On Thursday, April 6th at 12 PM (CET), we hosted the CAS SEE Seminar with Gregory Morgan Swer on Technology and The Decline of the West. Critical Perspectives on Oswald Spengler’s Apology for Violence, in conversation with our Fellow Andreas Wilmes.
GREGORY MORGAN SWER
Gregory Morgan Swer is an associate professor in philosophy at the School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
He is the editor-in-chief of the Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology. His research focuses on technological politics. He has published several papers on Oswald Spengler’s philosophy.
About the Seminar
Violence plays an integral role in Oswald Spengler’s historico-philosophical project. In his best known work, The Decline of the West, Spengler argues that expansionist violence is the only way left for an enervated Western Civilisation to prolong its existence.
I suggest that the theme of violence remains central to Spengler’s less known later works, particularly Man and Technics. In Spengler’s later philosophy violence is no longer presented as a last resort for Western cultural preservation but rather operates as a result of a tragic technological addiction.
This addiction, Spengler claims, can never be abandoned even though it guarantees the death of the culture that wields it.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88989643663?pwd=VnZTOWRmdnl0WEZIdTczc1paZWtkdz09
Meeting ID: 889 8964 3663
Passcode: 328897
Fellowships
Fellowships are enabled by the ERSTE Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund in the framework of supporting brain circulation for democratic development in Southeast Europe.
UNIRI The Moise Palace: Cres Island
An education center of the University of Rijeka. A five-hundred-year-old patrician townhouse and the largest Renaissance palace on the Croatian islands. A venue and forum for various scientific and research activities, it welcomes visiting academics, students and scholars.
