Introduction

This special issue has its origins in the Philosophies of Difference seminars, which were established in Melbourne in 2016 by Ryan S. Gustafsson, Rebecca Hill, and Helen Ngo. The seminars set out to provide a forum for scholars working in continental philosophy to engage with problems that have been marginal to the dominant traditions of Western philosophical thought. Ryan S. Gustafsson also critiques the nature–culture dualism and the idea of nature as an object that can be completely known, manipulated, and exploited in her article ‘Depth, Nature, Participation’. This involves a conception of difference as constitutive, the condition of possibility for any ‘thing’, subject, perception, norm, or experience. In this sense, the work of critique also unearths the constructive possibilities of difference for an ethics of inter-subjectivity and relationality, for elaborating non-anthropocentric sociality, and for what Seely calls, following Heidegger, ‘a chance for life’.