Events

What does it mean to lead a free life? The most influential answer proposed by modern philosophy is the idea of autonomy. To lead a free life is to lead your life according to laws you have given to yourself. However, this conception of freedom seems to be in crisis. The most general worry is […]

This conference seeks to offer a re-evaluation of a singular text — Wittgenstein’s 1929 “Lecture on Ethics” — and of its enduring influence within post-Wittgensteinian approaches to Ethics. The Lecture on Ethics was a unique event in Wittgenstein’s life and remains a singular text in his Nachlass. Contrary to his habitual mode of teaching, Wittgenstein […]

One of the distinctive Kantian doctrines is that human reason has an interest to possess ultimate explanations that make everything intelligible according to principles. When uninhibited by a critique of reason these interests yield the illusory pretensions to attain theoretical knowledge about the transcendental ideas of reason, such as God, the world-whole, the soul and […]

Thomas Khurana – Absoluter Idealismus der Rezeption: Eine Einleitung Lara Ostaric – Spontaneity, Receptivity in Schelling’s, Schopenhauer’s Conception of Creative Agency Alexey Weißmüller: „Das absolut-Concrete, die Nacht des Selbst“ Bemerkungen zu Hegel und dem Schacht Birgit Sandkaulen – Die absolute Reflexion und ihre Kritik in drei Modellen Christoph Menke und David Wellbery – Ästhetischer Idealismus […]

The idea of the conference is to bring together scholars who can shed light on the philosophy of nature in the epoch between  XVIII and XIX century Germany, which saw classical German philosophy, romantic Naturphilosophie as well as natural sciences all embarking upon the exploration of natural phenomena. All these philosophical movements and individual thinkers […]

If it is true that the mind is a socially distributed power, then the form of the mind seems to depend essentially on the structure of our social interaction. Against this background, the question arises as to what social structure characterizes the computing machines that increasingly determine our social life and behaviour. This question can […]

Thinking, Socrates once taught, is “the mind’s conversation with itself”, addressing these words to a pupil in the midst of conversation. In one of Cavell’s takes on this scene, he describes the teaching of later Wittgenstein, one of his own foremost mentors, as a continuous re-staging of the lesson that “philosophy does not speak first”. […]

With Sabina Bremner, Anton Ford, Eli Friedlander, Matthias Haase, Alec Hinshelwood, Thomas Khurana, Karen Ng, Christoph Schuringa, Michael Thompson, Lea Ypi and others.

Recently, there has been increasing interest in the relation between epistemic injustice and the concept of recognition. The main idea is that practices of silencing and epistemic exclusion have consequences that go well beyond the epistemic dimension and that influence our social practices of giving respect, esteem, and love. The conference is part of the […]

In recent years, there has been a wave of thoughtful and considered critical responses to scientific naturalism and more ‘liberal’ varieties of naturalism. However, the multitude of such possible avenues to tackle the issue of naturalism and the breadth of human life – as opposed to more ‘technical’ matters – appears to lack unity. This conference, therefore, aims is to bring together researchers from a number of these various camps, whose ultimate interests in the topic are geared towards critically reflecting on the deeper significance of the naturalism debate for human life itself.

THE POLITICS OF BEGINNINGS At a moment when many suggest that the end of an era has been reached, and when struggles against climate change, exploitation, neocolonialism, patriarchy, and racism proliferate, what role can Arendt’s account of political beginnings play in the conceptualization of a new time? Arendt has been celebrated as a key theorist […]

With Moran Godess-Riccitelli, Johannes Haag, Naveh Frumer, Benjamin Pollock, Thomas Khurana, Paul Franks, Gilad Nir, James Conant

This international conference will articulate the “Anthropocene” as a philosophical problem. It will determine the extent to which the current crisis challenges our philosophical self-conception and offer avenues for overcoming the this self-conception. More importantly, it aims to develop conceptions of a new politics of nature. With Andreas Malm, Christoph Menke, Rupert Read, Oxana Timofeeva, Slavoj Žižek, and others.

Hardly any thought is as defining for Kantian and post-Kantian thought as the idea of the unity of freedom and law. At crucial points, however, this very same tradition argues for the counter-idea: that the reality of autonomy in the human being requires a freedom from and against the law. What is the relation between these two ideas and how can they be reconciled? With Brady Bowman, Peter Dews, Michelle Kosch, Andrews Reath, Francey Russell, and others.