Thinking in cosmology proposes an interesting alternative to the all too human thought of our modern era, its insistence on a separation of Nature and Culture, and thus its removal from the world – thought, Deleuze and Guattari once asserted, crosses the universe in an instant. In this workgroup we explore the numerous possibilities the cosmological might open up to and how it moves in the works of some of the most important thinkers today: from the work on non-modern cosmologies and ontologies in the so called “ontological turn,” spearheaded by figures such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Phillipe Descola, and Eduardo Kohn; to the process philosophical works of Alfred North Whitehead which again flourishes in the cosmopolitics of Isabelle Stengers and in ways Bruno Latour; to works problematizing the modern perspective from specific ecologies, mental, social, or environmental, such as in the works of Marìa Lugones, Marisol de la Cadena, and Donna Haraway; to its possible deployment in relation to technics in Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics. What is the relevance of such cosmological thinking for the Humanities?

Readings:

- Viveiros De Castro, Eduardo, and Yuk Hui. “For a Strategic Primitivism: A Dialogue between Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Yuk Hui.” Philosophy Today 65, no. 2 (2021): 391–400

- Muprhie, Andrew. “The World as Medium: A Whiteheadian Media Philosophy.” In Immediation, edited by Erin Manning, Anna Munster, and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen. Open Humanities Press, 2019.

To participate send an email to: h.h.kuipers@uva.nl