Dimitris Vardoulakis (Western Sydney University)-“The Destruction of Metaphysics? On the Opposition between Epicureanism and Stoicism”

From logical positivism to fundamental ontology, philosophy in the first third of the 20th century joined the chorus of various modernisms calling for doing away with the past, here specifically the doing away with Judeo-Christian metaphysics. The difficulty with any move that determines a position in opposition to another is that the other position needs to be presupposed. Many philosophers admit that such a presupposition entails a metaphysical reversal concluding that we cannot simply get out of metaphysics. 

I will argue that there is a hitherto unnoticed affinity between certain strands of modern philosophy—especially in the wake of Heidegger—that posit an action without effects and hence irreducible to a metaphysics of presence and the Stoic way of constructing the relation between being and acting. Besides offering a different way to grasp a series of concepts such as the event, poetry and difference from an alternative historical perspective, this has the potential to find a way around the metaphysical reversal that has haunted philosophy for a century.

Dimitris Vardoulakis was the inaugural chair of Philosophy at Western Sydney University. Some of his books include Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka’s Laughter (2016); Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy(2018); Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism (2020); The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger’s Magical Materialism (2024); and The Agonistic Condition (2025). He is the co-editor of the book series “Incitements” (Edinburgh University Press) and the new journal Philosophy, Politics and Critique. He is currently serving as the chair of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP) and Vice President of the Council of the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS).