Organized by Dr. Reinhard G. Mueller and Dr. Douglas Giles.
Weekly meetings will take place on Thursdays 9:00 – 11:00 a.m. (US Central Time) beginning on November 13, 2025. There will be at least 7 seminar sessions.
Content
Today we assume that change in all areas of life, including its most basic conditions, will continue to accelerate. How can we manage to continually reorient ourselves? Can philosophy understand how to keep up with the times? Orientation is, in principle, the achievement of finding one’s way in an unsurveyable and uncertain situation so that one can successfully master the situation. It involves finding paths both in the terrain and through all the circumstances of human life: not only our daily life but even our survival depends on the success of orientation. Orientation is ubiquitous today. But how, in fact, do we orient and reorient ourselves in our everyday lives? And how can we grasp this process philosophically?
In this first part of our annual two-seminar program on the foundations of the philosophy of orientation, we will read the first half Werner Stegmaier’s What is Orientation? A Philosophical Investigation, which is also the foundational text of the Foundation for Philosophical Orientation. The second seminar will be offered in January – March 2026 to cover the second half of the book. The seminar is discussion based; this means participants are expected to read the respective chapters before the meetings to be able to discuss them with the group during the seminar sessions.
Please apply by November 06, 2025, via the application form below by briefly explaining 1.) your professional and/or academic background, 2.) your philosophical interests, and 3.) your motivation for joining the seminar (max. 100 words per field).