On May 4th, 2022, the IDK will have the pleasure to receive guest lecturer Dr. Sean McGrath, Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Prof. McGrath will give a talk titled: “We Are the Primitives of a New Civilization” at the WZU, room 101, University of Augsburg, at 16:00.
Abstract:
A political framework for the international collaboration required to survive the super-wicked problems facing the world today, such as climate change, technological disruption, and nuclear war, does not yet exist. At the same time, climatology has challenged us to think the deep future of the earth and raised the question of whether humanity will have a place on it. Our era is the dawn of not only “the ecological thought,” as Timothy Morton calls it, but also the eschatological thought. That is, we are called to think the end of civilization as we have known it in the 12,000 years of stable climate known as the Holocene, and the beginning of an era of humanity for which no pre-existing categories exist. We are called to think what FWJ Schelling called “das Unvordenkliche.”