Organized by Dr. Reinhard G. Mueller and Dr. Olga Faccani.
Weekly meetings will take place on Fridays 10 – 11:45 a.m. (US Central Time) beginning on October 13, 2023. There will be 8 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 seminar, we will read the first half of the primary book of the philosophy of orientation, Werner Stegmaier’s What is Orientation? A Philosophical Investigation, which is also the elementary text of the Hodges Foundation for Philosophical Orientation. A second seminar will be offered in February-March 2024 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. No prior philosophical or academic training is necessary to participate. Please apply by October 06, 2023, 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).