"Learning from and with each other: For a common future of humanity" is the title of this year's "Karl Jaspers Lecture on Contemporary Issues" on Monday, 24 June at 4 p.m. at the University of Oldenburg (A14, Lecture Hall 2).
In it, Prof. Dr Rudolf zur Lippe, philosopher, artist, exhibition organiser and professor emeritus for "Social Philosophy and Aesthetics" at the University of Oldenburg, will address questions of philosophical and transcultural exchange. This year's Karl Jaspers Award from the EWE Foundation goes to Prof Dr Chibueze C. Udeani, Nigerian-born holder of the endowed professorship for Missiology and Dialogue of Religions at the University of Würzburg. On Tuesday, 25 June at 11.00 a.m., zur Lippe will be speaking with Sadiq Al-Azm in a panel discussion at the PFL Cultural Centre (Peterstr.3) on the Arab Spring: "Arabic Spring. Civil Society in Islamic Contries". The Syrian thinker and philosopher is currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin. The celebrations will conclude with a public discussion with students on Tuesday, 25 June at 4 p.m. in the media library of the Altes Gymnasium Oldenburg. The topic will be zur Lippe's lecture from the previous day.
Zur Lippe, who retired in 2002, initiated the Karl Jaspers lecture series in 1990. He was a student of the diplomat, psychotherapist and Zen teacher Karlfried Graf Dürckheim and habilitated in 1973 in Frankfurt am Main with a thesis on the "History of the Body in the Modern Age" with the philosopher, sociologist and music theorist Theodor W. Adorno. From 1974 to 2002, zur Lippe was a university lecturer in Oldenburg, and since 1998 he has also been a visiting professor for the "Philosophy of Life Forms" at the University of Witten/Herdecke. In 1981 and 1982 he was appointed Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In addition to academia, zur Lippe increasingly pursued artistic activities and curated various exhibitions. In 1983, for example, he organised the exhibition "The Body - First Tool of Cultures" for the Berliner Festspiele. Since 1987, his exhibition "The Geometrisation of Man and the World" has been shown in Paris, Torun, Bombay, Cologne and Oldenburg. At the beginning of this year, zur Lippe took part in the Hamburg exhibition "In Between - Between Energy and Matter" with his own works.
Zur Lippe's Jaspers Lecture stands for a focus that had already characterised the initial phase of the lectures in Oldenburg with additional internal colloquia and salon discussions in Hude Monastery: intercultural dialogue with visiting academics from Mexico, India, Syria, Israel, France/Algeria, the Congo and Switzerland. Since 2005, zur Lippe has continued this work in the "Initiative Humboldt Forum" Berlin for the "Voices of Cultures".
"The Institute of Philosophy would like to thank the philosopher, social scientist and artist for the close and fruitful co-operation that has continued to this day," says the philosopher and managing director of the Jaspers Lectures, Prof. Dr Reinhard Schulz.
Since its inception, the series has been dedicated to philosophical and transcultural dialogue on contemporary issues. In the early years, personalities such as Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Lew Kopelew characterised the events. The first guest professors were the Austrian-American author, philosopher and priest Ivan Illich, the Indian philosopher and sociologist Jit Pal Singh Uberoi, the African philosopher Marcel Tshiamalenga Ntumba, the Chilean biologist and philosopher Humberto Maturana and the Swiss philosopher Jeanne Hersch.