A warmer year
Posted on 2 Jan 2023.
It has become something of a common-place for social power-brokers to issue statements to mark the end of an old year and the beginning of a new. Kings do it, prime ministers and presidents do it, and should not also the Ereignis Center for Philosophy and the Arts do it?
Thus, in the spirit of the less-than-haughty and dead-serious we offer the following:
2022 was great (for us, but really, this kind of reservation oughtn’t be necessary, as readers assume, in the absence of an explicit agent, that speakers nominally refer to their selves in their judgements – such reservations must be remnants of classical logic, or what certain venerable philosophers refer to as a “school philosophy” where priority was granted to an objective utterer) for these reasons:
- Restrictions legitimated by the spread of the corona virus largely ended or were radically reduced in scale and reach, which meant that
- Participants in the 2022 Ereignis Conference met on-site in Gdynia, in contrast to the previous year’s edition, which was held entirely online. Further,
- We welcomed our first students, registrants for our pre-recorded modules on Life Technologies, Ethics, and Wallace Stevens.
We carried on developing our learning site, moving from a showcase model to a dual model, keeping much content in the open, while reserving valuable content for registered users and students. As we are doing all coding in-house we’re curious to hear what you think about the present state of our site!
We look forward to 2023! We agree with those who say that one’s ability to set oneself outrageous goals is inversely proportional to one’s ability to fulfill those goals. (This is logic, really.) Nevertheless, we are looking to a year that will see
- Several new courses offered from Ereignis Institute, our learning site,
- A third, on-site and technically upgraded Ereignis Conference, and
- A growing realisation of the inter-connectedness of our contemporary world.
It’s early January 2023 in Gdynia, Poland. Trees, bushes and flowers are preparing for spring. Instead of snow and winter hats we have 14 degrees (Celcius), bare roads, and t-shirts. Opinion is divided on what the cause or causes of this unseasonal burst of warm weather may be. We at Ereginis Center for Philosophy and the Arts limit ourselves to observe that we seem to be heading towards a warmer year, a warmer future. This event, the green winter, can serve to remind us of what it is to have faith. To paraphrase the late Pope Benedict XVI, faith is not a set of norms, books, or rituals. It is not even a community. Faith is an event.
All the best for 2023.
