Anarchia and Archai: Reimagining the Pre-Socratics

Hannes Schumacher, Carlos Alberto Segovia (Universidad Del Salvador)

5 SUNDAYS, starting August 31, 2025.
11 AM-1 PM Eastern US Time. See time zone converter if you’re in a different location.
A Zoom link will be provided on registration.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Why (re)read today the (so-called) Presocratics? Why the need or at least the chance, thus felt, to do so? To merely document the hesitant beginnings of Western thought? To inquire, more narrowly, into the origins of philosophy, which might be deemed, from Jonia to Jena, a specifically Western game, in contrast to a good many other, and maybe wiser, forms of thought widespread throughout the globe? To find an antidote to such a game, whose dead-end, variously foretold over the last century and a half, some suspected to have now definitely arrived? To, conversely, unearth a promising, if inherently elusive, unsaid dimension beneath all that has been said through each move made on the board on which such game has been played, including the most recent and apparently rebellious ones – in search, then, of a radical new beginning under the aegis of a not less radical rethinking of the fashion in which past, present and future may still come together in fidelity, though, to philosophy’s own Greek dawn? Or as a way of confronting the theoretical impasses that are commonly acknowledged nowadays to define our present by supplying fresh, despite their old age, tools to a number of current ways of thinking that aim at overcoming the limits set upon the thinkable over the past five centuries or so, that is to say, in modern times – or maybe even from Plato and Aristotle onwards?

This joint seminar attempts at exploring these and other related issues through a dual lens, taking as its starting point the very notion of beginning or principle (archē), which, due to its other meaning of authority, has overshadowed not only its very precondition – unbeginning (anarchia) or pre-cosmic anarchy – but also the potential of multiple beginnings (archai) capable of creating worlds from boundless possibilities. Or should it be the case that the very notion of beginning has been misconceived, misread, diluted over centuries, and now demands us to return to the very first beginning: the bright shining of the cosmos? In any case, such a return to the (so-called) Pre-Socratics requires, in our view, a sharp bracketing of post-Socratic teleology – as if their only raison d’être was to “prepare” the works of Plato and of Aristotle – as much as a complicity with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others who have brought to our attention the very different “tastes” – the very different thought-worlds – of those we value as the first philosophers.

Thus in this seminar we will explore – and reimagine – the origins of Western thought which, under close inspection, might turn out to be less “Western” than you thought and – after all – less of an “origin”, perhaps, than a series of unexpected, open-ended avenues and views onto our present that challenge us to think otherwise, again, anew.

SESSIONS

1) Introduction + Hesiod
2) The Milesians (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes)
3) Heraclitus
4) Parmenides and his school
5) Anaxagoras, Democritus, Empedocles and beyond

FACILITATORS

Having lived and studied all around the world, Hannes Schumacher works at the threshold between philosophy and art. He completed his MA in Berlin with a thesis on Hegel and Deleuze, and he has also published widely on Nishida, Nāgārjuna, chaos theory, global mysticism, and contemporary art. Hannes is the founder of the Berlin-based publisher  Freigeist Verlag and co-founder of the grassroots art space Chaosmos ∞ in Athens, Greece. He has facilitated the following courses and groups at Incite Seminars: “Nishida Kitarō: The Logic of Place and the Religious Worldview”; “Who’s Afraid of Hegel: Introduction to G. W. F. Hegel’s Science of Logic”; “Chaos Research Group”; “Reading After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux”; “Deleuze & Guattari: What is Philosophy?”; and “Plato’s chôra through the lens of Derrida.”

Carlos A. Segovia is an independent philosopher working on meta-conceptuality, contingency and worlding in a post-nihilist key, at the crossroads of the philosophy of mythology. Among his publications, Dionysus and Apollo after Nihilism: Rethinking the Earth–World Divide(with Sofya Shaikut), Guattari Beyond Deleuze: Ontology and Modal Philosophy in Guattari’s Major Writings, Félix Guattari and the Ancients: Theatrical Dialogues in Early Philosophy (with Gary Genosko), and Nietzsche’s Pre-Dionysian Apollo and the Limits of Contemporary Thought. He has been associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at St Louis University Missouri, visiting professor at the University of Aarhus and the Free University of Brussels, and guest lecturer at the European Research Council, the Collège International de Philosophie, the École Normale Supérieure, University College London, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, the European University at St Petersburg, Waseda University, and Ryukoku University.