Current Projects
History of Place (topos) in Western Philosophy
Place, topos, plays a significant, if often poorly understood role both in the history of philosophy and the history of the natural sciences in the last centuries, and in recent decades there has been a substantial effort to recover the meanings of “place”. Notions of place and space have connotations far beyond conceptions of movement (kinesis), or of the cosmos itself – in particular, connotations for how human being, and being itself, is thought, both as such, and in its “public” place, in the polis. In ways that have too rarely been considered, the fundamental determinations of being in the world – in ways we have often thought of as “the political” – have been determined from out of the ways in which place and space are thought. For instance, if Aristotle certainly thinks an individual can change or alter their “station”, this is because he or she changes from the absolute determinations of the situation (place) into which that person is born. No two persons can occupy the same time or space. Conversely, an individual born into a Newtonian universe is a subjectivity, but (following Kant) his or her characteristics are relative: contingent on, and qualifying subjectivity, and so not a specificity of it. Because their time and space are relative (not absolute), so too are what differentiates them from each other.
In 2023/24, a monthly reading group was organised to work through Helen Lang’s 1988 book, The Order of Nature in Aristotle’s Physics (Cambridge).
Project Leads: Aaron Turner and Laurence Hemming
Hölderlin’s Hellenism
Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry and his interpretations of the Greeks, ridiculed in his own day, opened up the fundamental questions of language and translation for Germany after the First World War. Despite the misappropriation and manipulation of Hölderlin’s poetry by the Nazis, his legacy after the war remained relatively untarnished and by the end of the 20th Century his name had become entrenched in the fields of comparative literature, textual criticism, and literary theory and his work has been repeatedly translated and re-translated (not to mention the various new critical editions of his work). That being said, the question of Hölderlin’s Hellenism – the possibility of the ground of his engagement with the Greeks – remains obscure. During Hölderlin’s own lifetime in the late 18th/early 19th Century and during the time of his renaissance in the first half of the 20th Century, the question of modernity and its relation to antiquity was deeply problematic. Ultimately, this symposium asks whether or not Hölderlin can yet, and in what ways, provide a path of access for a meaningful and original encounter with the Greeks in the 21st Century.
An online symposium that addresses this question will take place in Spring 2025. More details will follow.
Project Lead: Aaron Turner