Heimspeki öndunar í sögu og samtíma

Lenart Škof, prófessor í heimspeki og forstöðumaður Science and Research Centre Koper, heldur fyrirlestur á vegum Heimspekistofnunar Háskóla Íslands í stofu 201 í Stapa miðvikudaginn 2. nóvember kl. 13. Fyrirlesturinn nefnist „Respiratory philosophy: historical and contemporary issues“. 

Útdráttur

The discussions around the breath and breathing have become increasingly pertinent with the current global environmental and health crises. The effects of atmopolitics are visible in weather events that characterise the present-day climate change crisis (in the form of extreme climate-related events as wildfires and dust storms), but also find expression in concerns with aerosol dynamics during COVID-19, racial police repression in the USA (Eric Garner, George Floyd and I can’t breathe campaigns) and in the growing deployment of tear gas as a crowd control agent in Asia, Europe, and North America. The act of breathing bears a distinctive political relationship with the air. The respiratory philosophy as presented and articulated in this lecture deals with our relationships with this aerial medium. “Breath” might seem like a peculiar project, or at the very least disconnected from the way in which most European philosophy has understood itself and its goals. But the “forgetting of air” (Luce Irigaray) in European philosophical discourse is by itself one of the deepest, unacknowledged tensions, shaping its unfortunate outlook on the world. A new philosophy of breathing (respiratory philosophy) has the double merit of decolonising the philosophical curriculum through an inclusion of non-European sources and insights, and of revealing how such “breathing” is a fundamental (if erased) element of its own history.

Um fyrirlesarann

Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Institute for Philosophical Studies at the Science and Research Centre Koper, Professor and Dean of Faculty of Humanities at Alma Mater Europaea and Visiting Professor of Religion at Nan Tien Institute (Australia) and Bennett University (India). Received KAAD grant (Universität Tübingen), Fulbright grant (Stanford University) and Humboldt fellowship for experienced researchers (Max Weber Kolleg, Universität Erfurt). Regular member of European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA, Salzburg). Among his monographs are Antigone's Sisters: On the Matrix of Love (SUNY Press, 2021), Breath of Proximity (Springer, 2015), and Pragmatist Variations on Ethical and Intercultural Life (Lexington Books, 2012). (Co)editor of numerous books and journal special issues, most recently Shame, Gender Violence and Ethics: Terrors of Injustice (Lexington Books, 2021), Atmospheres of Breathing (SUNY Press, 2018) and Borders and Debordering (Lexington Books, 2018). President of Slovenian Society for Comparative Religion. Main research interests: ethics, new cosmology, philosophical theology, intercultural philosophy, the philosophy of Luce Irigaray. His current research projects are dedicated to elemental philosophy, philosophical theology, and ethics of vulnerability.