THE POETIC EMERGENCE OF THE HYPOTHESIS OF AN INNER HISTORY (English)

The Chinese contemporary poet (and one of the Menglong/Misty poets) Meng Lang wrote:
 “Poets hover within the blind spots of history. Someone with a historical point of view cannot see these sites. The existence of the blind spots of history has only be discovered by humanity in the 20th century. These sites have been discovered by the poets.[…] Poets are worried ‘from the inside’ and that’s how it should be.”

What are these “blind spots of history”? Why do they escape to anyone having a “historical” point of view? Why have these blind spots been only discovered in the 20th century? And by poets? Which poets, and what peculiar link do they have to history? Why poets may be said “worried from the inside”? What does this assertion allude to? Why should we conclude that it must be so, that it is even excellent that it be so. And finally what are the new crucial ideas about history, interiority and exteriority emerging from taking seriously Meng Lang’s thesis.

These are the questions I would like to discuss with Alessandro De Francesco, an Italian contemporary poet and friend of mine.

About Judith Balso:

“In this moment, first I read poets, I learn from poets. Poems constitute an immense reservoir for thinking, which has hardly been truly explored. My constant companions: Pessoa, Mandelstam, Pasolini, Dante, Stevens, Rimbaud, Leopardi, Aygi and, more recently Hölderlin. My next book: reading Hölderlin without Heidegger. Second, at the « Ecole des Actes » (founded in 2016 by the Théâtre de la Commune in Aubervilliers), I teach, and learn with, people coming from the whole world, those called «migrants »,
in fact just people living now among us.”

About Alessandro de Francesco:

Alessandro de Francesco (PhD, University of Paris-Sorbonne) is a poet, artist and essayist. He has been teaching at the European Graduate School, the École Normale Supérieure, the Sorbonne, the Bern University of the Arts, and elsewhere. His work was presented at: STEIM, Kelly Writers House at U-Penn, CUNY, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Centre Pompidou, MAMCS in Strasbourg, Kunsthalle Basel, etc. Among his recent books: Continuum. Writings on Poetry as Artistic Practice (Uitgeverij, 2015) and Remote Vision. Poetry 1999-2015 (Punctum Books, 2016). Upcoming projects: Gherdeina Biennial, Italy (opening June 23rd 2018). Website: www.alessandrodefrancesco.net

WHAT’S SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE IS SAUCE FOR THE GANDER: THE ART OF LIVING IN MEDIEVAL MUSLIM ASCETICISM, SUFISM, AND LATE ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHY (English)

“Live in such a way so that when you die, people will cry for you.” Moral aphorisms of this sort, demarcating the art of living, are found plenty in medieval Muslim literature, particularly in wisdom compendiums and philosophical treatises. That theoretical and practical commitment to philosophical religion is the most apposite mode of living is well attested in Islamic studies and Arabic philosophy. The trajectories of righteous living were well known to Muslims of medieval times, as they are today. Central to good living was the art of cultivating piety and nurturing the soul. The most famous advocates of this ascetic modus vivendi were Muslims who belong to the Sufi tradition.

The comparison between Sufism and late Ancient philosophy,  particularly the type that developed in Alexandria in the 5th to 6th centuries AD, requires urgent attention. We’re at a time when, rightly or wrongly, the concept of ‘western civilisation’ is being re-imagined, re-conceptualised, and revised for the purposes of excluding and maligning non-Western thought and philosophies.

This presentation will address the pertinent topic of the art of living in medieval Muslim societies as well as highlighting the parallels between the prototypical modes of living in ancient ‘Western’ civilisations and those in Muslim societies. It was be shown that medieval Muslim thinkers were among the first to realise and enact the ‘Western’ ideal of living, long before the emergence of ‘modern’ Europe.

BINNEN EN BUITEN TAAL EN LOGICA: CARNAP VS. KRIPKE (Nederlands)

Waarover gaan we op dit nachtelijk uur nadenken? Rudolf Carnap, de grote logisch-positivist leerde van Ludwig Wittgenstein in Wenen (ergens rond 1930) dat je een onderscheid kunt maken tussen interne vragen en externe vragen. Interne vragen stel je binnen een systeem of denkkader, externe vragen gaan over het systeem. Externe vragen waren volgens Rudolf Carnap onzinnig, tenzij ze van louter pragmatische aard waren. ‘Waarom hebben we getallen nodig?’ was een heldere vraag, ‘Bestaan er getallen?’ was dat niet.  Ik behandel een vraag die de logicus Saul Kripke (ongetwijfeld de beste taalfilosoof van de twintigste eeuw) ooit gesteld heeft: kunnen we de vraag stellen waarom we logica nodig hebben? Is dit een zinvolle externe vraag? Ik zal laten zien dat het antwoord daarop negatief is. We kunnen logica (en bij uitbreiding rationaliteit) niet in vraag stellen. Als u deze lezing begrijpt, maakt u kennis met een eenvoudig transcendentaal argument dat u voor de rest van uw leven zult onthouden.

Over Filip Buekens:

Filip Buekens doceert analytische filosofie en logica aan de universiteit van Leuven en Tilburg University. Hij heeft belangstelling voor kritisch denken, het speuren naar onzin in de filosofie, en doet nu onderzoek naar de speltheoretische achtergronden van meningsverschillen. U kunt dus met gerust hart en geheven hoofd met hem van mening verschillen.

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE – ON THE (SOCIAL) EPISTEMOLOGY OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES (English)

Conspiracy theories seem to be on the rise and also seem to play an increasing role in public political discourse. This development is problematic for a variety of reasons, most importantly because widespread belief in conspiracy theories will undermine central institutions of open societies. One of the central questions that will need to be answered here if we hope to find out why conspirational thought is recently gaining such support and to find out how to respond to it, is the following: what mindset leads to the belief in conspiracy theories? In this talk I want to explain how philosophy, and epistemology in particular is essential for understanding the phenomenon and for developing a strategy to deal with the harmful kind of conspirational thought.

About Daniel Cohnitz:

Daniel Cohnitz (born in 1974) holds the chair for theoretical philosophy at Utrecht University. Cohnitz studied philosophy, German literature and language, and history at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. In 2005 he defended his dissertation on Thought Experiments in Philosophy (Gedankenexperimente in der Philosophie) at Düsseldorf. His research interests include metaphilosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, language, mathematics, and logic, and related areas of philosophy and cognitive science. Daniel Cohnitz is also president of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy.

Critical Studies Sandberg x DRIFT: The Politics of Turning

“Depending on which way one turns, different worlds might come into view”, Sara Ahmed writes. In this event, students of the Critical Studies department of the Sandberg Instituut will explore the politics of turning. How does turning open up new horizons – and what is the loss involved in every turn? Where do we turn towards? These questions will provide a starting point for five different performative responses, which will consider the act of turning as central to the shaping of subjects but also the imagination of resistance through the production of new epistemologies.

Contributors: Callum Copley, Silke Xenia Juul, Nemo Koning, Asja Novak, Filippo Tocchi

The Critical Studies department of the Sandberg Instituut brings together students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds around a common interest in politics and critical theory.

“I CANNOT DOUBT THAT WHAT YOU ARE DOING IS WRONG!” – MORAL CERTAINTY AND CROSS-CULTURAL MORAL DIALOGUE (English)

The ability to participate in moral practices presupposes what I call “moral certainty”. By “moral certainty” I do not mean the conviction that one’s own moral views are infallible, but the certainty with which morally competent agents act. This conception of moral certainty is inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. People who have developed a certain level of moral competence cannot reasonably doubt the moral rightness or wrongness of certain actions, institutions and practices. Moral certainty is thus in part the result of moral education. What does this mean for the possibility of resolving moral disagreements between people who have been socialised in very different social and cultural contexts? Do such disagreements reflect radically different moral certainties? I argue that the existence of moral certainty does not hinder cross-cultural moral dialogue, and that my view of moral certainty does not commit me to moral relativism.

About Julia Hermann:

Julia Hermann is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Philosophy and Religious studies at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She is a member of the research programme “Evolutionary Ethics? The (Meta)-Ethical Implications of Evolutionary Explanations of Morality”, funded by the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO). She holds a PhD from the European University Institute. Prior to joining Utrecht University, Julia was lecturer in social philosophy at Maastricht University. In 2015, her book On Moral Certainty, Justification and Practice. A Wittgensteinian Perspective was published by Palgrave Macmillan. Other recent publications include “Possibilities of Moral Progress in the Face of Evolution” and “Sinnott-Armstrong’s Empirical Challenge to Moral Intuitionism: A Novel Critique” (both Ethical Theory and Moral Practice). Julia is an author of the blog “Justice Everywhere”.

LOVING AND KNOWING: LETTING BE WITHOUT LETTING GO (English)

Playing on the festival’s theme of “buitenstebinnen” or “outside-in”, I will invite the audience to think together with me about the question “what is it to know something?” Cognitive science and philosophy of mind like to portray knowing as something that doesn’t require much involvement of the heart. But I will explore the idea that knowing is, in a particular sense, loving, and that loving is, in a particular sense, knowing. Loving and knowing share the same fundamental tension of letting something be, without letting it go. Using everyday examples, I will explore how this tension animates our lives, never letting us go, and bringing the outside in and the inside out, in a continual, inescapable, wonderful and exasperating dialectic.

About Hanne De Jaegher:

Hanne De Jaegher, philosopher of mind and cognitive science, is fascinated by how we think, work and play (basically live and love) together. For studying our rich social lives, she ongoingly develops the enactive theory of intersubjectivity called participatory sense-making. Its concepts and empirical methods find application in autism research, therapeutic practices, education research, ethics, psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience. With Ezequiel Di Paolo and Elena Cuffari, she wrote Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language (MIT Press, October 2018). Her doctorate is from the University of Sussex (2007), she has held various Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowships, and is currently Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at the IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind and Society, University of the Basque Country, San Sebastián.

INTERIOR INTIMO MEO ET SUPERIOR SUMMO MEO (English)

The body is only outside: exposed skin, network of sensitive receivers and transmitters. All on the outside and nothing like an “I” that would stand wrapped up inside. No ghost in the machine, nothing, the point without dimensions where “I” feel and feel myself feeling. The inside of the wrapping is still nothing but another outside, unwrapped differently, all in folds, reversion, convolution and adherences, all invaginations, heaps and conglomerations. (…)

That which comes out and that which enters, shit or thought, speech or saliva, excitement, excoriation, all go together with an outside the other, constant muttering and moving of the same whole which is in itself entirely outside of me. I remain the intimate zero point of a mind nowhere located in this entanglement that is blurred with pulps, tissues and fluids and that gives rise to this soul that we should conceive of as spread out all along the vessels and the integuments, knotted in lymph nodes and soaked with plasma.

About Jean-Luc Nancy: 

Je travaille au dedans et au dehors. En sortant et en entrant.  Par toutes les issues ou les accès que je rencontre. Comme je peux. Mais sans cesse.

Due to railway strikes in France, Jean-Luc Nancy will not be able to attend the festival in person. The lecture will take place through skype. 

OUTSIDENESS AND THE RIGHT (English)

Right-wing, fascist and alt-right thinkers believe themselves to be occupying the position of the ‘Outside’. Unlike the mid-twentieth century interest in the absurd, alienation and other existential themes, this current crop of thinkers, among whom, Nick Land, attempt to imagine a site beyond the supposed liberal hegemony of the ‘Cathedral’. This talk will attempt to analyse the political foundations of this position and locate it within various strands of contemporary nihilism. Against the image of the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ will be posited a ‘negative internationalism’ that seeks to abolish both capitalism and borders.  

About Nina Power:

Nina Power is a cultural critic, social theorist and a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton, London. She is the author of One Dimensional Woman and has written widely on feminism, activism, and structures of labour and care. Her work has been published in magazines and newspapers like The Wire, frieze and The Guardian.

BUITEN ZICHZELF, OF: HOE EEN ZIEL VAN ZICHZELF KAN WORDEN BEVRIJD (Nederlands)

Een lezing over de ziel, die het meest innerlijk van alles lijkt te zijn. Toch kan diezelfde ziel buiten zichzelf geraken in de toestanden van  verliefdheid of extase. Misschien kan de ziel alleen maar toegang krijgen tot haar ‘binnen’ als ze ook is aangesloten op iets dat compleet anders is. Dit inzicht is al te vinden bij Plato. Het lijkt een paradox: binnen is pas echt binnen als het in contact staat met ‘buiten’.  Wat is dat ‘buiten’, wat is de realiteit ervan en hoe kunnen we er contact mee maken?

In deze lezing werk ik een visie uit op het binnenstebuiten gekeerde subject.  Ik laat me inspireren door Kierkegaard die schreef over Abraham als een religieuze held met communicatieproblemen. En door  Levinas’ visie op het subject als plaatsvervanging: voor-de-ander bestaan, als een bevrijding van de ziel van zichzelf.

Over Renée van Riessen:

Renée van Riessen is filosoof en dichter. Ze doceert godsdienstfilosofie in Groningen (PThU) en christelijke filosofie aan de Universiteit Leiden. Ze is auteur van (o.a.) De ziel opnieuw. Over innerlijkheid, inspiratie en onderwijs (Sjibbolet, Amsterdam 2013). In 2018 verschijnt haar boek over Levinas’ theorie van de bevrijding:  Van zichzelf bevrijd. Levinas over het raadsel van de nabijheid (eveneens bij Uitgeverij Sjibbolet)   

WAT MAAKT MIJN ERVARINGEN ‘VAN MIJ’? (Nederlands)

Ieder bewust proces in mijn hoofd is op een diepe manier ‘van mij’—alleen ik denk mijn gedachten en ervaar mijn ervaringen. Maar wie of wat is dat ‘ik’? Hoe kan het dat die altijd dezelfde is? En hoe kunnen we dat eigenlijk weten? Om deze onbeantwoordbare vragen te vermijden wil ik voorstellen om het ‘van mij’ karakter van onze ervaringen niet in termen van een ‘ik’ te begrijpen: een waarneming of gedachte is ‘van mij’ als deze ‘logisch’ volgt op eerdere waarnemingen/gedachten en past tussen de andere ervaringen; d.w.z. als het een onderdeel is van een ‘belichaamde biografie’. Hedendaagse neurowetenschap laat zien dat we dat soort coherentie eigenlijk niet opmerken. Het ‘van mij’ karakter van mijn ervaringen is dan eigenlijk niets anders dan het ontbreken van schrik of verbazing bij elke gedachte of ervaring die we hebben. Ik zal betogen dat deze theorie meer recht doet aan onze ervaring dan theorieën die uitgaan van een mysterieus ‘ik’. Bovendien kan het bepaalde psychiatrische aandoeningen beter uitleggen.

Over Marc Slors:

Marc Slors schreef zijn proefschrift in Utrecht en Chicago onder supervisie van Marya Schechtman. Na zijn PhD was hij postdoc in Canberra (ANU) en KNAW Fellow in Nijmegen. Vanaf 2005 is hij hoogleraar cognitiefilosofie en vanaf 2012 hoofd van de sectie Filosofie van Cognitie en Taal aan de Radboud Universiteit. Hij publiceert vooral over persoonlijke identiteit, bewustzijn, vrije wil en sociale cognitie.

THE QUESTION OF THE OUTSIDE: DECOLONIZING CRITICAL THOUGHT (English)

What does it mean to decolonize critical thought? The Western tradition of critical thought has been very rich in its diagnosis of the ways in which hegemonic power operates; however its reflexivity has remained largely intra-modern. Western critical thought has functioned to reinforce modernity (with all its internal variations and contestations) as the total horizon of intelligibility. Decolonial critical thought enacts a different movement of critique. Decolonial critical thought stems from the awareness of an outside of modernity. It does not speak of a pure or uncontaminated outside of modernity, it rather recognizes the validity of non-western geo-genealogies of thought. Decolonial critical thought is engaged in a border thinking that listens to the experience and trajectories of the outside of modernity. It works towards epistemic justice by engaging the task of humbling modernity and enabling the possibility of listening to its outside.

About Rolando Vázquez: 

Rolando Vázquez is associate professor of Sociology at University College Roosevelt and affiliated researcher at the research institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at the University of Utrecht. He co-coordinates the Decolonial Summer School at UCR since 2010. With Gloria Wekker et al he wrote the report for the Diversity Commission of the University of Amsterdam. Through his work he seeks to develop practices of thinking and learning that transgress the dominant frameworks of contemporaneity, heteronormativity and coloniality. His research on the question of precedence and relational temporalities seeks to overcome the western critique of modernity and contribute to the ongoing efforts to decolonize knowledge, aesthetics and subjectivity.

PANEL: WHY PHILOSOPHERS NEED TO THINK ABOUT PREGNANCY (English)

Pregnancy is both common and unique. Each of us began life through pregnancy. Several hundred million women worldwide are likely to be pregnant at any one time. Nonetheless, pregnancy is dramatically different from any other thing that humans do. It is difficult, if not impossible, to understand what it is like to be pregnant without being pregnant. The foetus and the maternal organism are physically and morally intertwined. Because of this, many of our ordinary ethical concepts, like informed consent, the difference between doing and allowing, and self-ownership, do not apply well to pregnancy. This raises important philosophical questions not just about how we should treat pregnant women, but about how we should understand what it is to be human.

Panel members:

Dr Fiona Woollard is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. Fiona’s main current research is in the Philosophy of Pregnancy, Birth and Early Motherhood. Fiona shows that pregnancy, birth and early motherhood can challenge traditional ways of thinking about morality and knowledge. Fiona also identifies ways in which philosophical mistakes in our thinking about motherhood can influence the treatment of pregnant women and mothers, often leading to harmful consequences for these vulnerable groups. Fiona is working with parental support organisations, parent groups, health professionals and MPs to combat guilt and shame surrounding infant feeding decisions.

Teresa Baron is a PhD student with the Better Understanding the Metaphysics of Pregnancy (BUMP) Research Group at the University of Southampton. She is working on an investigation of various philosophical conceptions of parenthood, bodily autonomy and bodily part-whole relations, and of how the process of carrying a foetus fits into these ideas.

Rodante van der Waal is finishing her Research Master Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and studies midwifery at the Midwifery Academy of Amsterdam. In her studies, she focuses mostly on the topics of fertility, pregnancy, birth-giving and early motherhood through postmodern French thought, post-humanism and feminism. In her papers and writings she tries to think the themes of pregnancy and giving birth from a theoretical as well as a more intimate, or poetical, perspective.

The Amsterdam Research Institute of Arts and Sciences (ARIAS; a collaboration between UvA, VU, HvA, AHK and Rietveld), and DRIFT present a panel discussion about the philosophical knowledge that the extra-academic worlds of art and literature can provide academic philosophers with. Panel members will discuss how more creative or fictional forms of writing can inform academic philosophy or how literary styles can influence academic writing. They will also reflect on the performative perspective taken on in the preceding Sandberg-lectures. Does art itself have a place within academic disciplines instead of just being an object of study?

Panel members:

Josef Früchtl studied Philosophy, Theory of Literature and Sociology in Frankfurt/M. and Paris. He is professor in Philosophy of Art and Culture at the UvA and Head of the Department of Philosophy. He has written books such as The Impertinent Self. A Heroic History of Modernity and Trust in the World. A Philosophy of Film.

Fiep van Bodegom is editor at literary magazine De Gids and literary critic for De Groene Amsterdammer and NRC Handelsblad. She also publishes essays and (science-) fiction.

Amal Chatterjee has published fiction, British colonial history and on writing. Amal also teaches fiction at the University of Oxford, academic writing in the Netherlands and on the junction between academic and creative writing in Amsterdam, Coimbra, wherever they’ll have him.