After successful completion of the course, students are able to better contextualize their ongoing PHD research in the larger context of the discipline Architecture Theory, and with respect to contemporary discourses and developments especially in history, philosophy, arts and technics.
STANZAE CONTRAPPOSTAE
As long as European reasoning refuses to de- and re-categorize itself, that is, to reconsider what is implicit in it, to question it and to probe its “obviousness,” it cannot effectively access an elsewhere, another way of thinking; and philosophy, despite its “doubt,” will no longer be able to be self-reflective.
- Francois Jullien, Beginnings
It is not inevitable, when holding rationality in highest esteem, to find oneself locked up in the confines of necessities and determinations. This is about how to enter a way of thinking in which rationality goes together againstwith a metaphysical kind of freedom – where the more one pushes for rationalising what perplexes, the more the thinking-self is set free. This neologism, againstwith, indicates an doubly-directed, and inversely unfolding movement: rationalisation goes against deliberation, but freedom comes with rationalisation. They are opposites in direction, but not in substance.
How to conceive, how to contain such movement of thought?
By STANZAE CONTRAPPOSTAE.
Reading of texts and group discussions.
The weekly meetings entail:
- readings of approx. 30 pages
The seminar is conducted as a joint course with PHD candidates from ETH Zurich. It can be joined either actively (with the rewards of 3 ECTS) or passively (as a listener, without credit points).
Readings: TBD
Francois Jullien, The Book of Beginnings (Yale University Press, 2016); Erich Hörl, "Introduction to general ecology: The ecologization of thinking" in ibid. (Ed.), Introduction to general ecology The ecologization of thinking (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); Yuk Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics (Minnesota Press, 2020); René Descartes, Discours on Methods of How to Find Truth in Science; Jean Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking (Stanford University Press, 2003); Giorgio Agamben, Signatura Rerum, On Method; Giorgio Agamben, Stanza, Word and Phantasm in Western Culture; Georg Steiner, Language & Silence; ...
