LFU:online

Practicing research in a field of contemporary interdisciplinary significance.

This seminar is the second part of a two-part seminar series that started in the WS 2020 (222931) However, it will not presuppose that students have participated in the first seminar.
Philosophers of technology agree that the digital revolution represents one of the greatest challenges of our time – apart from the climate crisis. The basic lines of this challenge were predicted by Edmund Husserl in this famous, unfinished book on the ‘Crisis of European Sciences’ of 1936, on which leading philosophers of technology, like Bernard Stiegler, build. I have evaluated this discussion in the first part of my book: “Wege aus der Symoblischen Verelendung. Zur anthropologischen Herausforderung des Digitalen Zeitalters“, which was the topic of the last seminar. Starting from Stiegler and the anthropological discussion of the last 20 years, I have argued there that the new situation of the 21st century requires us to recover a concept of human intelligence that is consistent with virtue ethical and mystagogical accounts of the human strive for knowledge such as in Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa.
This is the topic of the second seminar, which will build on the second part of the above book “Teil 2: Minimal Religion. Orthodoxie in einer post-konfessionellen Welt.“ It will focus on the spiritual practices and ‘self-technologies’ that governed the epistemological basic attitude of the above sapiential thinkers. The key features of these practices will be systematically unfolded within the framework of the anthropological discussions of the early 20th century in the wake to Max Scheler (1874-1927). Given that these discussions have become forgotten subsequent to the (meanwhile outdated) ‘linguistic turn’ of the mid-twentieth century, the recovery of both traditions will take on the character of a mutually enriching dialogue between (late-)modern thinkers and premodern thinkers. This dialogue will have four foci:
(1) the value-revolution in contemporary discussions about ethical technology design.

(2) Schelers early attempts to recover the unity of scientific knowledge-formation and spiritual practice, which built on Edmund Husserl but avoided the subjectivism of the early and middle Husserl
(3) the blind spots, incoherencies and fallacies of Scheler’s anthropology that require a critical transformation of his value-ethics in the light of later and earlier medieval discussions
(4) the question to what extent a revised hermeneutics of ‘objective values’ provides the foundations of a recovery of the perennial tradition of premodern philosophy, which enables us to move beyond the debates of the turn of the millennium in the direction of a new kind of realism.
The theological aim of this seminar is, to develop a value-ethical realism that resonates with the orthodox teaching of the first millennium of the eastern and western tradition of Christianity, without getting entangled in the pseudo-problems of ‘late medieval thinkers’ such as Duns Scotus, Immanuel Kant and Jürgen Habermas.

Reading and discussion.

Active participation in the class and seminar paper.

General information on exams, dates and sign-on at the department:
https://www.uibk.ac.at/systheol/lehre/pruefungen.html.en.

Sarah Spiekermann, Digitale Ethik. Ein Wertesystem für das 21. Jahrhundert (München: Droemer 2019)
Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus (Halle: M. Niemeyer 1921) (https://archive.org/details/DerFormalismusInDerEthikUndDieMaterialeWertethik/page/n2/mode/2up)
Max Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen. 1. Band: Religiöse Erneuerung (Leipzig: Peter Reinhold 1921), 376-576 (https://archive.org/details/vomewigenimmensc00sche/page/n6/mode/2up)
Max Scheler, "Normative und deskriptive Bedeutung des 'Ordo Amoris' (1916)". In:  Schriften aus dem Nachlass I: Zur Ethik und Erkenntnistheorie (GW 10) (Bonn: Bouvier 2000), 347-376
Erich Przywara, Religionsbegründung. Max Scheler - J. H. Newman (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder 1923 (https://archive.org/details/MN40132ucmf_2 )
Johannes Hoff, "Rückkehr zur Wirklichkeit. Wissenschaft und Spiritualität nach der Wiederentdeckung unserer leiblichen Existenz". In: Reiner Frey; Gerd Doeben-Henisch (Ed.), Meditation und die Zukunft der Bildung 2019: Spiritualität und Wissenschaft (Weinheim - München: Beltz-Juventa 2020)
Thomas Fuchs, Das Gehirn als Beziehungsorgan. Eine phänomenologisch-ökologische Konzeption (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 52016) / Thomas Fuchs, Ecology of the Brain. The Phenomenology and Biology of the Embodied Mind (Oxford: Oxford UP 2018)
Hartmut Rosa, Unverfügbarkeit (Salzburg: Residenz 2018)
Charles Taylor, Ein säkulares Zeitalter (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2012), Teil V.  
The manuscript of my book will be distributed in the preparatory meeting. Further sources will be announced in the seminar.

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