Annual Erasmus Philosophy Lecture 2019

Yuk Hui will deliver the annual Erasmus Philosophy Lecture on the 29th November 2019 at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

The title of his lecture is: After the Organic.

Friday, 29 Nov 2019, 10:00 – 12:30pm
G2-46 (G-building)Abstract
In this talk I propose that in his Critique of Judgement, Kant has imposed an organic condition of philosophizing which came out of a particular historical and philosophical context, e.g. the emergence of biology and a counter-theory to mechanism. This organic thinking was developed further by the post-Kantians in parallel with the industrial revolutions and revived in different schools of the early 20th century, notably Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. I suggest that this organic condition of philosophizing seems to have come to its end after the rise cybernetics and modern computational theory, which Heidegger also sees as the end of philosophy, and which forces us to re-articulate a new condition of philosophizing.

Biography
Yuk Hui studied Computer Engineering and Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong and Goldsmiths College in London, with a focus on philosophy of technology. He currently teaches at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Between 2012 and 2018 he taught at the institute of philosophy and art (IPK) and Institute of Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media of the Leuphana University Lüneburg where he wrote his habilitation thesis. He is also a visiting professor at the China Academy of Art where he teaches a master class with Bernard Stiegler every spring. Since 2019 he is Visiting Associate Professor at the School of Creative Media of City University in Hong Kong. He is initiator of the Research Network for Philosophy and TechnologyOpens external, an international network which facilitates researches and collaborations on philosophy and technology. Hui is editor (with Andreas Broeckmann) of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and TheoryOpens external (2015), and author of On the Existence of Digital ObjectsOpens external (prefaced by Bernard Stiegler, University of Minnesota Press, March 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in CosmotechnicsOpens external (Urbanomic, December 2016), and Recursivity and ContingencyOpens external (Rowman & Littlefield International, February 2019). His writings have been translated into a dozen languages.

info: https://www.eur.nl/en/esphil/events/erasmus-philosophy-lecture-after-organic-2019-11-29

Latest from Blog

Chinese translation of ChatGPT, or the Eschatology of Machines (Voices of Photography, issue 35)

ChatGPT自2022年11月推出以來,便引發了狂熱與恐懼。它對不同語言的語義及語法的嫻熟掌握(但尚未精通內容),令只是期待普通聊天機器人的使用者感到驚訝。有些大學院校立即禁止學生使用ChatGPT來寫論文,因為它的表現優於多數人類學生。報紙上的專欄文章則宣布了教育的終結──不僅因為學生可以用它來做作業,還因為ChatGPT比很多老師能提供更多的資訊。人工智慧似乎已征服了另一個根據古典哲學來定義人性的領域:邏各斯(logos)。恐慌隨著存在領域(existential territory)1的進一步喪失而加劇。當氣候的崩壞和機器人的反叛召喚出了末世,人類歷史的世界末日想像變得更加強烈。 末日對於現代人來說從來都不陌生。事實上,哲學家卡爾.洛維特(Karl Löwith)在1949年出版的《歷史的意義》(Meaning in History)一書即指出,現代歷史哲學──從黑格爾(Hegel)到布克哈特(Burckhardt)──就是末世論的世俗化2。歷史的終極目標便是使超越的變成內在(makes the transcendent immanent),不論是耶穌基督的第二次降臨或只是成為神人(Homo deus)。更廣泛地說,這種對歷史時期的聖經式或亞伯拉罕式想像,為人類的存在提供了許多深刻反思,卻也阻礙了對於我們的未來之理解。 more