February 27, Thursday, at 6 pm (Kyiv time)
Speaker: Margaret Cuonzo is a Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy Long Island University, New York, USA.
Seminar Title: Paradoxes in Wartime: From Conway Hall to Zoom
Seminar Description: In "Paradoxes in Wartime, " I survey many paradoxes associated with war and, after a brief account of the nature of paradoxes and strategies for giving solutions, separate out the shallower paradoxes of war, many of which present surface inconsistencies (evil/good, chaos/order, etc.) that can be resolved, from the deeper paradoxes, which call into question folk concepts that are central to our everyday lives. I then focus on a few deeper paradoxes, including paradoxes involving deterrence, rational next steps, sunk costs, and others. Lastly, I'll reflect on why war might engender so many different paradoxes.
Margaret Cuonzo, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)
Professor of Philosophy (retired as of 09/01/2024)
Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus
466 Humanities Building
1 University Plaza
Brooklyn, New York 11201
718-964-7421
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262525497/paradox/
https://www.routledge.com/The-City-is-an-Ecosystem-Sustainable-Education-Policy-and-Practice/Mutnick-Cuonzo-Griffiths-Leslie-Shuttleworth/p/book/9781032108650
- Автор: Кафедра Філософії
- Перегляди: 71
January 31, Friday, at 6 pm (Kyiv time)
Speaker: Svitlana Balinchenko is a Senior Researcher at the Department of History of Foreign Philosophy, H. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy, NAS of Ukraine. Since 2001, she has studied the integration tendencies and choices of Ukraine through the perspective of social philosophy. Since the war-triggered internal displacement from Donetsk oblast in 2014, the focus of the research has shifted to the democracy, social cohesion, and solidarity challenges in the context of the war impact on the social-cultural space of Ukraine, in particular, migrants’ visibility in host communities, as well as postwar scenarios for the currently Russia-occupied parts of Ukraine.
Seminar Title: Visibility Contexts of Migration in Ukraine
Seminar Description: The seminar will be focused on migration studies in Ukraine, 2014-2024. The tendencies associated with different waves of war-triggered internal displacement in Ukraine will be reviewed through the social-philosophical context of (hyper-/hypo-/in-) visibility. The wider discussable aspects include the changes in social cohesion, resilience, and integration expectations in communities due to blind-spot and ritournelle effects accumulated during the massive protracted internal displacement to the government-controlled regions of Ukraine, since 2014.
Key topics include:· Data- and access-related gaps in Ukrainian migration studies during the war.
- Actual discussions on visibility, integration, and acculturation in social philosophy(migration studies).
- IDPs’ visibility through the lenses of power and decision-making: wave-1 effect.
- Primary/secondary internal displacement and return: blind-spot and ritournelle effects.
- Perspectives of migration studies in Ukraine.
The seminar will provide an opportunity to discuss the methodological and conceptual challenges associated with studying internal displacement during the war and the impact of discourses on the perception of migration-related contexts and vulnerabilities.
- Автор: Кафедра Філософії
- Перегляди: 58
December 23, Monday, at 6 pm (Kyiv time)
6pm (Eastern European Time, EET) / 5pm (CET).
Speakers:
Orysya Bila is the Chair of Philosophy and the Director of the Master's Program in Theology at Ukrainian Catholic University. She holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Theology from Ukrainian Catholic University and completed her doctoral degree in Philosophy at Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University. Her research interests include the philosophical legacy of Michel Foucault, ethics and global political theory, the ethics of memory, as well as Christian theology in a postmodern context.
Joshua Duclos is the Form of 1923 Chair in Humanities at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire. A former Fulbright scholar in Eastern Europe, he holds advanced degrees in philosophy from University of Chicago (A.M.) and Boston University (Ph.D.). He is the author of Wilderness, Morality, and Value (Lexington Books, 2022). His research interests include value theory, communitarian political thought, and environmental philosophy.
Seminar Title: "Philosophy in Crisis: Exploring the Role of Democratic Thought in Wartime Ukraine"
Seminar Description: This research seminar presents the findings of the article "Utopia, Dystopia, and Democracy: Teaching Philosophy in Wartime Ukraine" by Orysya Bila and Joshua Duclos (Link address: https://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/spe/article/view/24411/18568). The authors will share their experiences and arguments on the instrumental and intrinsic values of teaching philosophy in a country facing profound challenges.
Key topics include:
- The role of philosophy in cultivating democratic habits of thought and action.
- Philosophy as a means of opposing authoritarianism and fostering resilience.
- The potential of philosophical inquiry to offer consolation and inspire creative societal transformation.
The seminar will explore the authors' reflections on the ethical, cultural, and political dimensions of philosophy during the war. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss how these insights can contribute to academic and civic discourse in other contexts of crisis.
- Автор: Кафедра Філософії
- Перегляди: 58
November 25, Monday, at 6 pm (Kyiv time)
Speaker:
Olena Olifer
Assistant Lecturer of the Philosophy Department
Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University
Title: Social Dimensions of Practical Identity
The problem of identity, i.e., the question "Who are we?", was of great importance in social and political discourses in the twentieth century. When Ukraine gained its independence, the question of identity was posed by the Ukrainian nation for the first time. For more than 30 years, Ukrainian scholars have studied changes in the identity of the Ukrainian people. Nowadays, as Ukraine struggles for survival, the category of identity remains a topical issue, since identity tends to involve the uniqueness of a person in social discourse.
Personal identity has a long tradition of study. As an explicit philosophical problem, it has been explored since J. Locke. Today, analytic philosophy offers to consider a shift from the metaphysical aspects of personal identity to practical ones. This new framework for studying personal identity may be extremely helpful in analyzing the changes in the identity of Ukrainian people as they have transformed from civilians into military personnel.
While studying the problem of identity, attention should also be paid to the social dimension. Contemporary Ukrainian philosophers have developed their own socio-philosophical views on identity, which should be synthesized with the practical framework of personal identity suggested by analytic philosophers.
Keywords: personal identity, agency, person, practical identity, social identity, social role, narrative.
- Автор: Кафедра Філософії
- Перегляди: 64
October 14, Monday, at 6 pm (Kyiv time)
Speaker:
Paul L. Gavrilyuk,
Professor
Aquinas Chair in Theology and Philosophy
Theology Department/ JRC 140
University of St. Thomas
St. Paul, Minnesota 55105
Rebuild Ukraine, Founding President
International Orthodox Theological Association, Founding President
Paul Gavrilyuk is Ukrainian American theologian and philosopher. He was born and spent his childhood in Ukraine. He is the founding president of Rebuild Ukraine (rebuild-ua.org), a non-profit organization that has provided nearly one million dollars in direct aid for Ukraine's defenders, refugees, and children affected by the war since 2022. He is also the founding president of the International Orthodox Theological Association (IOTA, iota-web.org), which includes over 1,500 Orthodox leaders and scholars around the world. Translated into twelve languages, his books include, The Suffering of the Impassible God (Oxford, 2004), Histoire du catéchuménat dans l’église ancienne(Cerf, 2007), The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (co-edited with Sarah Coakley, Cambridge, 2012) and Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (Oxford, 2014).
Title: Two narratives of Ukrainian intellectual history: Dmitry Chizhevsky's Essays on the History of Philosophy in Ukraine and Georges Florovsky's Ways of Russian Theology
- Автор: Кафедра Філософії
- Перегляди: 74
May, 22, 2024
Speaker:
Luke David O'Sullivan
Associate Professor,
Department of Political Science,
National University of Singapore,
Faculty of Art and Social Sciences
Title: "Categories, History, and Historiography".
History deals with individual events or periods. The collapse of the Soviet Union or the Cold War era can never be repeated. But this is is why history as a genre of thinking has traditionally been deprecated; it did not deal in universals. This view is traceable to the ancient world; it can be found in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Their influence on subsequent Western thought ensured that philosophical emphasis remained on knowledge of universals. Medieval thought insisted that there is no science of singulars, and modernity inherited this view. Kant and Hegel remained fixated on so-called universal history, narratives of the past that treated it as important only insofar as it revealed a general plan or design at work. By the later twentieth century this way of thinking about the past had become deprecated as 'metanarrative'; a story about the past that was really designed to legitimate some other agenda. Such metanarratives, it was alleged, were becoming obsolete. The experience of the twenty-first century suggests, however, that metanarrative has not in fact gone away, and that history as the study of events in their individuality remains of marginal philosophical interest. There is reason to think that this situation is undesirable insofar as discourses about the past that legitimate aggressive political behaviour can end up imposing avoidable costs on a global scale. Better-informed historical conversations are thus one part of the puzzle in creating a more peaceful future.
- Автор: Козаченко Надія Павлівна
- Перегляди: 367
April, 30, 2024
Speaker:
OKSANA DOVGOPOLOVA
Co-founder and co-curator of the memory culture platform Past / Future / Art, Doctor of Science (in Philosophy), Professor at the Philosophy Department at the Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National University, member of the Memory Studies Association, author of scientific and educational publications
Title: «Artistic reflection of the imperial heritage»
Oksana Dovgopolova graduated from the Odesa Mechnikov National University with a degree in history, defended her candidate’s and doctoral theses on “Social Philosophy and Philosophy of History.” She completed an internship at the Swiss Peace Foundation (2022), Konsortium Ziviler Friedensdienst (2020-2022), the Museum of Second World War in Gdańsk (2019), the Yad Vashem Museum (2018), Central European University (2012), etc. Experienced in higher education, she has been working in the public sphere. Since 2014, she has been participating in dialogue initiatives in Odesa; launched the public history site Hubs of History. In 2015–2018, she organised several international student schools and public history projects focusing on societal reconciliation in the context of collective memory. Since 2018, she has been a curator of public programs for art projects at the Odesa National Art Museum, the Odesa Museum of Contemporary Art, Oleksandr Bleshchunov Municipal Museum of Private Collections, and the IZOLYATSIA fund. In 2018–2019, she developed the Memory Lab experimental unit at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. In 2019, together with Kateryna Semenyuk, she founded the Past / Future / Art memory culture platform. From February 24, 2022, after russia’s full-scale invasion, the project continues its work with a focus on the commemoration of the Russia-Ukraine war.
About Past/Future/Art https://pastfutureart.org/en/about
- Автор: Козаченко Надія Павлівна
- Перегляди: 320
March, 26,
Speaker:
Olena Mishalova
Associate professor of the Philosophy Department
Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University
Title: "Russia’s War in Ukraine as a «War for Identity» and Appropriation of Cultural Tradition".
Abstract: We propose to analyze Russia's current war in Ukraine through the perspective of Francis Fukuyama's concept of identity politics based on Samuel Huntington's civilization approach. We argue that Russia's war against Ukraine is a new type of war – a «war for identity» – a war that is waged primarily for the appropriation of Ukrainian cultural identity and historical heritage, rather than for political or economic resources. We believe that an effective explanatory framework for its consideration is provided by Huntington's civilizational concept of the world order, in which the most widespread and dangerous conflicts will be between peoples belonging to different civilizations (and cultures). The article emphasizes that the Russian war in Ukraine is a direct consequence of two factors: on the one hand, Russia is not satisfied with its own cultural tradition and seeks to appropriate Ukrainian cultural identity and historical heritage in order to restore the «lost empire»; on the other hand, Russia is historically a region of civilizational fault line between the countries of Western civilization and the countries of Eastern civilizations, it is a «torn» state in terms of cultural identity and has maintained its integrity for centuries only due to its authoritarian political regime, and constantly produces numerous conflicts around its borders.
- Автор: Козаченко Надія Павлівна
- Перегляди: 342
February, 27
Speaker:
Maksim Vak
Assistant professor at CUNY (City University of New York).
The topic
"Reevaluation of Arendt's The Origin of Totalitarianism"
The recent reemergence of totalitarianism in Russia makes exigent an examination of the origin and structure of totalitarian regimes. In my paper I reexamine the origin of totalitarianism in confrontation with the seminal work of Hannah Arendt, reading her work from the perspective of Nietzsche’s Genealogy. In my reading, Arendt’s phenomenology of totalitarianism assumes without question fundamental moments in understanding of the formation of nations: the role of truth in forming a national world view, the role of history and memory in forming a national world view, the role of imagination in forming nations, and the place of nihilism in the will of nation. In consequence, Arendt assumes that truth can undermine totalitarian falsehood, and that history and the preservation of memory can help to oppose the development of totalitarianism. In her rigorous interrogation of the origin of totalitarianism – its historical and economical conditions, as she does not question its genealogy – she does not address the nihilistic character of nations, which become the native soil for totalitarianism. In my paper I reexamine the notion of ‘truth’, assumed by Arendt, from the perspective of the will to power as a regime of power. Memory and history are reexamined accordingly as expressions of will to power. History in this power game is a product of imagination, a creation of myth in support of a dominant power. It is an esthetic game to foster the art of living. To understand the genealogy of totalitarianism I distinguish between the two types of nihilism and the two corresponding types of creation of history – active and reactive. In my paper I argue that reactive type of nihilism, which prevails in forming Russian ‘spirit’, inevitably delivers and redelivers totalitarianism on Russian soil. To illustrate my argument, I ‘imagine’ the birth of Russian national spirit at the beginning of the XIX century in the Karamzin’s history and its further development through following centuries as a history of a birth and development of reactive nihilistic spirit.
- Автор: Козаченко Надія Павлівна
- Перегляди: 341
January, 30.
The Speaker:
Svitlana Ovcharenko
Doctor of Sciences in Philosophy, Full Professor, Ukraine
Associate Research Global Governance Centre of
Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva)
The topic
“Another rational” regularities of information war:
The Russian-Ukrainian case
Abstract. An information war is analyzed as a special case of culturally determined artificial reality, in which communicative processes take place on a rational and non-rational level. Non-rational aspects of the use of information for military purposes are investigated in the context of the ubiquity of aesthetic factors in the functioning of social space, which provides grounds for applying conceptual theoretical generalizations from the field of art studies to a wide range of socio-political phenomena. The concept of "another rationality" allows us to interpret the manifestations of artistic thinking in non-artistic phenomena as a general principle of mindset and activity that is naturally applied in informational confrontation. The typical characteristics of the Russian way of information warfare against Ukraine are the embodiment of the laws of “anrational” thinking, which enables its effective emotional influence and rational irrefutability.
- Автор: Козаченко Надія Павлівна
- Перегляди: 299
