Dear members,
During 2020 the GIP launched a new lecture series. Given the serious situation of Covid-19 pandemic we would like to take advantage of the general necessity to communicate digitally. A digital lecture format allows members from all over the world to participate; also this gives us the chance to invite speakers from around the globe more easily. We very much invite all of you to join the monthly lectures and make this a forum for lively discussion!
2023
-Tuesday 31 January, 12 pm CET (UTC+1)
Prof. Dr. Daisuke Kamei, Ritsumeikan University Kyoto, Japan: "Jacques Derrida and Shūzō Kuki: On Contingency and Event"
-Thursday, 23 Feb 2023, 12:00 CET (=UCT+1)
Prof. Dr. Mathias Obert, National Sun Yat-Sen University Taiwan: „Als Phänomenologe unterwegs in japanischen Gärten“
The Lecture will be given in GERMAN
-Tuesday, 18 April, 12 pm CEST (=UTC+2)
Professor Dr. Eric Nelson (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology): "Daoist wuwei in the Anthropocene"
-Tuesday, 9 May, 12 pm CESTR (= UTC+2)
Professor Dr. Fabian Heubel (Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan / Visiting Professor, Institut für Philosophie, FU Berlin, Germany): “Being Between: Comparative and Transcultural Philosophy”
-Thursday, 29 June, 6 pm CEST,
Prof. Dr. Ali Asghar Mosleh, Professor of Philosophy, ATU/ Tehran, Head of Iranian Association for Intercultural Philosophy, Research Institute Director for Contemporary Culture. "Human and the Future of the Earth"
-Wednesday, 19 July, 6 pm CEST (=UTC+2)
Prof. Dr. Kwok-ying LAU, The Chinese University of Hongkong: „Cultural Flesh and Intercultural Phenomenology: Theory and Practice” (Hybrid)
-Tuesday, 31 October, 12pm CEST,
Prof. Dr. Masatake Shinohara, Kyoto University: "An Undecided Dimension of Depth: On the Question of the Place in the Thought of Kitaro Nishida"
To participate please send a short notice to niels.weidtmann@ciis.uni-tuebingen.de before the day of the lecture. The lecture will be given via zoom. A zoom-link will be sent to all those who registered.
Time: 7PM (Germany)
Following GIP-lectures will be announced shortly. For updated and more information about the past lectures HERE. GIP-lectures are organised by Dr. Niels Weidtmann, Dr. Anke Graness and Fernando Wirtz.
Stay healthy!
Niels Weidtmann, President
Facetten gegenwärtiger Bildtheorie. Interdisziplinäre und interkulturelle Perspektiven, herausgegeben von Sergej Seitz, Anke Graneß und Georg Stenger ist als erster Band der neuen Schriftenreihe der GIP (Reihe interkulturelle Philosophie) vor Kurzem beim Springer-Verlag erschienen.
University of Tübingen, 9th-11th May 2024
Topic
The study and intercultural comparison of topoi, places, and spaces are of great importance for intercultural philosophy. On the one hand, intercultural thought itself can be described as a topographical one, building on philosophy's stronger turn to space in the second half of the 20th century. While in the first half of the 20th century the focus of philosophy was rather on reflections about time and temporality (Henry Bergson, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and others), the passage to the second half of the 20th century is accompanied by a shift from a focus on time to the relevance of topos and spatiality: Merleau-Ponty's philosophy from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s bears explicit witness to the growing importance of space. The philosophical reception of Bataille's and Blanchot's writings (e.g. L'espace littéraire 1955) played an important role in awakening the interest in topological thinking. Deleuze underlined the “exteriority/interiority” distinction in Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962), opening the way for later spatial philosophical concepts such as deterritorialization and geo-philosophy. Foucault in La pensée du dehors (1966) interrogates the imaginal spaces in terms of order and heterotopia.
Parallel to the new relevance of topos and spatiality in philosophy the birth of structuralism and structuralist anthropology marks the 1960s, where the question of topos gains anthropological and cultural importance. Following Durkheim and Mauss, Lévi-Strauss puts the focus on the space and tries to correlate the spatial configurations such as settlements and villages with the social structure. To this topological interest comes the process of decentralisation. The backlash of postcolonial movements awakens national/indigenous self-consciousness as situated “we”. The way the Negritude movement marks the African thought in 1960s and 1970s shows strongly the necessity of “other locations from which thinking could start” (Eboussi Boulaga). Comparable philosophical thematization of topos and location of thought could also be outlined in other geographies and languages, as for example in the Arabic speaking world Mohammed Abed al-Jabri’s Kritik der Arabischen Vernunft did. The process of decentralisation is an important counterpart of the cultural turn.
If the homogeneously imagined and measurable space is the signum of modernity and its idea of globality, we are currently experiencing a return to a multiplicity of situated forms of life and lived spaces. This is strongly being discussed in relation to decolonial perspectives in anthropology ("ontological turn": Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Philippe Descola, Martin Holbraad, and others) and the critique of the nature-culture divide in literature and science & technology studies, feminist theory, and critical posthumanism (Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and others). However, these approaches often lack an eye for the historical depth and intellectual-historical significance of the respective spaces, including the homogeneously imagined space of modernity. This highlights the importance of interdisciplinary exchange on these issues.
Second, differently designed places and spaces may open up new and non-text-based access to other cultures. For example, images and artworks, as well as architecture and even landscapes, provide a unique access to cultural traditions and their thinking. Watsuji Tetsuro’s famous study on climatic influences on humanity is an early example for this (not without problems, though), but also with respect to arts and architecture this has already been shown (latest by Descola in his Les forms du visible) – and particularly well so with reference to East-Asia (Daisetsu Suzuki, Ryosuke Ohashi, Mathias Obert, and others). However, the relational structure of spaces and places to cultural traditions becomes relevant also the other way around. This is most obvious with respect to environmental issues. In environmental studies non-Western approaches become more and more relevant. This is true with respect to the acknowledgement of Amerindian epistemologies already mentioned above but it is also the case with respect to African epistemologies which raise inspiring alternative paths of thought. Finally, eco-phenomenology (Ted Toadvine, Charles Brown), nomadic thinking (Gilles Deleuze), and religious studies contribute to the discussion of lived spaces.
However, these different strands of thought have so far hardly been brought together and made fruitful for intercultural philosophy. We would like to make up for this with our conference.
The GIP international conference will address topoi, places, and spaces in an intercultural perspective in different dimensions. This will be represented by six sections which integrate a couple of non-philosophical disciplines as well:
(1) dwelling, belonging, and phenomenology of spatiality
(2) nomadic thought and imaginary geography
(3) aesthetics, architecture, and landscapes
(4) knowledges of ecology
(5) decoloniality and global history
(6) religious places and spatiality in religion.
A Call for Papers will be published soon.
Programm HIER
Die GIP ist erschüttert vom Angriffskrieg Putins auf die Ukraine. Wir fordern Putin dazu auf, den Krieg sofort zu beenden und alle Truppen aus der Ukraine zurückzuziehen. Die staatliche Souveränität der Ukraine und der Frieden in Europa müssen geachtet werden. Wir solidarisieren uns mit dem ukrainischen Volk, aber ebenso mit den vielen Menschen in Russland, die den Krieg ablehnen. Die GIP solidarisiert sich insbesondere mit den russischen Wissenschaftler*innen, die in einem offenen Brief gegen den Krieg protestieren.
Brief auf Deutsch:
Brief auf Russisch
https://trv-science.ru/2022/02/we-are-against-war/
The SIP is shocked by Putin's war of aggression on Ukraine. We call on Putin to end the war immediately and withdraw all troops from Ukraine. Ukraine's state sovereignty and peace in Europe must be respected. We stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people, but equally with the many people in Russia who reject the war. The SIP is in particular solidarity with the Russian scientists who protest against the war in an open letter
Letter in German:
In Russian:
https://trv-science.ru/2022/02/we-are-against-war/
Die Gesellschaft für Interkulturelle Philosophie (GIP) wurde 1992 als gemeinnütziger Verein gegründet und hat inzwischen Mitglieder in allen Erdteilen, die gemeinsam an der Sache der Interkulturellen Philosophie arbeiten. Es gilt die engen Schranken der eigenen kulturellen Bedingtheiten im Philosophieren zu öffnen und sich sowohl systematisch als auch historisch im gegenseitigen Austausch mit den philosophischen Bemühungen anderer, zunächst fremder Kulturen auseinander zusetzen.
Die GIP und ihre Schwestergesellschaften veranstalten zu diesem Zweck regelmäßig Tagungen und Kongresse; außerdem wird die Diskussion in zahlreichen Publikationen geführt. Die Mitglieder der GIP bemühen sich darüber hinaus, das Anliegen der Interkulturalität in Vorträgen, in Forschung und Lehre und in Diskussionsrunden bekannt zu machen. Gesprächskreise finden auf regionaler Ebene statt.
Interkulturelle Philosophie versteht sich nicht als eine Philosophie innerhalb einer jeweils bestehenden Philosophie. Vielmehr begreift sich diese Art des Philosophierens als methodologischer Standpunkt, mit dem eine Annäherung aller Weltphilosophien untereinander ermöglicht werden kann. Betont werden die unterschiedlichen Wege, durch die Menschen seit je her versuchen, sich selbst und die Welt gedanklich aufzunehmen und lebenspraktisch zu gestalten. Daher macht sich Interkulturelle Philosophie stark für eine Ausweitung des Blickes. Es gilt, unterschiedliche philosophische Standpunkte systematisch zu erforschen und mit einander in Verbindung zu bringen, ohne diese zu essentialisieren bzw. auf einige wenige zu reduzieren. Dabei redet Interkulturelle Philosophie weder einem Kulturrelativismus noch einer Indifferenz das Wort. Eher steht die ethische Haltung im Mittelpunkt, mit der eine gemeinsame friedliche, gerechte Zukunft erzielt werden kann.
Intensive Sprach- und Quellenstudien gehören daher ebenso zu den Aufgaben der interkulturellen Philosophie, wie das Herausbilden einer Hermeneutik interkultureller Verständigung. Hier werden in hermeneutischer, dekonstruktiver, spekulativer, dialektischer, etc. Gestalt Methoden und Wege der Annäherung ebenso untersucht wie die je unterschiedlich ausdifferenzierten Modelle und Systeme anthropologischer, logischer, staats- und rechtsphilosophischer, ästhetischer, religionsphilosophischer oder metaphysischer Art.