Alternative Ways of Philosophizing (Workshop in The Netherlands)

IDG's own Prof. Stefano Gualeni will be keynoting a provocative philosophy workshop in The Netherlands on the 28th Of November 2023.The philosophy department at the University of Tilburg is organizing an event that specifically looks into the mediality of the discipline of philosophy and experiments in ways of pursuing knowledge that are alternative to traditional linguistic forms (from 9.30 until 13.00).

https://nwwildman.wordpress.com/tilda-conference/alternative-ways-of-doing-philosophy-workshop/

Stefano will be specifically discussing his philosophical games and the hybrid textuality of his latest book The Clouds (Routledge 2023). Find a brief explanation of what the workshop is going to be about and the schedule for the event below!

Alternative Ways of Philosophizing

In his 2012 book, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, Ian Bogost contends that, ‘[t]he long-standing assumption that we relate to the world only through language is a particularly fetid, if still bafflingly popular, opinion’ (Bogost, 2012, 90). Similarly, Gualeni (2015) has argued that language is often ill-equipped to deal with large classes of knowledge essential to humanistic inquiry, philosophy included.

One potential response to these points is to reconsider how we do philosophy, shifting away from a langauge-centric practice to one that focuses on ‘building’ – i.e., designing and making artefacts as a heuristic practice. Such an approach offers to, ‘correct the discursive and linguistic bias of the humanities’ (Ramsay and Rockwell in Gold, 2012, 78).

This workshop explores the idea this idea of philosophizing via ‘building’. Drawing from a variety of scholarly perspectives (e.g. literary studies, the philosophy of fiction, game studies, research through design, and creative research), our speakers will examine ways of doing philosophy that are not exclusively focused on the production/consumption of academic texts.

Program

28 NOVEMBER 2023, @ TILBURG UNIVERSITY, DANTE 152A

Registration & Accessibility

• Attendance is free and drop-in visitors are welcome! If you’d like to register beforehand, email Nathan Wildman (n.w.wildmanATtilburguniversity.edu) with ‘AltPhilWays Workshop Registration’ as the subject.

Talk Abstracts

• Stefano Gualeni – An Experiment in Theory-Fiction. This talk questions the institutional paradigm according to which doing philosophy means producing a specific kind of theoretical text. As possible alternatives to this tendency, I will discuss my experiments with philosophical fictions. This talk starts with the presentation of some of my philosophical games and finally introduces my recent, experimental sci-fi book titled The Clouds. Harnessing at once fiction, theory, and meta-commentary, The Clouds exemplifies a (hybrid) use of text that leverages the unique qualities of each expressive form and challenges clear distinctions between them.
• Roos Slegers – Fantasy, shadows and Doppelgänger. Dragons, wizards, and epic battles between good and evil: fantasy is often dismissed as simplistic and escapist. Yet fantasy and science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin argued that “speculative fiction” is particularly well-suited to help us understand the struggle of the human psyche. I’ll focus on Le Guin’s accounts of Doppelgänger and shadow-selves to make a broader case for fantasy as a philosophically important genre.
• Caroline Hummels – Design-Philosophy correspondence with drawing. Material processes of inquiry, be it designly or philosophical, are tightly bound up with their products. By doing philosophy through other means, new questions can surface. In the Transforming Practices Studio at the TU/e, we are imagining and researching new sociomaterial practices, while exploring design-philosophy correspondence through non-discursive means. In this talk, I will show and discuss our endeavors, especially my two-year quest to research concepts such as correspondence and commoning through drawing.