29-30 October: Wor(l)d Crises with Jochen Schmidt
29 October 2025
17:00-18:00 with free buffet afterwards
Yudowitz, Wolfson Medical Building
30 October 2025
18:00-19:00
Gannochy, Wolfson Medical Building
We live in a world of crises. In the light of geopolitical and internal social upheavals and an intensifying ecological crisis, societies and individuals feel forced to relinquish some cherished certainties and self-evi-dent truths and sense the need to develop new designs and visions of collective and individual life. This always also means working through those traditional ideas and concepts of a good communal life that once appeared to offer reliable support and guidance, and understanding how such ideas and concepts are them-selves not crisis-proof entities; they are themselves affected by the crises of our present. In some respect, the crisis of our world is a crisis of our words. This crisis is by no means new: ideas and concepts are con-stantly undergoing transformations, and they regularly do so in a crisis-like manner. The point of our pro-ject is to combine two kinds of crises: to take exemplary crises that are shaking our world today and relate these to the crises of those concepts that people reach for to find support and orientation. Against this back-ground, colleagues from Glasgow, Stirling and Mainz, supported by the Georg Forster Forum and in cooper-ation with the Royal Society of Edinburgh, have embarked on a project that combines conceptual-historical, theological-hermeneutical and contemporary-diagnostic perspectives. The proposed seminar is meant to add to the successful partnership between the universities of Glasgow and Mainz.
