleased to announce that Professor Alison Stone will be joining us to discuss her latest book, Being Born: Birth and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2019) on Wednesday 19^th May. Please join us for a workshop and a lecture with the author of this fascinating book. These events are open to all, please feel free to share with your networks.

For the workshop, we plan to have short introductions to the book’s chapters to kick off and structure the discussion. If you would be interested in doing one of these introductions, please contact Joanna Kellond: J.Kellond@brighton.ac.uk

To register for the workshop and/or the lecture, please contact Ian Sinclair: I.A.Sinclair@brighton.ac.uk

On Being Born: Birth and Philosophy:

All human beings are born and all human beings die. In these two ways we are finite: our lives begin and our lives come to an end. Historically philosophers have concentrated attention on our mortality―and comparatively little has been said about being born and how it shapes our existence. In Being Born, Alison Stone sets out to overcome this oversight by providing a systematic philosophical account of how being born shapes our condition as human beings. Drawing on both feminist philosophy and existentialist concerns about the structure of meaningful human existence, Stone offers an original perspective on human existence. She explores how human existence is shaped by the way that we are born. Taking natality into account transforms our view of human existence and illuminates how many of its aspects are connected with our birth. These aspects include dependency, the relationality of the self, vulnerability, reception and inheritance of culture and history, embeddedness in social power, situatedness, and radical contingency. Considering natality also sheds new light on anxiety, mortality, and the temporality of human life. This book therefore bears on death and the meaning of life, as well as many debates in feminist and continental philosophy.

Alison Stone is a Professor of European Philosophy at Lancaster University, UK. Her research interests include feminist philosophy and post-Kantian continental philosophy. She is the author of many books, including Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity (Routledge, 2011) and Being Born: Birth and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2019). She co-edited the Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy (Routledge, 2017). Currently she is co-editing the Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century.