Conference
Dangerous thinking: IPH-UDP collaborative workshop
- Date
- Wednesday 15 May 2024
- Time
- Location
-
Gravensteen
Pieterskerkhof 6
2311 SR Leiden - Room
- 1.11
All are welcome to join this collaborative workshop between the Leiden Unversity Institute for Philosophy and the Instituto de Filosofía at Universidad Diego Portales, Chile (UDP), on the relation between philosophy and danger.
The dangers of philosophy
Danger usually appears as something bad: something either to be avoided or to be (heroically) overcome. When conceived as the theoretical pursuit of wisdom, philosophy can no doubt aid in many ways in circumventing, avoiding or minimizing danger. But there is also a tradition, going back at least to Plato, in which the philosopher and philosophy itself is considered intrinsically dangerous or risky. There are many examples – to name only a few: the dangerous Socrates was sentenced to death for asebia and corruption of the youth. Plato stressed philosophy's adherence to standards (truth itself) that are fundamentally different to those of the people, making the philosopher at best useless for, and at worst a danger to, society. Nietzsche and Foucault have stressed that the philosopher as courageous truth-speaker (parrhesiast) enters into a peculiar contract with themselves: valuing truth more than their life, philosophizing then intrinsically entails mortal risk. Nietzsche himself defined the ‘philosophers of the future’ as “willing to multiply by a thousand the dangers that life brings with it” (and defined himself, famously, as “dynamite”). And the Socratic model of thinking inspired Hannah Arendt to claim that “there are no dangerous thoughts, but thinking itself is dangerous.”
This workshop brings together different perspectives on the intrinsic relation between philosophy and danger, in order to address questions like: is philosophy essentially a dangerous activity? Should it be? Should philosophy not only help to avoid, but in some sense also actively seek out danger, and in what sense? How can that danger be understood if philosophy is not to be simply destructive? Can danger be thought as an intrinsic value? Or does the very notion of ‘value’ here immediately domesticate danger, subordinating it to what is presupposed as valuable and good? What type of ‘risk’ does philosophizing entail? Can we still learn from Plato, Nietzsche or Arendt, or is the relation of philosophy to danger fundamentally different today?
The workshop will consist of four talks, followed by discussion:
| The danger of thinking evil (Kant, Arendt, Blanchot) | Aïcha Liviana Messina (UDP) |
| The trial, the garden, the framework. On the threefold danger of philosophy | Ovidiu Stanciu (UDP) |
| Wounded thinking of the wounded world | Susanna Lindberg (LCCP) |
| The dangerous philosopher in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil |
Johan de Jong (LCCP) |
About the speakers
Aïcha Liviana Messina (UDP)
Aïcha Liviana Messina is Professor of Philosophy at Universidad Diego Portales and director of its Philosophy Institute (website).
Ovidiu Stanciu (UDP)
Ovidiu Stanciu is Assistant Professor of philosophy at the Universidad Diego Portales and Research Associate at the Husserl Archives in Paris (website).
Susanna Lindberg (Leiden)
Susanna Lindberg is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Leiden University and academic director of its Institute for Philosophy (website).
Johan de Jong (Leiden)
Johan de Jong is Assistant Professor of Continental Philosophy at Leiden University (website).
This project was made possible in part by a grant from the Leiden University Fund / Prof. R.A.V. van Haersolte Fund, https://www.luf.nl/