Ben Woodard

Ben Woodard received his PhD in Theory and Criticism from Western University in 2016. From 2017–20 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 philosophy through the work of F.H. Bradley. Since 2020 Ben has lectured at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy mostly on the history, philosophy, and politics of the life sciences. In broad terms, his work focuses on the relationship between naturalism and idealism in the long 19^th century. Ben also writes on science fiction and horror film and literature. 

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 is a translator of French philosophy and in particular the work of Giles Châtelet. Ben is also a founding member of the philosophy collective P.S., which is based at the Performing Arts Forum (PAF) in St. Erme, France.

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.