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
Book your free tickets here
Summary: 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.
Lecture: Precarious Humility, Word Crises and World Crises in Dialogue with Jochen Schmidt
October 29th, 17:00–18:00 (with free buffet afterwards)
“Humility’s time has come again,” thus historian Christopher Bellito concludes his recent monograph on this subject. But has it really? It is true that in response to current crises (ecological, political and other), quite a few people urge to reconsider this old virtue. But there are reasons why humility had been largely forgotten until quite recently. History shows that humility is deeply ambivalent and prone to fall into mendacity and paradox. The lecture argues that this can be good thing, as the ambivalent history of humility teaches us to be equipped for difficulties that we will encounter when trying to connect to humility anew.
Seminar: Wor(l)d Crises
October 30th, 18:00-19:00
The seminar will be moderated by David Jasper and will consist of a podium with by six colleagues: David Jasper, N.N. and N.N., Jochen Schmidt, Eva Baille and Samuel Shearn (subject to possible small adjustments). Jochen Schmidt will begin by rehearsing the main argument of his lecture (5 minutes). We will then focus on three questions: 1) Is humility something that we would actually want to discover anew, both in light of what the world as asking from as today and in light of what we know about humility from history? Is humil-ity just right to meet some of the challenges that are plaguing us today, or might it be that the opposite is true, that strong rather than week virtues are called for in our times? 2) Which other concepts should we consider anew, bearing in mind both the crises that these concepts themselves have gone through and the crises that we are facing today? Colleagues on the podium will present short statements (5 minutes). Those who are attending the seminar from the public will be warmly invited to join the discussion at any time. Specifically, we will ask the audience whether people would like throw in concepts that they should like to discuss. We will collect suggestions and then see which of these we can look at in more detail. – Subsequent to these public events, the group will continue their work on the Friday and the Saturday.
Members: Eva Baillie, Cornelia Dockter-Verscharen, Andrew Hass, Alison Jasper, David Jasper, Ulrike Peisker, Jochen Schmidt, Samuel Shearn, Jeremy Smith, Heather Walton.