Philosophy without Teachers: A Residency

Please find above the CFP (call for projects) for a week long residency in Greensboro, NC at Elsewhere, a living musuem (http://www.goelsewhere.org/), and in several historic homes in Greensboro, on which we will hang our signs, "Philosophy House," "The Stoa," etc. The residency has a simple premise: to bring together socially engaged, conceptual and performance artists with academically trained philosophers to explore the contemporary possibilities of ethical askesis.  

  The ancient philosophical schools understood philosophy as an ethos, a way of life involving personal character.  They designed exercises for our minds, bodies and communities in order to develop our ethos for the search for wisdom.  The main work was not theoretical but practical and relational, and the most important result was found in a life, not in a paper.  We want to explore the possibilities for developing philosophical practice in this spirit today, and we think that socially engaged artists who make an art out of living can help us think about our philosophical ethos today in terms of contemporary concerns.  The artists can teach the academics, and the academics can develop the artists.   Please see the CFP for more details, including scholarships for graduate students and financial support for non-TT college or university teachers.   Academic communities that may be interested:  radical pedagogues, environmental philosophers who use experiments in living, aestheticians who take the form of their classes as an aesthetic matter, social justice activist-scholars, LGBTQ theorists, experimental philosophers who experiment with character-changing exercises, among others.

Please find the CFP for this residency that explores tools for experiments in living by way of an analogy between askesis in the tradition of philosophy as a way of life and socially engaged art (cf. Michael Rakowitz as a good example).  If you liked Bob Frodeman & Adam Briggle's recent editorial in the NYTimes (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/11/when-philosophy-lost-its-way/), you'll like this residency:

http://fritzbooks.tumblr.com/post/134814815642/philosophy-wout-teachers-invitation-to-a


Come & experiment.  Research as collective and incremental enlightenment is truly great; but the unexamined life is not worth living, and living is mostly non-theoretical.

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Thank you & best wishes for 2016!

Due date: March 1, 2016