Celebrating Five Years of Our Foundation for Philosophical Orientation

Today, we are thrilled to celebrate the 5th birthday of the Foundation for Philosophical Orientation. On this day, five years ago, on October 25, 2019, we inaugurated our foundation in Nashville’s Parthenon, marking the beginning of an incredible journey. On October 11-13, 2024, we had the honor of hosting our 5th Anniversary Meeting at the beautiful Scarritt Bennett Center in Nashville, where we reflected on what we have accomplished in the past 5 years and explored exciting new directions for orientation research.

At our anniversary meeting, advisors, fellows, teachers, and guests from around the world came together to celebrate with us and critically discuss results of what we have achieved so far as well as potential new developments and future projects. You can find photos and the anniversary booklet here.

In our 2022-24 prize essay competition, participants engaged with the question: “How to Orient Oneself in Times of Multiple Crises?” Congratulations to our winners for their fantastic contributions! We awarded the following prizes:

• The First Prize Award ($5,000) went to Yuri di Liberto (Italy)
• The Second Prize Award ($4,000) went to Dirk Stemper (Germany)
• The Third Prize Award ($3,000) went to Nataliia Reva (Ukraine)

In our inaugural philosophical short film competition(2022-24) on the theme of “Orientation and Disorientation,” for which we received 1,973 submissions, we invited the three winning films to our event in order to rank them.

• We split the First Prize Award between Alessandro Amico (Italy) and Alexandre Silveira (Brazil)
• The Third Prize went to Pauline Bricout (France)

Congratulations! You can view the winnings films here.

Our event concluded with an anniversary speech by Professor Werner Stegmaier for the launch of his new book publication on Orientations Press, which is Orientation in Philosophy: Courageous Beginnings in the History of Philosophy toward a Philosophy of Orientation. This new book is the augmented and now complete edition of his overview of the history of the philosophy from the viewpoint of the philosophy of orientation. In his speech he reflected on these historical developments in philosophy and offered perspectives for philosophical directions in the future. You can download for free:

• Werner Stegmaier’s new book publication
• Werner Stegmaier’s anniversary speech

We are grateful and honored that you have been part of our journey in the past five years and that we had the chance to celebrate this milestone in person at our 5th Anniversary Meeting back in Nashville where everything began in 2019. It was wonderful to meet in person, to experience the energy of a community of curious minds we’ve built together over the years. We would like to thank especially Tina and Mike Hodges for their generous support of this event as well as of the past five years of philosophical orientation. And thank you, Professor Werner Stegmaier, for your guidance in these years, insights, and all your work that continues to inspire philosophical curiosity and research on orientation.

You can check out the photos of our event, our anniversary booklet with all the position papers, as well as Prof. Stegmaier’s anniversary speech here. 

Thank you to everyone who has been part of these five wonderful years – we look forward to continuing this journey with you and seeing where the next steps in ‘philosophizing-together’ (συμφιλοσοφεῖν) will take us!