Thinking with Tea - Cross-cultural Reflections

Tea has played a significant role in fostering cultural exchange between different regions and traditions throughout history. While tea has taken root in various forms in many cultures, mos are likely to associate the practice with China, its progenitor, or Japan, its cultivator. Yet, tea has a strong global presence and has flourished within Great Britain, the Americas, parts of Africa, Turkey and in Russia to name a few. 

Our conference, Thinking with Tea – Cross-cultural Reflections aims to explore these myriad forms tea has taken where it has flourished. Specifically, as our title suggests, the conference’s goal is to think with tea: In which ways has tea inspired thinking and how can these ways of thinking inform philosophy in the present? Further, we invite interrogation of the limits of philosophical thinking from the point of view of tea as a corporeal practice that operates beyond/before/between thought and its propositional analysis and forms of truth. The aim of the conference is thus twofold: To explore philosophical thought in relation to tea from the historical perspective, and to investigate how ways of thinking with tea can be put into practice within philosophy.