Spring lecture series: Andreas Weber

The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA) is pleased to announce the second lecture in the series ON THE ANTHROPOCENE: Either/Or. The lectures address the role of art and philosophy in relation to questions of ecology, climate change, co-existence, and sustainability as an existential urgency of our times.

Lectures are free and open to the public on Zoom.

Culture as Reciprocity. Towards ecological citizenship
Culture sets itself against “nature.” “Nature” implies determinism, the opposite of the experience and creation of meaning, which is culture’s domain. In the Anthropocene and its accompanying double crisis of global heating and life extinction, we need to rethink this classical opposition. What if we understood life not as a mechanical phenomenon, but as the embodied creation of meaning? And what if reciprocity was at the heart of ecology? The talk will explore how our shared aliveness can give us urgent clues about ecological citizenship.

Andreas Weber is a biologist, philosopher and non-fiction writer. His work deals with a re-evaluation of reality as alive, subjective, and deeply shared. He teaches ecophilosophy at the Berlin University of the Arts and is adjunct professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. His latest books are Enlivenment. Toward a Poetics of the Anthropocene (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019) and Sharing Life. An Ecopolitics of Reciprocity (New Delhi & Berlin, 2020). 

The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA) grants a PhD in Visual Arts: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory.