Ben Woodard

Ben Woodard received his PhD in Theory and Criticism from Western University in 2016. From 2017–2020 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the IPK (Institute of Philosophy and Sciences of Art) at Leuphana University where he completed a habilitation on the analytic/continental divide in the history of philosophy. Since 2020 Ben has lectured at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, the School of Materialist Research, and the New Centre for Research and Practice.

In broad terms, his work focuses on the relationship between naturalism and idealism in the long 19th century. More specifically, his current project focuses on the politicization of biology by way of eugenics, statistics, and the neglect of historical concepts in biological research. Ben also writes on science fiction, horror film, and literature and is a translator of French philosophy (particularly the work of Gilles Châtelet).

He is the author of numerous articles and three books: Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation and the Creep of Life (2012), On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (2013), and Schelling’s Naturalism: Motion, Space, and the Volition of Thought (2019). He has two forthcoming books: Uninhabited: Science Fiction and the Decolonial (Zero Books) and F.H. Bradley and the History of Philosophy: Animating a Lost Idealism (Edinburgh University Press).

The aim of this project is to examine how genetics, and in particular the public understanding of genetics, slides from purported certainties about individual identities to generalizations about populations. For instance, the genetic similarities between identical twins are taken to mean that all shared behaviors can be pinned to a genetic cause.

From socio-biology, to forensic DNA profiling, to genetic genealogies. the behavioral, criminal, and other statistical extrapolations of genetics often hides its weak probabilities and contingencies under a veil of unassailable scientific ‘fact.’ To this end this project will examine numerous high profile cases and events (such as the OJ Simpson murder trial, the apprehension of the Golden State Killer, to anti-black mass shootings using genomic studies as motivation) to articulate the ‘common sense’ perception of genes as keys to social dynamics. In addition, this project will look at how the popular conceptions of DNA have unfortunately collided with the resuscitation of the alt-right and its widespread disinformation campaigns about correlations between race, IQ, and sex.

Contemporary biological theory utilizes a broad range of model organisms in order to find evolutionary, developmental, and epidemiological generalities among living things. However, there is little consensus whether model organisms should be considered ideal constructs or material experiments, a divide which reflects a deeper disagreement within biology: between a gene-centric view and an organism-level view.

This divide in turn has significant consequences for how one carries out biocultural and biophilosophical analyses to understand how biological knowledge informs cultural structures and how concepts in turn affect the formation of biological theories. This project aims to demonstrate how this disparity regarding modelization within the life sciences is a fruitful means of constructing a decolonial biology following Sylvia Wynter and her genealogy of humans as auto-poetically storytelling beings grounded on the dynamic material loops of biological systems.