Rethinking enlightenment
ABOAGORA began in Turku in 2011 during the city’s European Capital of Culture Year, as a joint effort by the Turku Music Festival, the Department of Cultural History at the University of Turku, and the Donner Institute for Research in Religious and Cultural History at Åbo Akademi University.
The inaugural symposium was held on August 15-18 at the Sibelius Museum and the Old Academy Building under the theme “Rethinking Enlightenment.”
a critical discussion on the heritage of the Enlightenment
Our modern world is in many ways a product of the eighteenth century and the culture of the Enlightenment. This heritage requires not only critical engagement but also the challenging and even the severing of particular juxtapositions that compromise Western thought. Are knowledge and belief opposites? Can reason and emotion be separated from each other? What do ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ mean in the year 2011?
The Agora lectures from Aboagora 2011 are available on ABOAGORA’s YouTube channel:
Ilkka Niiniluoto
Chancellor and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki
Dan Sperber
Research Professor Emeritus at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS and Director of the International Cognition and Culture Institute
Ruth Behar
Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Poet, Essayist, and Filmmaker
The Death of the Angel. Reflections on the Relationship between Enlightenment and Enchantment