Contemporary Philosophy of Culture

This course explores the nature of cultural experience whether artistic, interpretive, or educational, within the contemporary landscape of technology, virtuality, fragmentation, subjectivity, and globalisation. It questions whether a fundamental aspect of our existential and cultural experiences is fading due to the pervasive influence of technology and broader socio-economic shifts. This vital aspect, unlike self-centered subjectivity, may depend on our capacity for availability to ‘otherness’. The course investigates the relevance of fostering such an ethical awareness in a world dominated by transient, casual modes of self-expression. Ultimately, it asks: Do our existential and cultural formations gain meaning only when relating to other persons or other things, be it a community, a person, a field, or a broader social, economic, or political reality? 

Lectures

1. 1. The Integrity of the Person at the Age of Virtual Productivity

   2. Contemporary Education as Mutual Formations in Self-expression

   3. Grace and Trust in the Formation of the Self-identity of Absolute Contradictories: On the Cultural Relevance of the Ethical Phenomenologies of Gabriel Marcel and Nishida Kitaro

   4. Self-Retraction as the Act of Seeing the Taking Place of Meaning - Between Ethics and Zen

   5. Creativity, Technology and Self-awakening to the Other

   6. After the Crisis of Truths in Contemporary Art, The Way to Wisdom

   7. Contemporary Western Culture and the Possibility of a Responsible Humanism

   8. Hope and Despair in Postmodernity

   9. Dwelling in the Light of the Thou, or the Art of the Opening Space: Ethics and Experience in Contemporary Culture

   10. For an Ethics of Hope and Availability in a Multi-Relational Culture