Workshop 1  (July 1)

"Coping with contemporary challenges and pitfalls in science communication"

Workshop 2 (July 3)

"Interactive and creative science storytelling: the basics" 

Lentecyclus KVAB

Workshop "Seeing to Learn and Learning to See" 

(Brussel, 4 juni 2025)

Inaugural Katharine E. Welsh Speaker 

"Responsible Science (Communication)" 

(John Hopkins) 

14/5/ 2024) 

Lecture 

"The Catch-22 of logocentrism and expressing the Eternal Dao"

A growing number of academics are looking at the world and nature in a different manner emphasizing, for example, interconnectedness, agency, cooperation, and embeddedness in nature instead of approaching it in terms of isolation, passiveness, and survival. But although awareness is growing that we need a new way of looking at ourselves and the world to solve our large-scale global crises, there is still a hazardous way ahead of us to achieve this goal from within the academic community. In order to shed some light on this deeper issue, we will take a look at the fundamental problem that logocentrism poses to us academics because it is the foundation of modern science and most of Western philosophy. We will do this from a Daoist perspective.

How can we be sure that we are really thinking outside Western philosophy? For this, we need to investigate what the boundary is that differentiates “Western philosophy” from other ways of knowing and use this insight to help us evaluate our own behaviour and thinking processes. We argue that the essence of what is here referred to as “Western philosophy” is, in fact, logocentrism, a principle which is also found outside of Western philosophy and which is the conviction that language is not only a fundamental expression of reality but the superior form of epistemology altogether. This logocentric attitude is reinforced through education worldwide, endangering epistemological diversity. Importantly, the dominance of logocentrism in civilized societies is one of the central critics of Daoist philosophy which is expressed in the very first verse of the foundational book of its philosophy by Lao Tse. The Eternal Dao that can be spoken about is not the Eternal Dao, reads the famous verse from the Daodejing. Yet, we need to speak about the eternal Dao here, and by doing so, it is no longer Eternal. But if we do not speak about Dao, the Eternal Dao is not brought up at all. The fundamental problem we encounter here could be described as a kind of catch-22. If you want to share insights from philosophies outside logocentrism, you will have to abide by the rules of logocentrism to share these in an academic setting. This is the catch-22 of the academic who wants to bring change in the academic system. The only format recognized by the academic culture is deeply logocentric and its templates all depend on it. The mould itself that shapes academic thinking is logocentrism. The deep conviction that we can express nature fully and truly through logos is so fundamental to all modern science that it would cease to function if we took it away. Therefore, we will initiate much needed discussions during this presentation in an academic setting to foundationally reflect upon how we can chisel out an emptiness, in line with the Daoist line of thinking, so that other ways of knowing do not become a victim of the catch-22 and become assimilated in the process. 

Workshop 1 

"Coping with contemporary challenges and pitfalls in science communication"

Workshop 2 

"Designing, iterating, and evaluating science stories from A to Z"