Drew Dalton on The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism

You’re listening to Conversations in Atlantic Theory, a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.

Today’s discussion is with Drew Dalton, who teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Dominican University in Chicago, Illinois where he currently serves as chair of the department. He is the author of numerous articles in European philosophy, literature, cultural studies, and phenomenology, as well as three authored books: Longing for the Other: Levinas and Metaphysical Desire, published in 2009 by Duquesne University Press, The Ethics of Resistance: Tyranny of the Absolute with Bloomsbury in 2018, and the just out book The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Reason to Ethical Pessimism with Northwestern University Press, which is the occasion for our conversation today. In this discussion, we explore the relationship between material science and metaphysics, the relation between metaphysics and ethical sensibility, as well as the place of pessimism in our ethical, existential, and political thinking. A link to the online essay mentioned at the close of the podcast is here: "The Beautiful Pessimism of Jimmy Buffett" in The Conversation.