If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out and difficult (Heraclitus, B18)
Since the beginning of the XXth century, the experience of recurring crises is globally manifest in Western sciences and culture, national and international relations, and political and economic systems. An impending environmental disaster is added decades later. The motor behind Modernity’s idea of progress and its nascent political projects—the faith in the predictive potency of natural laws and their causal determinism—begins to weaken (Husserl, Spengler, Toynbee). Towards the end of the XXth century, humanity faces the collapse of the so-called Western and Eastern blocks. The growing globalization of communications, interdisciplinarity, and technological revolution promise to revive the intercultural dialogue and expand “democratization.” But the accelerated growth of the digital revolution and its Promethean possibilities reveals its “Janus face”. Technical-digital training increases exponentially (see the “open AI-ChatGPT”), in inverse proportion to education and culture. “Information” expands while “critical knowledge” decreases. Former methods and theories lose the efficacy of “predictive control.” Even physics acknowledges entropy, chaos, and unpredictability. “History” is discovered within the natural world, and sciences speak of “the end of certainty” (Prigogine). The use of dynamic probabilistic systems increases. The idea of an “in-disposable future” surprising us “like a robber in the night” (Saint Paul, Heidegger), as well as Habermas’ “new invisibility” darken the future of the planet and humanity. Instead of being fulfilled by syntheses of coincidence, human expectancies (founded upon past experiences) are met with conflicts or emptiness (Husserl). An epistemic shadow grows within the context of worldwide communication threatening to devour it. Cognitive (emotional) biases radicalize and polarize opinions, evidential criteria evaporate, and narrative “bubbles” proliferate. Digital networks and media oscillate between consensual dialogues and battlefields—where acknowledged “truths” have silenced dissenters. Verbal and ideological violence becomes physical violence (Arendt). The world tends again towards crude populisms, autocracies, and/or totalitarianisms (Fromm, Arendt). Barely disguised as institutional democracies, they begin to replace them.
The XIX Journeys of the Peruvian Circle of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics summons scholars to reflect and interpret the structure and genesis of cognitive and emotional individual and collective experiences in order to shed light upon the paradoxical and multifaceted crises and violence that our globalized humanity faces today, and that takes shape as a “new invisibility” regarding the future of democracy, ecology and technology.
Keynote speakers: James Dodd (New School for Social Research), Michael Staudigl (University of Vienna), and Natalie Depraz (Université de Rouen)
Submission of title and abstract (max. 150 palabras): 15th of August 2023 (cipher@pucp.edu.pe).
Blind evaluation: 15-29th of August
Confirmation: 30th of August – 10th of September