Christoph F. E. Holzhey – Dis/enchanting Emergence: On Ilya Prigogine’s Science of Self-Organization
Tuesday, May 10, 2022 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4A Science & Religion Project Talk
Nineteenth-century emergentism promised to mediate between mechanism and vitalism — that is, between the assumption that processes of the living are reducible to Newtonian physics and the claim that they require non-physical life forces or souls. Soon dismissed as neo-vitalist, it was re-habilitated in the 1970s through sciences of complexity, chaos, and self-organization. While emergence has become a popular notion that is mobilized in a host of different theories, disciplines, and contexts, its function remains highly ambiguous, oscillating between neo-vitalism and neo-mechanicism. Focusing on Ilya Prigogine, an influential protagonist and popularizer of the sciences of self-organization in the 1970s and 80s, and with a brief comparison to Francisco Varela, co-inventor of the notion of autopoiesis, the seminar explores some aspects of emergence’s bifurcation and multistability, including its relation to time and eternity, non-dualist thought, and the attempt to explain the mysteries of life and consciousness.
Christoph F. E. Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, which he has directed since 2006. He received a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Princeton University in 1993 with a dissertation on the entropy and information loss of black holes. At Columbia University, he studied German Literature and wrote a dissertation on paradoxical pleasures in aesthetics (PhD 2001). Returning to Germany, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2001-03) and at the Universität Siegen (2003-06) in the VW-project ‘Mystik und Moderne’. He has directed the interdisciplinary projects Tension/Spannung, ERRANS, and Reduction at ICI Berlin and (co-)edited several interdisciplinary volumes, including Biomystik: Natur – Gehirn – Geist (2007), Tension/Spannung (2010), Multistable Figures: On the Critical Potential of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing (2014), De/Constituting Wholes: Towards Partiality Without Parts (2017), and Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure (2020).
This event is part of a series of seminars organized by the BCB Science & Religion Project, a part of the Oxford-led project "New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe" with support from the Templeton Foundation.
Email: r.shields@berlin.bard.edu