In your book (and even in this interview so far) you are rather hard on what you call “substantivism,” blaming it not just for bad philosophy, but for patriarchy and a litany of other political crimes. I wonder if that’s really fair. In the first place, it might be asked whether it is even possible to link specific ontologies with specific political positions, given that the greatest philosophers have generally been useful to people of all political stripes. There are both “Left” and “Right” Kantians, Hegelians, Nietzscheans, and even Heideggerians for instance. The other objection someone might make is that Aristotle’s theory of substance was a radical progressive break with previous Greek philosophy in the sense that his substances can be destroyed, can have different qualities at different times, are both individual and ambiguous, and therefore deserves more admiration than it usually receives in recent philosophy. So, why do you dislike substantivism so much?
