MYTH, RITUAL AND PRACTICE FOR THE AGE OF ECOLOGICAL CATASTROPHE

Fabrice Monteiro, a garbage spirit, from his series
The Prophecy (2017)

The European Forum for the Study of Religion and the Environment

- is pleased to announce its
seventh international conference

Friday May 17 to Sunday May 19, 2024

Universität Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

MYTH, RITUAL AND PRACTICE
FOR THE AGE OF ECOLOGICAL CATASTROPHE

 

Click here for the Call for Papers and Conference Description:

https://www.religion-environment.com/conference/open-call-for-papers

Proposals will be accepted until 31 October, 2023

This conference will explore the many questions that arise from the apparent continuing philosophical-scientific indigestibility of mythology, ritual and practice. What does or would gaia-logical mythology, ritual or practice look like? Are they, could they be more pedagogically effective with non-experts than analysis and critique? Is the solution to ecological alienation the same as the age-old solutions to spiritual alienation? Is ecological alienation parallel to the emic/etic divide in ethnography? Is “practice” the way “in”? Is “belief”? Does gaiaism demand rituals and practices? Are contemporary scholarly analyses (Haraway, Latour, Stengers, Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s pantheologies, Sloterdijk, etc.) today’s form of ecological myth? Is myth, with its associations with the archaic (despite the work of Cassirer, Barthes and others), a fitting genre for today? (Many traditional myths are hardly gaian.) Must gaian myth, rituals or practices be atheological (i.e., is theology, as some argue, inherently not deep-ecological)? Does subtractive theology (à la Badiou) better lend itself to legitimate gaian mythology? Do ecotheologies written out of specific continuing pre-modern cultural-religious traditions that are not entirely or comfortably gaian satisfactorily bridge the spaces between emic and etic genres/approaches and satisfy calls for new gaia-ologies? Is there a meaningful difference between the myths of “major religions” and “indigenous” cultures? How do or might “old” and “new” cultural material relate to one another? Must scholars-scientists, environmentalists or artists use only material from “their own” heritages in producing gaia-ologies? Are there bases for and modes of considering or evaluating the skill or usefulness of gaia-ologies, gaian myths, rituals or practices? How have religious or spiritual environmentalists created gaian myths, rituals or practices? How might they? What artists, artistic works or modalities or works of popular culture stand as noteworthy examples?

Conference Chair: Jonathan Schorsch jschorsch AT uni-potsdam.de

We will be most grateful if you could circulate this through your networks.

Kind regards,
Jonathan Schorsch

-- 
Professur, Jüdische Religions- und Geistesgeschichte
Institut für Jüdische Theologie
Universität Potsdam
  jschorsch AT uni-potsdam.de
  +49 (0)331 977 1744

Founder and Director
Jewish Activism Summer School
  www.jassberlin.org

Founder and Director
The Green Sabbath Project
  www.greensabbathproject.net

My source:

Philos-L "The Liverpool List". Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/philos-l/
https://www.facebook.com/PhilosL/
@PhilosL @LiverpoolPhilos

Image: c/o https://www.fabricemonteiro.com/

I am planning to submit an abstract, to develop further ideas encountered and contributed at SOPHERE.

Conference: Diagrams in Science, Science in Diagrams

Johannes Stabius, Astrolabium imperatorium: detail (Nuremberg: Johann Stuchs, 1515). Courtesy Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Einbl. VIII, 12, broadside, 61 × 45 cm.

Diagrammatic forms of visualization are ubiquitous in scientific publications, as well as in popular mediations of scientific contents. Every computer interface relies on diagrammatic forms, combining textual and graphical elements. Diagrams abstract and encode information. They are indispensable in many scientific contexts, and, together with charts and graphs, also in the daily media, reaching a wide audience of experts and non-experts.

 

As natural and familiar as these abstract forms of representing information are to us, they are products of many historical developments. Their historical roots may go back to prehistoric epochs. However, the historical integration of diagrams in scientific contexts is relatively recent. Even if these developments with regard to Western cultures have their origin in antiquity and were significantly developed further in the sciences of the Middle Ages, the early modern period can be considered the first flourishing phase of the diagram in practically all areas of the sciences of that time.

This event proposes to trace this historical development in the early modern period. It takes a truly interdisciplinary approach when talking about a timespan of roughly 500 years (1300-1800) across all early modern sciences, from Architecture to Zodiac men in medicine. The talks bring together research on the culture of the diagram in various sciences of the epoch to form a large overall picture.

This event aims at tracing the emergences and the disruptions of traditions of diagrams in all fields of scientific theory and practice, e.g. (but not restricted to) geometry, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, alchemy, law, theology, and music.

It will address, among others, questions such as the following:

1. Do the diagrams under investigation come from a precise tradition or do they form the foundation of such a tradition?

2. What is the scientific/disciplinary context of the diagrams under investigation and how do they relate to it?

3. What is the aim of the diagrams under investigation (illustration, explanation, demonstration, etc.)?

4. How does the medium carrying diagrams under investigation impact their form and role (print, manuscript)?

5. What are the most intriguing visual/graphical features to be found in the diagrams under investigation?

6. How do the diagrams under investigation interact with the text and which vocabulary is used to refer to the diagrams?

7. What justifies the diagrams under investigation to be labelled as ‘diagrams’ (and not ‘tables’, ‘maps’, etc.) and what is a reasonable demarcation line here?

8. How do the diagrams under investigation relate to scientific practices (experiments, taking measures, etc.)?

More details:

https://www.biblhertz.it/3101937/conference-diagrams-in-science-science-in-diagrams.html

Forgotten Streams ...

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group - population

Forget the Golden Ratio ...	Cristina Iglesias, Forgotten Streams, Bloomberg London
...	it's time to get real ...

Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History,

 "The Renaissance friar Fra Luca Pacioli singled out one of Euclid's irrational ratios - the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio - and proclaimed that it was a metaphor for the Almighty because divine nature is irrational in the sense of being beyond the understanding of rational mortals. Thus Pacioli associated Euclid's ratio with theology. But neither Pacioli nor the ancients associated the ratio with art or beauty.

That association was not made until the early 1800s, when German mathematicians first referred to Euclid's division (sectioning) of the line as "golden"; adopted from them and popularized by Adolf Zeising's New System of Human Proportions (1854), the term became central to the (false) historical claim that ancient, medieval, and Renaissance artists and architects had used the ratio to determine ideal proportions." p.73.

Gamwell (2016).

Lynn Gamwell (2016) Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691165288.

(Thank you to PUP for the review copy - more to follow.)

I often think of Millingford Brook local to me as forgotten. It runs through and under (A58) in Ashton, Wigan, Lancashire, UK.

My source:
Heathcote, E. (2020) Constructions for the city, Life&Arts, FT Weekend, 14-15 March, p.16.