AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Victoria LawsonIn personPracticing Val Plumwood’s Philosophy in the Indoor Spider EncounterWhen you experience physical bodily sensations of fear and disgust, beyond an immediate jump scare, of a spider inside your home, you experience a reaction informed by the separation, both conceptually and physically, of nature and culture in Western society. This separation, according to Val Plumwood, is not just a separation of distinct concepts, of a natural world and a human one, but a chasmic split between radically disparate and homogenised concepts. This informs her account of Western culture as a hegemonic centre – a dominant group forming an exclusive centre of moral and social reasoning – hyper-separating itself from nonhuman animals and the environment. This worldview requires individual maintenance, where experiences that resist conceptual separation elicit not just a physiological, but a conceptual reaction against the mixing of the boundary between nature and culture. I argue that spiders inside the cultural space of the home are an example of this boundary mixing, one in which you can choose to confront your own conceptual belief. This is important, as Plumwood argues the nature/culture dualism has given a conceptual basis for environmental destruction, a destruction which risks the ongoing existence of humans everywhere. 

Georg Lukács’ The Destruction of Reason and Max Horkheimer’s The End of Reason both center on the theme of reason, as their titles indicated. However, there is a profound divergence in their intellectual foundations and teleological outlooks. This study examines these divergences through two core lenses: the philosophers’ contrasting attitudes toward Stalinism and their differing conceptions of reason’s prospects. As a consequence, their views on praxis, individuality, and the role of collective vs. individual struggle diverge: Lukacs prioritizes material transformation and collective action, while Horkheimer emphasizes critical reflection and the preservation of individual autonomy. Despite both being considered as foundational figures of Western Marxism, their disagreements reflect deeper tensions within Marxist thought regarding emancipation, rationality, and the relationship between theory and political practice. This paper argues that these differences stem not from contradictory commitments to Marxism, but from distinct responses to 20th-century political realities (e.g., fascism, Stalinist governance) and divergent interpretations of Marxism’s core tenets, particularly regarding the nature of reason and the path to human emancipation.

This paper investigates a fundamental aporia within the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas: how can ethical responsibility endure when infinite responsibility exceeds the finite subject’s capacity to fulfill it? Levinas grounds subjectivity in an asymmetrical responsibility for the Other that precedes freedom, reciprocity, and self-possession. Yet such radical responsibility threatens the subject with ethical exhaustion, shame, and retreat into ontological self-enclosure.
Against interpretations that soften Levinasian asymmetry through reciprocity or mutual recognition, this paper argues that asymmetry remains irreducible. At the same time, however, asymmetrical responsibility generates what I call “hopeful asymmetry”: a fragile ethical hope directed toward the Other. Through an analysis of shame, substitution, and diachrony in Levinas’s major works, I argue that this hope functions as the transcendental condition that prevents ethical responsibility from collapsing into nihilistic absurdity. Hope does not resolve impossibility; rather, it suspends impossibility so that ethical responsiveness may continue despite constitutive inadequacy.
Ultimately, the paper proposes a new interpretation of Levinasian ethics in which ethical shame becomes bearable only through the irreducible hope awakened by asymmetrical responsibility itself.