︎  Call for Applications
Informal Intensive Study Courses:
Integrated Credit Program, Fall Semester of 2026

The courses offered for the Fall 2026 ICP (Integrated Certificate Program) are diverse and the totality of the program may seem heterogeneous. In some sense, it is heterogeneous yet again there is a connecting line of inquiry in and much of epistemic proximity among all of the proposes courses. All the courses test the possibilities and the limits of epistemic realism be it with Laruellean, Marxist, Bergsonian, Kantian, Simondonian or other means. The boundaries between “Nature” and “Technology” (or Artifice as a more generic term) become porous. We move from “leftism” to Marxist imagining of the political horizon. However, the Marxian method does not exclude the role religion could play in this process. Art, Science and Religion stand together with Philosophy running through as a thread prefixed by a “non-“, or an “anti-“ or a “post-,“ or holding no prefix whatsoever. The proposed courses and thinkers teaching them have stepped beyond the boundaries set by the epistemic paradigm of poststructuralism; they are on the other side of the post-90s “critique” or “theory”; we do not resort to these two terms to replace the more “loaded” terms of “philosophy” and “science” and the concept of techne (of art, artifice, language and logical argument).

Anna Greenspan
“The Nature of Artifice” 
Weeks of October 12 - to November 2 - Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday (earlier start than the usual which is 18.00 CET)

Artificial Intelligence, we are now increasingly told, is not built, but grown. Emergent properties are not intentionally encoded or even fully comprehensible. Creating AI models has become more like tending to a garden than programming a machine.

The Nature of Artifice explores the ideas and practices of gardening, with their long intellectual histories, cultural variation, and aesthetic depth as a way to develop a philosophy of the artificial. We examine seven key sites in the history of the garden arts: Paradise gardens; Italian Mannerist and Baroque gardens; Jiangnan scholar gardens; the English Picturesque; Botanical gardens; Japanese Zen gardens; and the urban gardens of today. Each exemplifies an aesthetic tradition which shares in the common project of mimesis. Inside the garden walls is a representation, mirroring, miniaturisation, simulation, or encapsulation of a “Nature” that lies beyond its walls. Taken together, these great moments in the garden arts offer vital insights for reconceptualizing contemporary technologies of simulation: whether virtual reality, artificial life, robotics or AI

John Ó Maoilearca
“What is Living and What is Dead in Contemporary Thought: Quasi-Realism, Philosophical Hallucinations, and the “Self-Existing Image”
(November 2026, every Monday)

1. In Matter and Memory (1896), Bergson writes that ‘matter, in our view, is an aggregate of “images”. And by "image" we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing - an existence placed halfway between the “thing” and the “representation”.’ What is this ‘more’ and ‘less’? What does this ‘halfway’ house entail? Many thinkers have tried to address the ‘in-between’ through philosophical positions (phenomenological, ontological, and epistemological), but perhaps the time is now right to look at it again through a non-standard posture, a practice of pathological invocation and temporal restoration, preposterous scales and ‘reverse mutations’.

2. What does a picture want? What level of fabulation is operative when we say that a picture can have a ‘want’, a ‘desire’, a final causality of its own? Beyond being a formal idea (in its maker – a ‘representation’) or a material object in itself (a ‘thing’), can the physical image/picture have its own final idea as ‘self-existing image’ without the added weight of sentience or intentionality? Not an anthropomorphic idea or thing, but an existence between idea and thing, a halfway existence. This might also be what Laruelle called an ‘in-person’, a form of non-philosophical existence that can be seen as a living, quasi-real, an ‘as-if’ life and ‘as-if’ real. Yet, these ‘as-ifs’ or ‘imaginary solutions’ will not be offered as second-best answers, but as genuine alternatives formed out of performative practices that invoke new forms of philosophical being, space, and time.

3. What if there was a covariance to be found between the transitions and ‘intransitions’ amongst physical levels of the real and various aporia concerning inter-theoretical reduction? Theories, understanding themselves as material, might then give us some insight into the physical ‘impasses’ existing between physical domains. And given the scalability of a problem understood in this way as material, we could then select one level to think of it supernormally as a model for thinking (about) physus as part (of the) real. For instance, the temporal repair of a 2.5 tonne car. This seemingly preposterous model would also be a reverse mutation (‘pre-post-erous’), a type of temporal interference that scrambles the thresholds of perception (or ‘structures of regard’) and confuses the levels of the real.

4. The defragmentation of the self can be seen as both a repair of self (its desolated parts/moments), and as a reparation or justice between vying structures of regard. In one’s own (contained but still multiple) ‘self’, repair qua defragmentation is not of a thing (through either nostalgic representation or actual time-travel), but of processes, of movements: a restoration or invocation of ‘constructive interference’ between types of movements (‘moments’) in one’s ‘life’ that have scattered or been destructively interfered with to the point of losing their ‘resonance’, their ‘communication’. There is a ‘decoupling, a ‘loss of synchronization’ or ‘phase detuning’ – a decoherence of sorts that one can only endeavour to repair (a perfect reversal is impossible): it is a form of piggybacking on other movements so that one’s own part-movements can re-communicate. A re-structuring of regard of what is real and what is only a hallucination, of what is alive and what is not, at all levels or scales, be they ‘above’ us or ‘below’.

Alberto Toscano 
"Relations of Destruction: War, Capital, and Fascism in French Philosophy after 1968"
(every Tuesday, November 2026)

From the late 1960s to the 1980s, French philosophy, responding to turbulence in the world-system and radical mutations in political formations and ideologies, undertook a wide-ranging problematization of three interlocking phenomena – warmaking, accumulation and the politics of domination. This course will return to texts by Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Virilio and others to reconstruct these conceptual developments and test their capacity to illuminate the present.

Anna K Winters
"Epochs of the Epoché: Reading the History of “Bracketing” with Marion & Laruelle
(November 2026, Wednesdays)

Heidegger argued that the history of philosophy was the history of metaphysics, itself destined to be destroyed. But is there a subterranean tendency in the history of philosophy towards a nonmetaphysical form of thought: the epoché, or the bracketing of the world, already the suspension of the sufficiency of metaphysics? Reading selects antique, medieval, and modern texts alongside the work of Jean-Luc Marion and François Laruelle, this subterranean tendency will be made to emerge in its sceptical, biblical, and scientific guises alike. The supposed obsolescence of metaphysics can thus be put into perspective from a standpoint at once “smaller” and “bigger”: that of the refusal of the adequacy of the order of the world to speak to the person, whether human or divine. The question of “philosophical modernity” will then be posed anew in terms of the paradoxical non-authority of the suspension of authority over its sufficiency to itself (Laruelle), viewed through the historical mediation of this procedure through the religious act of confession as a form of the epoché (Marion).

Cecile Malaspina
"Element, Individual, Ensemble, Network: A Simondonian Glossary for Our times”
(December 14th and 18th 2026 and January 4th and 8th, subject to possible revision)

This seminar is organized as a concentrated close reading dedicated to mapping the internal architectural vocabulary of Gilbert Simondon. Structured strictly around the conceptual trajectory of its title, the course functions as a patient, almost hermeneutic interrogation of how technical reality constitutes itself across shifting scales of reality: from the isolated element to the autonomous individual, and ultimately to the collective ensemble and regional network.

The seminar demonstrates how Simondon’s two foundational works inherently dovetail to support this lexicon. By reading On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (trans. Malaspina and Rogove) alongside key selections from Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (trans. Adkins), participants will trace how the general laws of ontogenesis—the very process of coming-into-being. The scope remains rigorously bound to textual archaeology. Through this micro-analytical focus, the course aims to reconstruct a glossary for our time, allowing participants to grasp Simondon’s concepts not as abstract categories, but as an operational framework capable of articulating the present structural conditions. (the blurb is provided by the Organizer, as a placeholder for the syllabus to be made available in September)


Katarina Kolozova
"Parallel Readings of Kant and Hegel:
Through the Prism of Marx and Machinic Materialism"
(January 2027, hybrid at Berlin Museum des Kapitalismus)

This course reads Hegel’s opening move in the Science of Logic as far more consequential than the usual formula of dialectical development suggests. It treats him as claiming not merely that being and nothing pass into one another, but that pure being and pure nothing are indistinguishable at the level of abstraction, and that becoming is then presented as the truth of this indistinction. It asks whether this move genuinely preserves difference, beginning, and plurality, or whether it neutralizes them from the start. On this reading, Hegel appears as a transformed or “perverted” Eleatic: although he speaks in the name of movement and becoming, he secures them only by subordinating distinctness to an underlying identity.

Against Kant, the course argues that Hegel tries to overcome the critical separation between pure thought and determinate existence. It examines whether Hegel’s entire project is an attempt to refute Kant while in fact sidestepping the Kantian point: Kant keeps contradiction tied to the limits and operations of reason, whereas Hegel transfers contradiction into being itself. In this sense, it shows Hegel as effectively reversing the Copernican revolution by objectifying what Kant had treated critically.

Marx engages with the question of change and transformation in his doctoral dissertation on the atomists and the Epicureans more closely: philosophy’s paralysis in thinking change and transformation can be resolved—and perhaps an exit from philosophy into a science (of the species-being of humanity) achieved—only by transcending this Eleatic submission of the material to logic and abstraction. Certainly, as Sohn-Rethel later demonstrated, thought must operate with abstractions, but those operations are submitted to the “unruly” and imperfect real of the material universe. This position, read in conjunction with Sohn-Rethel, is epistemically closer to Kant, we will argue, than to Hegel. Dialectics remains a method in Marx, not an ontology. This lens, supplemented with Laruelle’s machinic materialism, will be applied to what will be a close reading of Marx and Kant.

Jason Andrey Bonnila 
“Foundations for an Insurgency of Extinctive Communism: Noise, Speculative Realism, and Blaccelerationism”
(Mid-October to Mid-November 2026, Saturdays)

“Noise without meaning or end is revolutionary insofar as it
supports nothing and no one.”
— Mattin, Thesis V on Noise
“From Caracas to Tehran the message to the Global South is
the same: submit or be destroyed”.
— International Anti-Imperialist Conference


Slavoj Žižek's critical commentary on Ray Brassier's upcoming book Fatelessness: Freedom and Fatality After Marx begins with a strategic alliance between pessimism and communism: "Today's communist has to accept the immanent despair of the human condition and propose communism as a strategy to cope with it." Žižek rejects the implicit humanist optimism of the standard Left, which assumes that human beings possess an essential potential for solidarity and cooperation allegedly frustrated by capitalist alienation. Without naturalizing evil in the opposite direction — itself a capitalist projection retrojected onto human nature — he urges abandoning the notion of a frustrated creative essence awaiting emancipation: the critique of capitalism cannot rest on restoring an authentic humanity, since no pre-alienated subject exists to be recovered. Neither Max Stirner's figure of a "utilitarian egotist" nor Richard Rorty's figure of a "liberal ironist" is able to abolish the mediation between the current ontological state and temporal ontic things. Against both the epistemological myth of the social given and the liberal myth of the sovereign subject, the course traces back to the sources for an understanding of a new figure named the extinctive communist, found in what Mario Aguiriano, reviewing Mattin's Social Dissonance, calls "Brasserian Marxism." In this horizon of subsumption and real abstraction, experience is socially (Marx) and conceptually (Sellars) mediated.

The understanding of this figure requires a pedagogical analysis of the concept of noise. The Uruguayan composer and philosopher Reynaldo Young, articulating Alain Badiou with Paulo Freire, conceives education in noise not as the transmission of knowledge but as a praxial accompaniment that stands alongside those who declare an event the status quo holds to be impossible, like the emancipation. Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed is thereby reinscribed within the Badiouan truth procedure, traversed by the undecidable, the indiscernible, the generic, and the unnameable. Consequently, we want to explore the scope of this philosophical militancy in both metaphysics (via a discussion of contingency and semiotics in Meillassoux and JLIAT) and politics (via a pragmatical exploration of Afropessimism).

Christine Wertheim 
"Sexual Difference as Construtural"
“Rethinking Sexual Difference as CON-structural rather than merely Structural”
(February 2027)

Arguing that there is not one Patriarchy, but many, this course focuses on the specifically Occidental form, whose unique conceptual and technical perspective is tied to a particular mode of gender organization. The course postulates that exploring links between Western culture’s ideas, practices of sexuation, and technology, reveals that key concepts in its philosophy and psychoanalysis are not ideologically neutral, but deeply inflected by their material context in Occidental patriarchy.

We begin with two scriptural foundations of this culture in ancient Greece: Parmenides’s conceptions of Being and nøn-being which establishes Western philosophy, and The Oresteia, Aeschylus’s dramatic trilogy, in which the birth of democracy is linked to the institution of a patriarchal social order. A third technical myth of Hephaestus, the god who invented automatons will also be discussed. We then explore a range of praxes that highlight links between the conceptual, psychosexual and technical, in order to see what might need revision: 1)- ideas about space and voids, 2)- notions of matter and form, 3)- various formulations of logical structure, 4)- relations between bOdies and signifiers, 5)- theories of gender and sexuation, 6)- desire for the elimination of bOdies in favor or pure (|n)-Form-ation, and 7)- the perpetuation of all these in contemporary digital technology.

Methodology – The course assumes a perspective in which structures of phenomena – physical, psychological and Sensical – are seen as becoming-knowable through observation and the use of formal notations, which may themselves be amended through observation and interaction. Notations discussed include graphical scripts where iconicity is valued as much as symbolism. The POV may thus be described as a structural-materialism. However, the focal ‘structure’ is not that of Saussure, with its binary notion of difference. Nor is it some extension of this into a quasi-triadic (post-structural) defer-ancé. Rather, our base is a complex CON-structure employing two principles, neither of which may be reduced to the negation of the other. This CON-structural approach is based on Peircean rather than Saussurean semiotics, especially Peirce’s Existential Graph notation for deductive logic, in which a spatial complex comprises as real a component of the meaning system as any signifier. From this notion of logical structure, different to the one used in Lacan’s sexuation formulas, we develop a CON-structivist view of sexual difference that highlights the patriarchal assumptions and limitations built into many current theories of sexuation.

Further Information About the ICP
Deadline for Applying: July 30th, 2026 (21.00 CET)
Selection process and information on your status of enrolment: August 10th, 2026.

Enrolment is confirmed once the participation fee has been paid following successful selection by the committee of instructors. SMR is a self-sustaining platform and therefore depends on participation fees. We aim to keep fees as affordable as possible and can provide letters of support to help you apply for grants from your university or other funding institutions. Payment deadline: September 10th, 2026.

Requirements:

Graduate level preparation for courses. Applicants do not necessarily need to have the formal level of education that is equivalent to second and third cycle university study programs, it suffices if they can self-assess they can follow the courses. Graduate level is second and third cycle as per the European Higher Education Area (Bologna Signatory Countries in Europe that issue ECTS credits, which include all of our European HEI partners at SMR) and as in North America. Integrated Credit Program is an intensive program of informal education co-organized by ISSHS (EHEA/ECTS institution) and Arizona State University-CPT, in the frameworks of SMR, and our Estonian partner charged with organizational responsibilities. The selection of participants (students) is carried out by the academic institutions running the program.

The motivation statement embedded in the application form and the short bio should suffice to assess ability to follow the course. When you are applying for a given semester, there is an application form in which you can fill out all relevant information. The link to the form is at the bottom of this page.

Credits and Certificates:

About the ECTS certificates

Credits, depending on the number of courses and individual work put in, can vary from 1 ECTS to 3 ECTS credits. The certificates are issued by one of the European Higher Education Area member institutions of SMR, participating in the Erasmus+ program as full members holders of a valid Erasmus Charter of European Quality in Higher Education (ECHE). It is co-signed by our co-director who represents one of the founding institutions, Arizona State University – Centre for Philosophical Technologies. Note: ISSHS, just as the other founding SMR institutions from Europe—CIL- Design Academy Eindhoven and ATTP-Technical University of Vienna—is a holder of an Erasmus Charter of Excellence in European Higher Education Institutions 2021-2027, ISSHS has been accorded 97 out of maximum 100 points of the independent Erasmus ranking agency, which describes it as one the "best places to study in Europe." Arizona State University is a top US institution in the area of research innovation across a vast array of fields: in 2024 ASU is ranked nr. 1 in the US for global impact, innovativeness, and multidisciplinary research. ASU ranks alongside MIT, University of California-Berkeley, Georgia Tech and Purdue University and ahead of Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton among the top 5 universities in the US in several other categories https://www.asu.edu/about/rankings/ranked-number-one.

Participation fees:

SMR is a self-sustaining initiative with modest infrastructural support from its founding institutions. To maintain its independence from the founding institutions themselves and from major donor and grant programs it sustains itself through funds collected through participation fees. Our aim is to constantly reduce prices, increase the number of participants, diversify forms of participation and, through different forms of affiliation, expand and reinvent its concept of ownership. In the meantime, we suggest you apply for scholarships at your home institutions for which we can provide a support letter. If you have to pay from your own pocket we offer instalments if that helps (depending on the price as sometimes the transfer fees can be higher than the discount itself). Finally, those who will enroll in the ICP Spring 2026 courses qualify for a discount in the range of 15 to 30 percent for one of our summer schools organized in Greece (with an online component)

One course: 180 euro
Discount for combined multiple courses:
A package of 2 courses: 290 euro for up to 1.5 ECTS.
A package of 3 courses: 370 euro for up to 2 ECTS
A package of 4 courses: 400 for up to 3 ECTS.
Above 4 courses: 450 for up to 4 ECTS certificates.

The participants ICP Fall 2026 qualify for discounts for their participation to our Summer Institute 2027 in Greece which will be determined based on committed activity and number of ECTS points earned. Economic disadvantage is another criterion.

ECTS credits, as per the European Higher Education Area, and EAR can be awarded for informal studies. This is how one (1) credit is calculated as per the Lisbon and Bologna principles and guidelines for ECTS:

One credit equals 25 work hours, and those hours include the participants' individual work and preparation, their work between sessions and qualitative assessment of their engagement and contribution during the interactive parts of the session. Attendance is also important in addition to active participation and initiative.

How to Apply:
Interested applicants can find the link of the full application form at the very bottom of this page. All application forms must be filled out in full and sent in by the above stated set deadline to be considered valid. If you have any inquiries, please, send them to the following email address and responsible person: Dr. Filippo Scaffi at schoolofmaterialistresearch@gmail.com

Payment:
Payment instructions will be sent to all successful applicants at the same time they receive their acceptance letters. If anyone has difficulties to make the first payment which is necessary to officialise the enrolment, please contact us directly, and we will do our best to make sure we work it out together. If you wish to pay on instalment plan, please be sure to check the relevant box in the application form.

About SMR:
The School of Materialist Research is an international platform, founded by the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University, the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje, the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics at TU Vienna, which, in cooperation with the Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy Eindhoven, functions as a global online school combining education, research, and mentorship to advance academic study at the intersection of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) and the STEM sciences.


Application form