Here are my concluding words to the 4th Ereignis Conference, presented in Gdynia, Poland, on August 11, 2024.

Very briefly to round off this conference and I will just go straight into it. It won’t be very long so that we can have a nice rest all of us.

First I will do some pragmatics, even though I’m not the greatest pragmatic I will still start there. There is an aftermath to this conference. Many people have asked about it and I will just repeat it now so that it’s very clear to everyone. We will publish a volume of proceedings. This will be a genuine publication with an ISBN number. It will be archived in the National Library and archive.com and elsewhere. It will not be peer reviewed however. What we will do is that we will invite all of you to send us the papers that you have given this weekend. We will send you formatting instructions because it has to be quite meticulously formatted for us to not have to spend too much time doing this. We don’t have a enormous staff here, so we do it ourselves. So, please, it has to be properly formatted and we will send those instructions probably next week. This will be a purely electronic publication. It will not exist in print.

The second thing we will do is that we will invite everyone here to submit a full paper to our peer reviewed journal Inscriptions. Our section editor for Academic Articles, along with an American scholar who is now in Japan, Andrew Jorn, and myself will look at the look at all the submissions along with external reviewers. It’s a blind review process and those who get accepted there can be published then by Inscriptions in a special section devoted to to this conference. Whether that will be in the January next year or if it will be in our issue number two next year, this is something we haven’t decided on yet, but it will be out next year.

The third thing is that we have instituted as sort of formal evaluation structure for all our events and we will invite you to submit an evaluation form. This is something that we do on our web page and I will take that up here. Okay, so when you log into our our web page, this is what you get up on your screen. You can modify your profile. It might be useful to be aware of this button and then you can do more stuff here. It will come up a button where you can submit your evaluation for this conference, but then at the very bottom of this page there is a discussion group and I would encourage everyone to ask questions, to answer questions that are already there and participate and make this a lively forum. This is for the benefit of all of us. It will strengthen the center and you know, we can all learn something, so, please, feel encouraged to do that. Right, so we will send out instructions for for these things probably next week already.

That was the pragmatic part. Now I will talk a little bit about this conference as a whole. I will just give some very very brief comments about silence. Already Matthew in his first keynote yesterday talked about this thing: silence as a kind of translation. Silence is connected very intimately to translation. Again, Ronnie this morning talked about that silence can be about sort of translation of being, that being is or being can be silent. Silence needs to be translated somehow. There can be a nothing, as some ontologies would would claim, that does not require translation.

Thus, silence can be the beginning of speech, or it can be about converting silence into speech and then we are we returning to the topic of Matthew’s keynote because there he says he said that there is a conversion of experience that happens. And we discussed whether this also entails a conversion of the speaking subject. Matthew discussed Jon Fosse and his conversion into Catholicism about a decade ago and the question is posed in Septology, his mammoth of a novel, and we may ask whether this novel is essentially about a conversion. So what we have is a conversion of silence into speech, but also about a conversion of the speaking subject and the question of whether these two elements can be usefully held apart. So this is one major question that I think remains after this conference.

Or I would say ala Wittgenstein that silence could be the end of speech. The last line of the tractatus that Chris brought up, for example, comes to mind here:

Of that which I cannot speak I must remain silent.

Searle discusses the task of those who want to defend the earlier Ogden translation. For instance, the famous last line of the book,

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

What cannot be said, cannot be said!

Was sich nicht sagen läßt, läßt sich nicht sagen!

Since the earlier translation is so well known, I felt the need to keep the inverted word order in my translation, rather than translating the sentence more directly as “We must not talk about what cannot be spoken of” or “We mustn’t try to say what cannot be said.” But no “whereof …thereof” or “About things we cannot speak of we must keep silent.”

And so and this is Searle’s final line in the Tractatus.

About things we cannot speak of we must keep silent.

And with those words I thank everyone for participating and We will leave it at that. Thank you very much.

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Gutter får bedre resultater i matematikk når den som vurderer prøvene ikke vet kjønnet til den som prøves. Hva er grunnen til at gutter får kjønnsfratrekk når karakterene settes i skolen?

Dette innlegget er tidligere publisert i nettavisen Subjekt.

Oppfatningen av jenter som søte, snille og stort sett føyelige, og gutter som høyrøstede, brutale og oftere slemme får store konsekvenser for barna våre og mulighetene deres når de vokser opp. Det litt banale perspektivet på kjønnsforskjeller kommer til uttrykk på mange samfunnsområder. Vi får følelsen av at det litt idealiserte, Bakkebygrenda-aktige perspektivet gjør seg gjeldende f. eks. i mediedekningen av politiske personligheter både ute (Clinton vs. Trump) og på hjemmebane (Solberg vs. Moxnes). Hovedanliggendet her er hvordan ideen om de søte små pikene og de voldsomme, uvørne guttene har fått lov til å skape en betydelig strukturell forskjell – omtrent halvparten av oss vil vel si urettferdighet – som begynner i grunnskolen og som etterhvert får dramatiske og radikale effekter i form av uliketer i utdannings- og arbeidsmuligheter, med påfølgende avvikende innektsnivå, i gutters disfavør.

Mannsutvalget kom med sin rapport for to uker siden. Særlig når den suppleres med subjektive opplevelser, slik som vi fikk i samtalen mellom utvalgets leder Claus Jervell og Magnus Marsdal i sistnevntes podkast Mímir og Marsdal, får vi et utfyllende og temmelig oppdatert bilde av likestillingen i Norge sett fra menns og gutters perspektiv. Lærere og andre folk i utdanningssektoren har lenge visst at det er en skjevhet i hvordan jenter og gutter verdsettes i skolen. Gitt at den mest objektive vurderingen av elevers ferdigheter er den som gis når eleven og den som vurderer ikke er kjent for hverandre og den mest subjektive er vurderingen som foretas av læreren alene, har vi en skala av vurderinger fra nasjonale og internasjonale prøver i den ene enden av skalaen og standpunktkarakterer satt av faglærer på den andre. Mellom disse to har vi eksamenskarakterene, som i hovedsak settes av et kollegium.

Siden vi har nasjonale prøver i tre fag, lesing (på norsk), engelsk og matematikk, gir det mening å sammenligne karakterene i disse tre fagene. I femte trinn skårer gutter og jenter omtrent likt, jenter ett skalapoeng bedre, i lesing, mens gutter skårer tre skalapoeng bedre i regning. De nasjonale forskjellene i disse fagene øker når barna blir eldre. Når vi kommer til niende trinn skårer jentene tre skalapoeng bedre i lesing, mens guttene skårer tre skalapoeng bedre i regning. I engelsk skårer guttene litt bedre enn jentene på femtetrinn mens ulikheten er borte på niende trinn. Likevel, når læreren får lov å sette sin egen karakter får jentene høyest karakter i alle fag, med unntak av gym. I gjennomsnitt får guttene fire grunnskolepoeng færre enn jentene. (Kilde for disse tallene er NOU 2024: 8, s. 107-108.)

Det som er nytt i denne rapporten er at tendensen til å forfordele jentene fortsetter og er blitt forsterket. Forskjellene er økende i fagene: guttene blir stadig bedre enn jentene i matte mens jentene blir bedre enn guttene i lesing, samtidig som jentene får stadig bedre utgangspunkt etter grunnskolen. Forskjellene som har sin årsak i kjønn er store og økende.

Dette skjer til tross for at det pedagogiske etablissementet i årevis har satt i tiltak for å utjevne forskjellen mellom elevenes objektive ferdigheter og karakterene de får. Høyt prioritert har såkalte vurderingsfellesskap vært. Dette betyr i korte trekk at lærere settes sammen for å bli enige om hvilke karakterer som passer til ulike besvarelser. Dermed, har man tenkt, skulle det bli en mer lik vurdering på tvers av besvarelser og elevgrupper. Som datagrunnlaget til Mannsutvalget viser har tiltakene vært feilslått. Avstanden i grunnskolepoeng mellom jentene og guttene fortsetter å øke, i guttenes disfavør, til tross for at guttenes kompetanse objektivt sett stadig blir bedre enn jentenes i matte.

Det vi nå må våge å gjøre er å spørre hva som er årsaken til at jentene får høyere karakterer i fag der de har lavere kompetanse. Mannsutvalget forsøker ikke å besvare dette spørsmålet direkte. Før vi forsøker å gi en forklaring er det likevel på sin plass med et viktig forbehold: Mannsutvalget og forfatteren av denne kronikken er ikke imot kvinners rettigheter og naturligvis for likestilling mellom kjønnene. Denne likestillingen bør ta form av mulighetslikestilling. Det er og vil fortsette å være forskjeller mellom kjønnene; det er ikke noe mål å fjerne disse forskjellene. Poenget her er heller ikke å bestemme hvorvidt likestilling er et spillteoretisk pluss-sum- eller null-sum-spill, som Erna Solberg har yndet å prosedere spørsmålet. I noen tilfeller er kjønnskampen åpenbart en strid om begrensede ressurser der kjønnene står mot hverandre, som når den kvinnelige ledelsen ved Universitetet i Oslos lar 14 kvinner og to menn få delta i institusjonens koordineringsgruppe for likestilling. På andre områder, f. eks. i omsorgsspørmål, kan det tenkes at både barna og foreldre av begge kjønn vil få et godt utfall av større grad av likestilling. Dette er likevel ikke hovedpoenget her. Det vi vet er at jenter og gutter har ulikt ferdighetsnivå i skolen men at karakterene de får i skolefagene inverterer denne kjønnsmessige forskjellen. Gutter er bedre i matte, men får dårligere karakterer.

Når vi vet at forskjellene mellom gutter og jenter i ferdigheter øker – gutter blir stadig flinkere enn jenter i matte – mens vurderingen går motsatt vei, i gutters disfavør, er det på tide å anerkjenne at strategien for å skape likhet mellom karakterer og faktiske ferdigheter har mislyktes. Når forsøket på å skape vurderingsfellesskap ikke har utjevnet forskjellene er det nærliggende å spørre om det er dypereliggende årsaker til at lærere foretrekker jenter i klasserommet, og belønner dem deretter til standpunkt, selv om gutenne har bedre ferdigheter. Kan årsaken være at jenter er lettere å ha med å gjøre, mens gutter anses som høyrøstede og vanskelige?

En indikator på at dette kan være tilfellet er at når lærerne blir spør om hvilket kjønn som er mest modent når de begynner på barneskolen svarer det store flertallet at jentene er modne og guttene barnslige. Vi vet samtidig at det store flertallet av barneskolelærere er nettopp kvinner. Det kan synes som om man foretrekker barn av sitt eget kjønn når man vurderer hvilke barn som skal anses som modne.

Vi vet imidlertid også at det ikke er en direkte sammenheng mellom læreren kjønn og forskjeller i standpunktkarakterer. Enkelt forklart gir både mannlige og kvinnelige lærere jenter bedre karakterer. Det er derfor en forenkling å hevde at lærere forfordeler sitt eget kjønn.

En mer nærliggende forklaring på det store og voksende misforholdet mellom ferdigheter og utdeling av belønning og straff i form av standpunktkarakterer i gutters disfavør er at det foreligger en vanlig kulturell oppfatning om gutter som brutale og oftere slemme enn jenter, og at det er lærerens oppgave å påvirke guttene for å få dem til å forandre seg. Jenters belønning i form av bedre karakterer er derfor en belønning for at jenter er enklere å ha med å gjøre og for at de oppfører seg slik læreren og utdanningssystemet vil. Gutter straffes tilsvarende for at de oftere oppleves å stikke kjepper i hjulene for utdanningsmaskinen.

Denne mekanismen for belønning og avstraffelse kan være ubevisst. Vi trenger mer kunnskap om forholdet mellom læreres oppfatning av kjønnenes oppførsel og standpunktkarakterene barna være får i skolen.

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There is something to say about silence in politics that goes beyond both the psychoanalytic repression theory -- we’re silent because we’ve pushed the troublesome content out of our consciousness -- and the critical claim that we’re silent because of convenience -- speaking up about injustice might prove too costly for our career. The politics of silence goes beyond simple expedience to something more profound: we hold our tongue because it is our calling.

The critical inflexion of this would amount to something like “for you to hold this post, or achieve this kind of recognition (Bourdieu) you must at least appear to subscribe to our dogma”, and thus repress or stay silent about any objections you might have. A case in point, much discussed in Norway these days, is how successive Foreign Ministers have stayed silent on the imprisonment and possible extradition to the US of Julian Assange. The American legal order has promised to prosecute Assange outside the civilian system -- in Military Courts that practice significant silencing of relevant details -- and within the bounds of a system that practices capital punishment. How come these FMs use such evasive language when Assange’s case comes up? One explanation is that it is not because they simply repress any objections, or that they take a chance on not saying anything so as not to impede their career (although a former FM was elevated to the post of Norway’s Ambassador to Washington just the other day), but that they wouldn’t have been named FM were they likely to speak up on the issue. Their silence is a part of their post, so to speak.

In other words, the situation is worse than the individualising critique implicit in the theories of repression and expedience.

More, and to join our conference on silence and politics: 2024 Ereignis Conference.

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Some thoughts on recent geopolitical suggestions in the US election campaign.

Right, so in so far as Mr Trump’s point is that we should pay our bills he is right. We small people, we who dream of one day having sufficient wealth to live well in this world, don’t we imagine that we will, in this prospective future, powerfully collect our outstanding balance, that we will not be taken for fools, but that we will stand firm and demand our right? And what right is more certain than our right to have our outstanding balance settled?

However, a part from this appeal to the small in us the reality of Mr Trump’s claims is, unfortunately, highly questionable. Far be it for a newly minted man of action to be concerned with such niceties as realities; let us nevertheless look at a few of them:

1. Apparently the encounter so vividly narrated by Mr Trump did not feature as its main antagonists a male head of state, as Mr Trump claimed, but rather Mrs. Ursula von Leyen, who was head of the European Commission at the time (Thierry Breton in an interview with France’s LCI television, referred to by Reuters at https://www.reuters.com/world/european-officials-criticize-trumps-nato-comments-2024-02-11/). Probably an insignificant case of memory loss on Mr Trump’s side, no?

2. There is no agreement in Nato that all member states should funnel 2 % of their GDP to defence spending. In reality this was a recommendation made in 2014 as a goal to be reached by the end of this year, but surely we are able to discern the difference between a recommendation and a demand? (For more information about the status of the 2 % target, see e.g. https://www.reuters.com/world/nato-allies-agree-spend-at-least-2-their-gdp-defence-diplomats-2023-07-07/.)

3. Article 5 of the Nato treaty stipulates that an attack on one member state is to be considered an attack on all. For that reason when USA was attacked on 9-11 her allies in that alliance mistered forces & munitions in support of the invasion of Afganisthan. (You can read more about Nato’s Isaf mission here: https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_8189.htm.) “On September 12, 2001, the day after the 9/11 attacks, NATO met in an emergency session. For the first and only time in its history, NATO invoked Article 5. All 18 of the United States’s allies stated they would support America’s response to the attacks” (https://www.911memorial.org/learn/resources/digital-exhibitions/digital-exhibition-revealed-hunt-bin-laden/international-community-responds). It would show an unprecedented level of ingratitude should the US on a future, say, Russian invasion of Denmark say to the Danes that they feel Article 5 does no longer apply.

The international interstate system is anarchic. For the last 30 years or so it has been dominated by one “super” power. Suggestions that this power will no longer be able to honour its commitments indicates that we are entering a new era, an era in which we will see a larger number of “great” powers dominate, and where the former “super” power will be reduced to one among these.

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2023 in publishing: new books in poetry and creative criticism from Tankebanen forlag.

In the middle of scholarship, conferences, seminars, exhibits, and sundry other stuff we easily forget that we also have a foot in the publishing industry. Tankebanen forlag is a publisher registered in Norway, which means that we dutifully send off packages of our books and journals once or twice a year to Norway’s National Library. They, in turn, ship copies of our publications to lending libraries so that the “general public,” so-called, may borrow our books and journal for free.

Public libraries are great things. While libraries have ancient roots — there are evidence of archives and libraries in Egypt and Mesopotamia — it appears that it was Gajus Asinius Pollio who founded the first public library in 39 BCE. The notion of a “general” public is particularly relevant here, as Pollio was, indeed, a general, and the “public” in his sense, while not strictly limited to generals, was severly circumscribed.

In more contemporary times there was once, amid a few very great corporations, a small publisher that issued one or two books a year, along with a peer-reviewed journal. This publisher, bearing the name of Tankebanen forlag, has come out with these fine books this year:

• Pintxos: Small Delicacies & Chance Encounters, by Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, a fine collection of thoughts, interventions, tidbits, and various other short texts, with references to art, philosophy, food, travel, and many other domains. Fun, explorative, and immensely readable this book is available in print and as e-book.
• A Listener and Other Poems about Musicm by Christopher Norris, is a series of finely crafted formal verse in a variety of verse forms, including the sonnet, terzanelle, quatrain, terza rima, ottava rima, and pantoum. The poems treat composers, such as Shostakovich and Philip Glass, and a great many music-related themes. Available in print and as ebook.

Back-copies of the print edition of our journal, which comes out with two issues per year, can be ordered from our distributor at the cheaply price of no more than €24.

Being a publisher is fun, fun, fun, but it doesn't really pay off in financial terms. However, should you feel that our initative in the industry is worthwhile, order our books or copies of the journal in print.

Thank you for your support, and happy holidays!

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Inspired by an ongoing discussion with Matthew Keenan on surrealism and poetry in the Ereignis forum and elsewhere, here is a new translation of one of the earliest published poems by Tor Ulven (1953-1995).

Ulven’s early work is playful, with surprising turns and unusual imagery. The central figure in this collection is the urfugl, or “original bird,” whose shade has given name to the book. The Archaeopteryx or “Urvogel” (German), was a genus of avian dinosaurs. Unlike contemporary birds it had teeth and jaws instead of a beak. The name derives from the ancient Greek ἀρχαῖος (archaīos), ancient, and πτέρυξ (ptéryx), feather or wing. In Ulven’s lifetime Archaeopteryx was regarded as the oldest known bird.

In this poem imagery from paleontology and sorcery meet with Ulven’s unique world-view. Read the poem in full here.

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My review of Jason Holt’s edited collection Philosophy of Sport: Core Readings, Second Edition is out and in print.

My review of Jason Holt’s new edited collection of essays on sports philosophy is out and in print in the journal Teaching Philosophy 46, no. 3. In the review I write that Philosophy of Sport: Core Readings, Second Edition is “a competent attempt at providing college instructors and students with a comprehensive set of key texts in a wide variety of topics in sports philosophy.” The review nods to work by Mike McNamee, R. Scott Kretchmar, Harry Collins and others. Thank you to David Sackris, the journal’s Review Editor, for competent and kind editing!

The journal’s publisher page is here.

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New novels by House of Foundation authors Jonny Halberg and Agnar Lirhus: somewhat unconventional, fairly good.

In recent weeks, I have been reading two books by authors affiliated with the art collective and and literature center House of Foundation (HoF) in Moss, Norway. In addition to several smaller studios for artists, HoF has a large exhibition space, a nice, well-stocked bookstore (Audiatur) and a cosy café. HoF cooperate with the regional biannual Momentum art festival, in addition to hosting their own temporary high-quality exhibits. To top it all, the folks arrange annual festivals for poetry and music, the Bright Nights [Lyse netter] fest has acheived national recognition as a venue for exciting, cutting-edge acts.

One of the enthusiasts behind this initiative is Jonny Halberg, an author known to chiefly work in “dirty realism.” He has won several prizes for his many novels, short stories, film scripts, and raft of reviews, articles, and essays. This year he released John’s Revelation [Johannes’ åpenbaring] to critical acclaim (there’s a review here [in Norwegian]). The novel is fairly good, but unfortunately burdened by a protagonist who, in the author’s eagerness to construct a Bildungsroman, appears a little obscure and perhaps less-than-credible.

The book presently on my café table is The Dragon [Dragen] by Agnar Lirhus, an author also loosely affiliated with HoF, in addition to working part-time as a language teacher at a local upper secondary school. I previously read with great pleasure a collections of poems by Agnar, Us [Oss, the name naturally plays on the city’s name, Moss], published by HoF. The Dragon is set in a small town that could be Moss. Indeed, everything from descriptions of the local football field to place names, characters and experiences ring familiar to someone familiar with the town. The plot revolves around a young father, Daniel, whose experience of personal turmoil collides with social expectations of a family life governed by routine and predictability.

Daniel has three young children with Henriette, who periodically disappears into a solipsistic drug haze. In the house where they live, Daniel shares bedroom with his partner and boyfriend, the nurse Martin, on the top floor, with separate bedrooms for the two boys, while Henriette stays in a room on the ground floor with their daughter, for as long as Henriette is off drugs. The family constellation is thus unusual, but not improbable. It is the dynamic between the characters that makes the novel interesting and veracious. Most striking are the descriptions of Daniel’s increasing penchant for the bottle. He vents what he finds to be unbearable expectations of him as a father in an increasingly intense alcoholism, also manifest when the children are present; they go to a restaurant to eat pizza together and Daniel has to drink two pints of beer before the food arrives. The descriptions of his budding abuse are distressing, but phrased in alluring and well-crafted language.

The Dragon appears to tell us that we humans are quite simple and predictable beings. As such, the novel finds its place in the the genre we refer to as heimstadsdiktning, poetry of the home stead. Read more about it here [in Norwegian].

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In the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin we find two distinct approaches to critique. To Adorno a negative dialectic provided the limit of what it was possible to imagine in our time; for Benjamin social critique was animated by a messianic moment to come. The most recent issue of Inscriptions features prominently essays that relate to each of these social philosophers: Anda Pleniceanu, in her essay “Carving out the absence within,” draws on Adorno to suggest a novel apporach to philosophical concept-building while Georgios Tsagdis profoundly investigates Giorgio Agamben’s idea of “form-of-life” as a kind of messianism. Read the editorial that discusses these and other contribution to our latest issue: https://www.tankebanen.no/inscriptions/index.php/inscriptions/article/view/224 (open access).

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This was my opening speech to this year’s Ereignis Conference, Beyond Dualism, that was held on-site, here in Gdynia, and online.

Hello everyone, and welcome to this third Ereignis conference.

The theme of this year’s conference, Beyond Dualism, resonates with debates that have a long and venerable history in thought. Many of the speakers here will relate their contribution to one of these debates: can we simply split the world between mind and body, nature and culture, national and foreigner, high and low, and so on? Jacques Derrida is known for his uncovering of Western philosophy’s reliance of such opposites: presence/absence, speech/writing, and so on, and then for his particular way of reestablishing thought, what is known as deconstruction. Judith Butler, later, asked whether it is possible for us to continue to rely on a binary or dualist perception of sex and gender, or whether gender, rather, is a constant flux, an event and a happening.

Thus, when we seek to move Beyond Dualism we can address a wide array of contemporary topics in philosophy and cultural theory. In our conference we will begin by connecting the notion of philosophical dualism – most prominently the mind/body split – to recent insights from quantum physics. Werner Heisenberg’s 1927 article on quantum mechanics introduced a new kind of relation between our instruments of measurement and communication and the world they are said to measure: what Heisenberg had found was that the more precisely we measure a particle’s momentum, the less precision we can give to it’s location and vice versa. In his keynote speech Prof. Jørgen Veisland will point out how insights such as Heisenberg’s make particles “disperse in[to] a cloud of probability.” What are the implications, Veisland will ask, of indeterminacy and interrelation on Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of Repetition, and, by implication, to our conception of time, space, and our place in the world?

Lucy Huskinson will tackle the topic of dualism from a different angle: in the history of psychoanalysis, she will show, while the founding texts have sought to go beyond the split of mind from body they have nevertheless tended to rely on their own dualisms, splitting the mind into two-worlds of ego-conscious and unconscious, each with their own ways of Being and rules of behavior. Certainly, she will argue, Sigmund Freud remained wedded to a specific form of Cartesian dualism, manifest, e.g., in a soul fatally isolated from its environment. In her keynote Huskinson will consider how the non-human environment differently figures in the psychoanalysis of Freud and his pupil, C.G. Jung, and then reconsider the significance of the built environment, our architecture, for their theories.

Our first keynote tomorrow will consider how the split between the original and the translated text can be mediated by an act of love. In fact, Jeremy Fernando will argue, there is no love without translation, since any attempt to connect to another being entails that we engage in an act of reading. He will go on to argue that translation should be properly regarded as the most sensitive of readings, as it is constituted as an act of opening oneself up to the possibility of the text, and the possibility of another. Translation and love, while not quite the same thing, are thus potentially inseparable from each other.

Vivek Narayanan, the poet whose recent translation, or “rewiring,” as he prefers, of the ancient Sanskrit epic Ramayana has been hailed by The Times Literary Supplement and Harvard Review, promises to ask questions that are “provocative to the themes of the conference.” His keynote will in part be a performance from After; his talk is entitled “Trapped Between History and the Transcendent.”

Interspersed between these talk will be many papers from delegates with topics ranging from realism and idealism to Benedetto Croce and Thomas Aquinas. We look forward to hearing all of your contributions, and encourage everyone in attendance to participate with questions and comments after each talk.

Now, before we begin the proceedings of this year’s conference allow us to briefly draw your attention to the organising body, Ereignis Center for Philosophy and the Arts. Founded five years ago we are an organisation for research, education, and outreach based in Norway and Poland. We have a global reach and international membership. This is the third edition of our conference. Our educational initiative, Ereignis Institute, offers online courses, live seminars, and mentoring programmes. Our multidisciplinary approach to teaching is founded on a basic trust in students. Our refusal to reduce students to metrics entails that our modules, while offering extensive feedback and discussion, are without exams. We seek those who have a genuine desire to learn.

One person who has been particularly supportive in this burgeoning endeavor has been Prof. Jørgen Veisland of the University of Gdańsk. We are very happy to have been able to publish several of his essays in our peer-reviewed journal Inscriptions, as well as a volume of poetry in translations on our English-language imprint utopos publishing. More recently, Professor Veisland has cooperated with us in building our teaching programme; this coming semester he will be offering what promises to be a highly interesting and novel seminar on Modernism and metaphysics with our learning platform.

Therefore, it is with great pleasure and deep appreciation that we would like to honour you, Professor Veisland, with the title of Honorary Professor at the Ereignis Institute.

Your remarkable leadership, expertise, and guidance have enriched our immensely. On the behalf of the us all, please accept our warmest congratulations and sincere gratitude for your invaluable contributions to our center.

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