Conference “The Person, Morality and Politics: in Search of Philosophical Alternatives” (archive)
All political parties and institutions claim to serve people. Election programmes and politicians’ speeches almost universally declare that the human person comes first. Most citizens feel and understand that such phrases are just a smokescreen, but where does this scepticism come from? Is it not the case that modern politics is fundamentally alien to the human person? Is it possible to reconcile an ethical concern for each individual as a unique being with thinking in terms of commonalities such as the state, the law, national security, the laws of the market, gross domestic product? Is it still possible today to bridge the gap between the individual and the state?
From antiquity to the present day, the tension between the moral and the political has been felt in the theoretical reflections of philosophers and in practical life. The conference sought to take a fresh look at the relationship between morality and politics, moving away from abstract theories and towards the individual as the foundation of morality and politics. The origins of morality and the political were proposed to be found in the inner framework of the concept of the person. By updating the first-person perspective that structures practical experience, the conference sought answers to the following questions: are our political capacities, actions and expectations compatible with personal morality? What are the core virtues and moral attitudes without which politics is unthinkable? How should attitudes towards politics and morality be changed to bring them back together? Or is their conflict inevitable and unresolvable?
The conference “The Person, Morality and Politics: in Search of Philosophical Alternatives” will take place from 28 February to 1 March 2022. The conference will take place in Vilnius (Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vokiečių str. 10).
The conference is a part of the project “The Modern Problem of the Relationship between Morality and Politics: the Challenge of Western and Lithuanian Philosophy” implemented by IIRPS VU. The project is funded by the Lithuanian Research Council.
Holger Zaborowski is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Erfurt, Germany. His main areas of research include political philosophy, phenomenology and hermeneutics. Zaborowski studied philosophy, Catholic theology and classical philology at the universities of Freiburg, Basel and Cambridge. He has published extensively on classical German and 20th-century philosophy, and has researched problems in phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethics, politics and philosophy of religion. His publications include a comprehensive study of the contemporary German personalist Robert Spaemann: “Robert Spaemann’s Philosophy of the Human Person. Nature, Freedom, and the Critique of Modernity”.
MONDAY 28 FEBRUARY 2022
17.00 – 18.00 prof. dr. Holger Zaborowski “Robert Spaemann, Joachim Ritter and the Non-Political Dimension of Philosophy” (recording available here)
18.00 – 18.30 Discussion with prof. Holger Zaborowski (Moderated by prof. dr. Alvydas Jokubaitis)
TUESDAY 1 MARCH 2022
10.00 – 10.30 prof. dr. Alvydas Jokubaitis “Why doesn’t politics have its own ontology?” (recording)
10.30 – 11.00 dr. Aistė Noreikaitė “Is Man a Political Animal? The Search for the Political in the Ontology of the Person” (recording)
11.00 – 11.20 coffee break
11.20 – 11.50 Dr. Vilius Bartninkas “Moderation in Morals and Politics” (recording)
11.50 – 12.20 Dr. Simas Čelutka “Self-sacrifice as the moral basis of politicalness” (recording)
12.20 – 14.00 lunch break
14.00 – 14.30 Simona Merkinaitė “Is it possible to reconcile politics and morality? The perspective of H. Arendt”
14.30 – 15.00 Assoc. Dr. Povilas Aleksandravičius “The Role of P. Ricoeur’s Creative Imagination and Bergson’s Creative Emotion in the Process of Creating Social Norms”
15.00 – 15.20 coffee break
15.20 – 16.20 Concluding discussion (all speakers present)
