Learning to Know the Unknown: Imagination / Reason / Intuition

In this lecture we will analyze and discuss three ways of knowing at work in artistic research, sciences and philosophy: Namely, imagination, reasoning and intuition.  The first kind of knowledge, imagination, is bodily, corporeal, sensual, concrete. A question or problem strikes us, it puts us into a search, a continuous re-search mode. One learns to understand a problem or thing that has started to matter for us.  The second way of knowing we are investigating in this course is reasoning. One is searching for a commonly shared point of view on a particular phenomenon, while one is reasoning. This second kind of knowledge is intersubjective, argumentative, conceptual, discursive, a concrete abstraction of concrete affections.  In his Ethics, the philosopher Baruch de Spinoza claims that the third kind of knowledge, intuition, is a combination of the former two. One refers reasonable concepts to concrete situations, when one understands a phenomenon intuitively. In intuition, abstract concepts are no more abstractions, but clarified general view-points on the world, we are sharing with others as embodied, sensual, corporeal, bodily affected beings in-a-world. In order to make our concepts concrete, we will analyze a transdisciplinary project at the cutting edge of philosophy and artistic research, Philosophy On Stage, in which all three kinds of knowledge are brought together in order to create a new image of thought, in which not only our brains, but our entire bodies are called to think.  

Certificates are aquired through regularly attending the course and participating in class discussions (50% of grade). The students can chose to write an essay during the semester (8 pages - including the project description) on a significant aspect of the topic we are discussing or to attend a written examination at the end of the semester on relevant issues discussed during the semester course (50% of grade). 

0 - 50 % = 5
51 - 65 % = 4
66 - 77 % = 3
78 - 89 % = 2
90 - 100% = 1

Students from other faculties or universities will be given a place on the course subject to room capacities.

Reading List:

Böhler, Arno (2014): „Staging Philosophy. Toward a Performance of Immanent Expression“, in: Laura Cull/ Alice Lagaay (eds.): Encounters in Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, pp. 171-196.   Damasio, Antonio (2004): Looking for Spinoza. Vintage Books: London.   Deleuze, Gilles (1988): Spinoza. Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley, City Light Books: San Francisco.   Mediathek Philosophy On Stage#4 (2015): http://homepage.univie.ac.at/arno.boehler/php/?page_id=841(Zugriff 24. Juli 2017).   Spinoza, Baruch de (2000): Ethics. Edited and translated by G.H.R. Parkinson, Oxford University Press: Oxford.   Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Baruch Spinoza https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/ (Zugriff 24. Juli 2017). 

Place of the course: Hintere Zollamtsstrasse 17, 4. Stock | A-1030 Wien