Exploring Contradiction Beyond Contradiction 2025 Conference

Exploring Contradictions beyond Contradiction

1st International Conference on Contradiction Studies

RTG Contradiction Studies

02/11/2025 –02/14/2025

U Bremen

Contradictions are omnipresent and the identification of contradictions is usually accompanied by the imperative to resolve them. Contradictions can be ascribed to individual actions as well as to social formations. They extend to all areas of life: political orders, academic settings, religious practices and many more fields that are permeated by them. Without contradictions, there are no pluralities and no truths. Nevertheless, there is a long and powerful (especially European) tradition of problematizing and resolving contradictions and reducing them to logical incompatibility. This tradition of avoiding contradiction is countered by alternative concepts of thinking contradiction, above all in dialectics or paraconsistent logic (Priest/Tanaka [1996]2022). Contradiction Studies take up this reflection and move away from the widespread negative assessment of contradiction (cp. Febel/Knopf/Nonhoff 2023; Lienert 2019; Lossau/Schmidt-Brücken/Warnke 2019; Nintemann/Stroh 2022; Warnke/Hornidge/Schattenberg 2021). In this sense, our conference aims to explore contradictions beyond contradiction.

Please find more information here.

Back to overview
earthing

“Geography as a discipline stands for a certain worlding, if not earthing, of contradiction, in both theoretical and pracitcal respect.”

Julia Lossau
hierarchy of norms

“If social contradictions are reflected in law, law cannot form a hierarchy of norms free of contradictions.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
every day

“Living in contradictions is what we experience every day. Why do we know so little about it?”

Gisela Febel
limits

“Resistance is a democratic right, sometimes a duty. With literature we can find models for this right and think about its limits.”

Gisela Febel