︎ Winter Open Seminars 2024 / 2025
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You can register for all the Winter Open Seminars 2024/2025 free on this link
22nd of November - 20th of December
Joel White
22nd of November 2024 | 19.00 CET/13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: On Logomachy: A Conceptual Recovery
Short description: I take logomachy to be a transduced thermoinformatic logic of sense. It is concerned with how thermodynamics, the science of energy and entropy, and information theory, the science of information, affects questions concerning the adequacy, validity, and demonstration of sense, what is sometimes called logic or philosophical semantics. The content of the course, in particular, will explore the etymological and conceptual history of the Greek word λογομᾰχῐ́ᾱ (logmachia) and its subsequent translations into Latin, French and English as Logomachiis, Logomachie and logomachy. I shall track, through the major events in the concept’s history (from Plato and Saul to Artaud via Derrida), what is at stake in logomachy’s philosophical recovery as a thermoinformatic logic or art of sense.
Daniel Sacilotto
25th of November 2024 | 21.00 CET/15.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: Materialism and Eschatology: A Genealogy of Modern Thanatropism
Short description: This seminar explores the development of eschatological narratives in modern and contemporary philosophy. Expanding on the genealogy of structural materialisms developed in Structure and Thought Toward a Materialist Theory of Representational Cognition (2024), we will interrogate how thanatropism becomes an inherent dimension of various attempts to travers the critical turn and avoid the anti-realist consequences associated with transcendental idealism. Accordingly, radicalizing the tenets of Kant’s attempt to think of the conditions of all possible experience as the limits of finite cognition, we shall examine how the eschatology forms part of an epistemological and ontological matrix that challenges the idealist or “correlationist” results of post-Kantian philosophy, in order to think of the material conditions that present a limit to life (death), and even to materiality itself as a whole (extinction).
Radek Przedpełski
3rd of December 2024 | 19.00 CET / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: THINK CRAZY! Thinking Philosophy through Esoteric Conceptualism in the Polish People's Republic
Short description: In 1975, aesthetics scholar Stefan Morawski (1921-2004) in his comparative cartography of Western and Polish conceptualism asserted that the latter is unable to articulate practices that could be called properly Conceptual. Morawski bemoaned the lack of a "genuine attempt to turn art into meta-art" in the sense of “analytical tendency” of Kosuth and Atkinson. As such, Polish neo-avant-garde cannot but fall back on a substantialist aesthetics incapable of problematic thinking.
The seminar challenges Morawski’s claim that 1970s neo-avant-garde practice in the Polish People's Republic cannot do philosophy. In fact, "the characteristic incompleteness of Polish conceptualism" diagnosed by Morawski is already a way of philosophising— deterritorializing post-totalitarian hybrid state socialism of the 1970s through articulations of an opaque, fragmented system incorporating contingency.
This fun and crazy open seminar will focus on a strand of Polish neo-avant-garde I call “Esoteric Conceptualism.” It will consist of an introduction and a series of case studies showcasing ways of doing a practical philosophy through art.
The seminar will run according to the esoteric script:
I. Powers of the False
II. Mountain of Art
III. Million Pyramids
IV. Dreaming
V. Threading
Yuval Molina Obedman
04th of December 2024 | 19.00 CET / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: Military Metaphysics: Toward a Materialist Philosophy of War
Short Description: 'Military Metaphysics: Toward a Materialist Philosophy of War' is an attempt at synthesising some of the insights of materialist philosophy in the context of warfare. As demonstrated by recent events, arguments about the obsolescence of wars in the past two decades fail to capture how war endures as a material and structural reality within the conditions of late modernity. Far from technological pessimism, this proposal shifts the focus to the transformations in the securitarian images empowering technologically enabled devastation today, departing from Bruno Latour's dictum that 'technoscience is a military affair.' This presentation, thus, considers some of the philosophical assumptions at play while suggesting future venues of research regarding the roles of 'civic' innovation; product obsolescence and anti-production; feedback loops between the imagined apocalypse and the materiality of its potential enactment; or the ways that 'war images' intersect with the material conditions of conflict, including research values and priorities, resource allocation, and labor mobilization.
Paria Rahimi
12th of December 2024 | 19.00 CET / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: Arendt’s Condition: Revisiting Her Critique of Marxian Labour
Short description: This lecture examines Hannah Arendt's seminal work, The Human Condition, with a focus on her critique of Karl Marx in the chapter "Labour." Arendt frames this chapter as her critique of Karl Marx, explicitly stating, "In the following chapter, Karl Marx will be criticized." However, I argue that her critique is not directed at Marx's nuanced conception of labour but rather the "vulgar Marxism" prevalent in her time—an epoch marked by the ideological rivalry between fascism and communism. Arendt's critique, I contend, reflects the intellectual conditions of her era more than Marx's original insights. To do justice to Marx and expose significant divergences, I draw closely on Marx's writings, bringing him into a direct dialogue. This analysis demonstrates that Arendt critiques not precisely Marx's theory of labour per se but the spirit of Marxism in her age, which often oversimplified or misrepresented Marx's thought. Ironically, as I show, Arendt's misreading of Marx parallels the very misunderstandings perpetuated by her Marxist contemporaries—the condition to which Arendt herself was conditioned.
Moises Ramirez
17th of December 2024 | 19.00 CET / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: On Impresence - Habitat of Hiatus
Short description: Proposing the argument that there may be a space/process between presence and absence: impresence. This talk will briefly go over the structure of the argument I am assembling and then focus on the articulation of impresence as being a habitat for hiatus.
Guilherme Giantini
20th of December 2024 | 19.00 EST / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: Design for the end of the anthropocene
Short Description: To interrogate design is to interrogate the human. Examining the anthropocentric affiliations between them admits a discussion on the symbolic and material emancipation of the act of designing from the act of being human as a fixed and universal measure of life. With this in mind, posthumanism may catalyse an ontological reorientation of design as a semiotic, materialistic and ethical praxis of revelation capable of, like art and other forms of expression and affection, conceiving emergent processes of ideation and materialisation that become autonomous from human exceptionalist principles, thus grasping the death drive in human apocalyptic theories. A design of and for the end of the anthropocene is to put into perspective and practice an act care for the other at the expense of the self; it is a form of activism of artistic and collective manifestation in which, from the absence of the designer’s ego or of the privilege of access to decision-making power, a transformative semiotic intensity emerges – turning away the symbolic in a dizzying chaos of senses to create and express other forms of subjectivity and relationality.
︎ Winter Open Seminars 2024 / 2025
![]()
You can register for all the Winter Open Seminars 2024/2025 free on this link
22nd of November - 20th of December
Joel White
22nd of November 2024 | 19.00 CET/13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: On Logomachy: A Conceptual Recovery
Short description: I take logomachy to be a transduced thermoinformatic logic of sense. It is concerned with how thermodynamics, the science of energy and entropy, and information theory, the science of information, affects questions concerning the adequacy, validity, and demonstration of sense, what is sometimes called logic or philosophical semantics. The content of the course, in particular, will explore the etymological and conceptual history of the Greek word λογομᾰχῐ́ᾱ (logmachia) and its subsequent translations into Latin, French and English as Logomachiis, Logomachie and logomachy. I shall track, through the major events in the concept’s history (from Plato and Saul to Artaud via Derrida), what is at stake in logomachy’s philosophical recovery as a thermoinformatic logic or art of sense.
Daniel Sacilotto
25th of November 2024 | 21.00 CET/15.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: Materialism and Eschatology: A Genealogy of Modern Thanatropism
Short description: This seminar explores the development of eschatological narratives in modern and contemporary philosophy. Expanding on the genealogy of structural materialisms developed in Structure and Thought Toward a Materialist Theory of Representational Cognition (2024), we will interrogate how thanatropism becomes an inherent dimension of various attempts to travers the critical turn and avoid the anti-realist consequences associated with transcendental idealism. Accordingly, radicalizing the tenets of Kant’s attempt to think of the conditions of all possible experience as the limits of finite cognition, we shall examine how the eschatology forms part of an epistemological and ontological matrix that challenges the idealist or “correlationist” results of post-Kantian philosophy, in order to think of the material conditions that present a limit to life (death), and even to materiality itself as a whole (extinction).
Radek Przedpełski
3rd of December 2024 | 19.00 CET / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: THINK CRAZY! Thinking Philosophy through Esoteric Conceptualism in the Polish People's Republic
Short description: In 1975, aesthetics scholar Stefan Morawski (1921-2004) in his comparative cartography of Western and Polish conceptualism asserted that the latter is unable to articulate practices that could be called properly Conceptual. Morawski bemoaned the lack of a "genuine attempt to turn art into meta-art" in the sense of “analytical tendency” of Kosuth and Atkinson. As such, Polish neo-avant-garde cannot but fall back on a substantialist aesthetics incapable of problematic thinking.
The seminar challenges Morawski’s claim that 1970s neo-avant-garde practice in the Polish People's Republic cannot do philosophy. In fact, "the characteristic incompleteness of Polish conceptualism" diagnosed by Morawski is already a way of philosophising— deterritorializing post-totalitarian hybrid state socialism of the 1970s through articulations of an opaque, fragmented system incorporating contingency.
This fun and crazy open seminar will focus on a strand of Polish neo-avant-garde I call “Esoteric Conceptualism.” It will consist of an introduction and a series of case studies showcasing ways of doing a practical philosophy through art.
The seminar will run according to the esoteric script:
I. Powers of the False
II. Mountain of Art
III. Million Pyramids
IV. Dreaming
V. Threading
Yuval Molina Obedman
04th of December 2024 | 19.00 CET / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: Military Metaphysics: Toward a Materialist Philosophy of War
Short Description: 'Military Metaphysics: Toward a Materialist Philosophy of War' is an attempt at synthesising some of the insights of materialist philosophy in the context of warfare. As demonstrated by recent events, arguments about the obsolescence of wars in the past two decades fail to capture how war endures as a material and structural reality within the conditions of late modernity. Far from technological pessimism, this proposal shifts the focus to the transformations in the securitarian images empowering technologically enabled devastation today, departing from Bruno Latour's dictum that 'technoscience is a military affair.' This presentation, thus, considers some of the philosophical assumptions at play while suggesting future venues of research regarding the roles of 'civic' innovation; product obsolescence and anti-production; feedback loops between the imagined apocalypse and the materiality of its potential enactment; or the ways that 'war images' intersect with the material conditions of conflict, including research values and priorities, resource allocation, and labor mobilization.
Paria Rahimi
12th of December 2024 | 19.00 CET / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: Arendt’s Condition: Revisiting Her Critique of Marxian Labour
Short description: This lecture examines Hannah Arendt's seminal work, The Human Condition, with a focus on her critique of Karl Marx in the chapter "Labour." Arendt frames this chapter as her critique of Karl Marx, explicitly stating, "In the following chapter, Karl Marx will be criticized." However, I argue that her critique is not directed at Marx's nuanced conception of labour but rather the "vulgar Marxism" prevalent in her time—an epoch marked by the ideological rivalry between fascism and communism. Arendt's critique, I contend, reflects the intellectual conditions of her era more than Marx's original insights. To do justice to Marx and expose significant divergences, I draw closely on Marx's writings, bringing him into a direct dialogue. This analysis demonstrates that Arendt critiques not precisely Marx's theory of labour per se but the spirit of Marxism in her age, which often oversimplified or misrepresented Marx's thought. Ironically, as I show, Arendt's misreading of Marx parallels the very misunderstandings perpetuated by her Marxist contemporaries—the condition to which Arendt herself was conditioned.
Moises Ramirez
17th of December 2024 | 19.00 CET / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: On Impresence - Habitat of Hiatus
Short description: Proposing the argument that there may be a space/process between presence and absence: impresence. This talk will briefly go over the structure of the argument I am assembling and then focus on the articulation of impresence as being a habitat for hiatus.
Guilherme Giantini
20th of December 2024 | 19.00 EST / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: Design for the end of the anthropocene
Short Description: To interrogate design is to interrogate the human. Examining the anthropocentric affiliations between them admits a discussion on the symbolic and material emancipation of the act of designing from the act of being human as a fixed and universal measure of life. With this in mind, posthumanism may catalyse an ontological reorientation of design as a semiotic, materialistic and ethical praxis of revelation capable of, like art and other forms of expression and affection, conceiving emergent processes of ideation and materialisation that become autonomous from human exceptionalist principles, thus grasping the death drive in human apocalyptic theories. A design of and for the end of the anthropocene is to put into perspective and practice an act care for the other at the expense of the self; it is a form of activism of artistic and collective manifestation in which, from the absence of the designer’s ego or of the privilege of access to decision-making power, a transformative semiotic intensity emerges – turning away the symbolic in a dizzying chaos of senses to create and express other forms of subjectivity and relationality.
You can register for all the Winter Open Seminars 2024/2025 free on this link
22nd of November - 20th of December
Joel White
22nd of November 2024 | 19.00 CET/13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: On Logomachy: A Conceptual Recovery
Short description: I take logomachy to be a transduced thermoinformatic logic of sense. It is concerned with how thermodynamics, the science of energy and entropy, and information theory, the science of information, affects questions concerning the adequacy, validity, and demonstration of sense, what is sometimes called logic or philosophical semantics. The content of the course, in particular, will explore the etymological and conceptual history of the Greek word λογομᾰχῐ́ᾱ (logmachia) and its subsequent translations into Latin, French and English as Logomachiis, Logomachie and logomachy. I shall track, through the major events in the concept’s history (from Plato and Saul to Artaud via Derrida), what is at stake in logomachy’s philosophical recovery as a thermoinformatic logic or art of sense.
Daniel Sacilotto
25th of November 2024 | 21.00 CET/15.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: Materialism and Eschatology: A Genealogy of Modern Thanatropism
Short description: This seminar explores the development of eschatological narratives in modern and contemporary philosophy. Expanding on the genealogy of structural materialisms developed in Structure and Thought Toward a Materialist Theory of Representational Cognition (2024), we will interrogate how thanatropism becomes an inherent dimension of various attempts to travers the critical turn and avoid the anti-realist consequences associated with transcendental idealism. Accordingly, radicalizing the tenets of Kant’s attempt to think of the conditions of all possible experience as the limits of finite cognition, we shall examine how the eschatology forms part of an epistemological and ontological matrix that challenges the idealist or “correlationist” results of post-Kantian philosophy, in order to think of the material conditions that present a limit to life (death), and even to materiality itself as a whole (extinction).
Radek Przedpełski
3rd of December 2024 | 19.00 CET / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: THINK CRAZY! Thinking Philosophy through Esoteric Conceptualism in the Polish People's Republic
Short description: In 1975, aesthetics scholar Stefan Morawski (1921-2004) in his comparative cartography of Western and Polish conceptualism asserted that the latter is unable to articulate practices that could be called properly Conceptual. Morawski bemoaned the lack of a "genuine attempt to turn art into meta-art" in the sense of “analytical tendency” of Kosuth and Atkinson. As such, Polish neo-avant-garde cannot but fall back on a substantialist aesthetics incapable of problematic thinking.
The seminar challenges Morawski’s claim that 1970s neo-avant-garde practice in the Polish People's Republic cannot do philosophy. In fact, "the characteristic incompleteness of Polish conceptualism" diagnosed by Morawski is already a way of philosophising— deterritorializing post-totalitarian hybrid state socialism of the 1970s through articulations of an opaque, fragmented system incorporating contingency.
This fun and crazy open seminar will focus on a strand of Polish neo-avant-garde I call “Esoteric Conceptualism.” It will consist of an introduction and a series of case studies showcasing ways of doing a practical philosophy through art.
The seminar will run according to the esoteric script:
I. Powers of the False
II. Mountain of Art
III. Million Pyramids
IV. Dreaming
V. Threading
Yuval Molina Obedman
04th of December 2024 | 19.00 CET / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: Military Metaphysics: Toward a Materialist Philosophy of War
Short Description: 'Military Metaphysics: Toward a Materialist Philosophy of War' is an attempt at synthesising some of the insights of materialist philosophy in the context of warfare. As demonstrated by recent events, arguments about the obsolescence of wars in the past two decades fail to capture how war endures as a material and structural reality within the conditions of late modernity. Far from technological pessimism, this proposal shifts the focus to the transformations in the securitarian images empowering technologically enabled devastation today, departing from Bruno Latour's dictum that 'technoscience is a military affair.' This presentation, thus, considers some of the philosophical assumptions at play while suggesting future venues of research regarding the roles of 'civic' innovation; product obsolescence and anti-production; feedback loops between the imagined apocalypse and the materiality of its potential enactment; or the ways that 'war images' intersect with the material conditions of conflict, including research values and priorities, resource allocation, and labor mobilization.
Paria Rahimi
12th of December 2024 | 19.00 CET / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: Arendt’s Condition: Revisiting Her Critique of Marxian Labour
Short description: This lecture examines Hannah Arendt's seminal work, The Human Condition, with a focus on her critique of Karl Marx in the chapter "Labour." Arendt frames this chapter as her critique of Karl Marx, explicitly stating, "In the following chapter, Karl Marx will be criticized." However, I argue that her critique is not directed at Marx's nuanced conception of labour but rather the "vulgar Marxism" prevalent in her time—an epoch marked by the ideological rivalry between fascism and communism. Arendt's critique, I contend, reflects the intellectual conditions of her era more than Marx's original insights. To do justice to Marx and expose significant divergences, I draw closely on Marx's writings, bringing him into a direct dialogue. This analysis demonstrates that Arendt critiques not precisely Marx's theory of labour per se but the spirit of Marxism in her age, which often oversimplified or misrepresented Marx's thought. Ironically, as I show, Arendt's misreading of Marx parallels the very misunderstandings perpetuated by her Marxist contemporaries—the condition to which Arendt herself was conditioned.
Moises Ramirez
17th of December 2024 | 19.00 CET / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: On Impresence - Habitat of Hiatus
Short description: Proposing the argument that there may be a space/process between presence and absence: impresence. This talk will briefly go over the structure of the argument I am assembling and then focus on the articulation of impresence as being a habitat for hiatus.
Guilherme Giantini
20th of December 2024 | 19.00 EST / 13.00 EST
(Direct link for registration here)
Title: Design for the end of the anthropocene
Short Description: To interrogate design is to interrogate the human. Examining the anthropocentric affiliations between them admits a discussion on the symbolic and material emancipation of the act of designing from the act of being human as a fixed and universal measure of life. With this in mind, posthumanism may catalyse an ontological reorientation of design as a semiotic, materialistic and ethical praxis of revelation capable of, like art and other forms of expression and affection, conceiving emergent processes of ideation and materialisation that become autonomous from human exceptionalist principles, thus grasping the death drive in human apocalyptic theories. A design of and for the end of the anthropocene is to put into perspective and practice an act care for the other at the expense of the self; it is a form of activism of artistic and collective manifestation in which, from the absence of the designer’s ego or of the privilege of access to decision-making power, a transformative semiotic intensity emerges – turning away the symbolic in a dizzying chaos of senses to create and express other forms of subjectivity and relationality.