Crisis, Critique and Loss of Concepts: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein (November 2016)
Seminar Held: with Professor Stephen Mulhall (University of Oxford)
The Inheritance of ISIS (November 2016)
Seminar Held: with Dr Faisal Devji
Critical Technology (November 2016)
Workshop Held: 'Critical technology: Is technological risk the main threat to the survival of humanity? Or do we need to rely on technology to survive?’
Anders Sandberg (FHI), Apocalypse 2.0: existential risks, technology, and the problem of forethought
Eric Drexler (FHI), Structured Transparency: Surveillance, civil society, AI, and existential risk
Joss Wright (OII), Urizen's Web: Transparency, Freedom, and Control
Miles Brundage (FHI), Developments in AI
Owain Evans (FHI), Discussion of the general risks and benefits of AI technologies
On Political Theology? (December 2016)
Seminar Held: with speaker Professor Andrew Benjamin (Monash)
On madness and expertise: The atomic bomb and visions of global order in the 1940s (January 2017)
Talk Held: with Dr Or Rosenboim (University of Cambridge)
Crises in science and a crisis for science (January 2017)
Talk Held: with Professor Alexander Bird (University of Bristol)
Devoted Actors and the Will to Kill and Die (January 2017)
'Devoted Actors and the Will to Kill and Die: Research on the ISIS frontline and with Al Qaeda Affiliate' with Scott Atran (Research Director, CNRS Paris; Research Professor, University of Michigan; Founding Fellow, Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, University of Oxford). Faisal Devji (St Antony's College) was the respondent.
Language, crisis and affect: Muted emotions in Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (February 2017)
Talk Held: with Dr Tobias Heinrich (University of Oxford)
Exodus, Reckoning, Sacrifice: Three Meanings of Brexit (February 2017)
Event Held: with Kalypso Nicolaidis (St Antony's College, University of Oxford)
Respondent: Anand Menon (King's College London)
Chair: Timothy Garton Ash (St Antony's College, University of Oxford)
The Concept of the Transformational Leap in Russian Culture (February 2017)
Talk Held: Russia's history includes several major transformations that reshaped the country, changed its essence and place in the world and its historical identity. The debate focused on the desirability and logic of these transformations and analysed the genesis, the causes and the structure of a consensus that these transformations were important and revealing and continue to play decisive role in Russian intellectual history until the present day.
Emergency, Imagination and Management (February 2017)
Talk Held: with Professor Steve Connor (University of Cambridge)
Walter Benjamin Meets the Cosmics (February 2017)
Walter Benjamin eulogized the Cosmics: he corresponded with Klages and employed their ideas as the methodological cornerstone of his celebrated Arcades Project. Why did he revere their work, and why has the “Cosmic connection” been so little discussed in run-of-the-mill Benjamin scholarship?
Rousseau, Freedom and the French Revolution (March 2017)
Event Held: on 'Democracy and its discontents: Rousseau, Robespierre, Paine'.
Yannick Bosc, Daniel Thévenon and Olivier Tonneau reconsidered the opposition between liberty and equality, and thus the thesis that the demos is democracy's worst enemy.
Olivier Tonneau (University of Cambridge), Justice as prudence: Robespierre's struggle to prevent terror (1789-1792)
Yannick Bosc (Rouen), Thomas Paine and Robespierre: the Terror of the Rights of Man
Daniel Thévenon (University of Cambridge), Rousseau, Freedom and the French Revolution
The Rise of Endless War (March 2017)
Talk Held: with Professor Samuel Moyn (Harvard University)
Ernst Kantorowicz on Methods and Postage Stamps (March 2017)
Talk Held: with Professor Robert Lerner (Northwestern)
Equality, Catastrophe, and the Great Disequalization (April 2017)
Talk Held: on "Equality, Catastrophe, and the Great Disequalization: Reading Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in light of Recent Work in Human Paleontology, Anthropology, and Economics" with Professor Darrin McMahon (Dartmouth College).
Extreme Piety and Fundamentalism (April 2017)
Talk Held: given by Nurit Stadler, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dystopia Today (April 2017)
Event Held: with Greg Claeys (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Robespierre and the Politicians’ Terror (April 2017)
Talk Held: with Marisa Linton (Kingston University)
Terminus or Renovation? Francis Bacon and crisis in early modern knowledge (May 2017)
Talk Held: with Dr Richard Serjeantson (University of Cambridge)
A Genre in Crisis: The Novel in 1940s France (May 2017)
Talk Held: with Professor Ann Jefferson (French, University of Oxford)
Sattelzeit as Endzeit? Making sense of catastrophic change in the nineteenth century (May 2017)
Talk Held: with Professor Joachim Whaley (University of Cambridge)
Sacrifice Revisited (May 2017)
Seminar Held: on the revisitation of the concept of Sacrifice in late modernity in its various configurations, philosophical and ideological.
Faisal Devji (Oxford) ‘Gandhi, Sacrifice and the Ambiguities of non-violence’
Martin Crowley (Cambridge) ‘Bruno Latour's Anti-sacrificial Politics’
Kalypso Nicolaidis (Oxford) ‘Meanings of ‘Sacrifice’ in Brexit Mythology’
Brad Evans (Bristol) ‘The Violence of an Artificial Love’
Jonathan Leader Maynard (Oxford) ‘Consequentialist Extremism: Present Sacrifices for Future Dreams in the Justification of Violence’
Kimberley Hutchings (QMUL) ‘On Violence, Gender and Sacrifice: old stories and new reflections’
Fascism, Fake News, and the Nature of Social Extremophilia (June 2017)
Talk Held: with Luciano Floridi (Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information, University of Oxford)
Between Historiography and Literature: "Gershom Sholem's Intellectual Biography" (June 2017)
Event Held: with Amir Engel (Hebrew University)
Workshop on Crises of Meaning and Political Theology (June 2017)
Workshop Held
Speakers included:
Martin Ruehl (Cambridge), "Ernst Kantorowicz and the Politics of Political Theology"
Amir Engel (Hebrew University), "On Real and Imagined Catastrophes: Gershom Scholem's Sabbatinism."
Julia Ng (Goldsmith's), "Surrealism’s Political-Theological Afterlife: Benjamin—Blumenberg—Taubes."
Carolin Duttlinger (Oxford), ''Rescue in the Face of Danger: Benjamin, Goethe, Sebald''
Hjalmar Falk (Oxford/Gothenburg), "The Modern Epimetheus. Carl Schmitt's Marian Katechontism"
Jean-Claude Monond (ENS), '"Progress, Providence, eschaton: Löwith, Blumenberg, and after"
How the Mouse Lost its Tail, Or, Lamarck's Dangerous Idea (June 2017)
Talk Held: with Professor Jessica Riskin (University of Stanford)
Rethinking Crisis (June 2017)
Two Day Conference Held: Perspectives on the concept and topic of ‘Crisis’, to approach it meta-critically and understand its various deployments. The aim was to foster new thinking on this ubiquitous concept.
'A Crisis the earth has never seen: Nietzsche, the ''war of spirits'' and Great politics' (December 2017)
