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The 12th
International Conference of |
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ISSEI |
In cooperation With |
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International Society for the Study
of European Ideas |
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Section I: History, Geography, Science
and
Section
V: Religion, Philosophy, Anthropology, Psychology, Language
Workshop: Hannah Arendt on Science and the Human Condition
Chair: Chris
Irwin
Following
the launch of the first human-made orbital satellite in 1957, Hannah Arendt
observed with concern that technologies made possible by science had granted
her generation a capacity that no previous one had known: the ability to rise
above the earth and break away from its confines entirely. This position (found
in the Prologue to The Human Condition)
is paralleled by her views on the development of nuclear weapons and, with
them, the capacity for human beings to annihilate the very conditions of their
existence. With these reflections, Arendt draws attention to what she regards
as the tendency of modern science to look beyond its own dependency on the
rootedness and conditionality of thinking in order to attempt to raise itself
to a “universal” position from which the phenomenology of human existence is
regarded as irrelevant to the truths that science yields.
While Arendt’s pessimism is understandable,
this attitude is problematic at a time when science is required to help heal
the wounds it has made, or at least made possible (e.g., climate change, the
depletion of vital resources). Yet she also alludes to the possibility that
science can be reconfigured and brought into a different relationship to
thinking and action. For example, in Volume One of The Life of the Mind, she seems to
suggest that science could have an important political potential, since it
appears to be both capable of and responsible for providing ways in which
thinking can preserve its connections with the senses and so the common world,
thus counteracting the necessary but always ambivalent propensity of thinking
to isolate itself from the world. In this regard, science could help to reign
in speculative fantasies that might be transformed into or used to support
destructive political, economic, and social practices.
The organizers of this workshop invite
papers which examine, apply, or contest Arendt’s views on the possible uses and
abuses of science. Topics of interest would include:
·
How Arendt’s critical analysis of the history and
legacy of modern science could be used to inform or reform scientific
endeavour.
·
How scientific thinking and practices might be
brought into a more dialectical relationship with what Arendt describes as
“thinking” and, in general, with what she calls the life of the mind.
·
How the practice of science
can be connected with an Arendtian conception of
collective action.
·
Examinations of
the question of whether or how scientific discourses could be linked to the
renewal of and recommitment to the cultural and social imaginary of a common,
public world.
·
Discussions of
the risks involved in the marriage of science and politics, especially in light
of their disastrous convergence in certain modern political ideologies.
Please
send proposals to:
Chris
Irwin
[The conference] [Feedback]
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us]
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