The AIPCT is pleased to announce the Residency Lecture of Helen Grela, “Have We Effectively Made Money a Person and Ourselves Its Corporeal Embodiment?” set for May 20, 2021, 2 PM (Central Time US). The response will be given by Kenneth Stikkers, Senior Fellow of the AIPCT.
The lecture will be on Zoom. RSVP to personalist61@gmail.com for a link.
In this paper, Grela considers whether, as a society, we might have unwittingly turned money into a person (as Marx implies) and ourselves into its corporeal embodiment. To do so, she explores how our social imaginary is based on certain flawed or inconsistent concepts that both obscure and enable such a reality. These concepts include our reflexive beliefs that money is a naturally arising and neutral tool in economic transactions; that our economic system protects the universality of natural rights of life, liberty and property; and that our legal system supports our common understanding of the person as the bearer of these universal rights. The paper is forthcoming in a volume edited by AIPCT Fellow Jared Kemling, The Cultural Power of Personal Objects, forthcoming in the SUNY Series in American Philosophical and Cultural Thought.
Helen Grela is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She received a BS in International Economics from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and an MS in International Finance from MIT‘s Sloan School of Management. She was also awarded a Fulbright research grant to the Warsaw School of Economics, where she examined the banking system under communism. Helen had a career in finance, first in corporate commercial banking in New York and Boston, and later in private equity finance in Warsaw. She started her philosophical studies only recently, enrolling in Roger Scruton’s masters level program for mature students at Buckingham University–London. In her dissertation, she is exploring how heterodox theories of money might affect Robert Nozick’s libertarian position on distributive justice. She has been in residence from May 2-21, 2021.