PhD Thesis Workshop, January 20–23, 2022
Congress Center Monte Verità, Ascona
The interdisciplinary workshop seeks to explore scientific and aesthetic approaches to the occult through manifold lenses, working against familiar disenchantment narratives that scientific reasoning and Enlightenment world views alienated modernity from occult practices, the natural world and the divine. For this workshop, the terms "occultism" or "the occult" are viewed in an expanded manner, as an effort to produce and interrogate knowledge of "invisible" realities. Analyses of occultism are thus not restricted to religious traditions, practices and phenomena; they also concern the wider aesthetic and scientific formation and transformation of modernity.
The workshop is organized by the ZGW together with the ESSWE – The European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism, and the Chair for Literature and Cultural Studies of ETH Zurich. It forms part of the academic exchange program of the ZGW with the Cohn institute at Tel Aviv University,
generously supported by the Daniel Gablinger-Stiftung.
Portrait
The Center »History of Knowledge« (ZGW) has been – from 2005 to the beginning of 2022 – a leading scientific center of excellence of the University of Zurich (Center of Competence) and the ETH Zurich (D-GESS) that aimed to promote and coordinate cultural, historical and philosophical research and teaching on modern knowledge systems and knowledge societies. The ZGW was a center for scientific research as well as a platform for public reflection on the role of knowledge in modern societies.
At the end of 2021, ZGW faculty comprised twelve professors from the University of Zurich and six professors of the ETH Zurich. The associated faculty consisted of 18 members (Post-Docs). In this way, the ZGW brought together expertise in theoretical and practical philosophy, literary and cultural as well as historical science (history of science, art, medicine, architecture, technology and global history), creating a strong interdisciplinary, internationally-oriented research group.
The ZGW also had a master program and a doctoral program, which will both be continued after the end of the ZGW.