Enlightenment in the World

Pillars of creation – Pillars of creation

Unlike the Middle Ages or the Baroque era, the Enlightenment is not a closed historical epoch. European thinkers in particular established reason as a universal authority of judgment. In doing so, they laid the foundations for freedom and revolutionary movements, for democracy with the separation of powers, for the formulation of universal human rights and for an understanding of reality based on scientific knowledge.

Under the impact of fascism, world war and the Shoah, the philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer formulated their criticism of this system of thought as the “Dialectic of Enlightenment”. The current doubts go even deeper. Are colonialism, capitalism and racism systems of rule and structures that have enabled or promoted the principles of the Enlightenment? Is universalism eurocentric? Is progress in science and technology leading us to the climate catastrophe?

The Potsdam Einstein Forum is putting these questions up for public discussion to mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of Immanuel Kant, the most important philosopher of the Enlightenment. In July, it invited experts from Europe and North America to put the Enlightenment on trial.

Now, together with the Humboldt Forum, it is bringing together thinkers from Africa, Asia and the Americas to address these questions from a non-European perspective and present them in impulses. The Berlin Palace, predecessor of the Humboldt Forum, was a prominent place of the Enlightenment. The audience is cordially invited to engage directly with the speakers and with each other in a table discussion. Entry is possible at any time.

Programme

more detailed information will follow at the beginning of August

Friday 30.8.2024

7.30 pm Teresa Koloma Beck (Hamburg) and Mithu Sanyal (Düsseldorf) in conversation with Susan Neiman (Potsdam)

Saturday 31.8.2024

1 pm: Impulses

2 pm: Table discussions

3.30 pm: Impulses

4.30 pm: Table discussions

6 pm: Panel

The first part of the Thinking Festival on Thursday, August 29 at the Einstein Forum, Potsdam, is also open to the public and free of charge without registration. To the programme

With

Aziz Al-Azmeh (Vienna, Austria), Bipasha Bhattacharyya (Cambridge, England), Amber Carpenter (London, England), Subhas Ranjan Chakraborty (Calcutta, India), El Hadji Ibrahima Diop (Dakar, Senegal), Jonathan Keir (Aichtal/Tübingen), Sankar Muthu (Chicago), Carlos Peña (Santiago de Chile), Keidrick Roy (Cambridge, USA), Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (Ithaca, USA), Anna Winckelmann (Nijmegen, Netherlands), Raef Zreik (Jerusalem, Israel)

Further Information

- 16 years and older

- Language: English, German

- Hall 1, Ground Floor

Einstein Forum

Next date:

• Date Friday, 30/August/2024 19:30 (1 more date)
• Venue Humboldt Forum: Saal 1
• Address Schloßplatz, 10178 Berlin-Mitte