Is there a Field for Philosophy?

Anne-Françoise Schmid (Mines Paris Tech)

The School of Materialist Research is proud to present the fourth of its (free) promotional lectures, which will last through May and June. Our fourth lecture, which will take place on May 26, 2021, at 18:30 CET and is part of a cluster called “Materialism in Philosophy and Non-philosophy: Marxian, Scientific and Artistic Perspectives” is by Anne-Françoise Schmid, entitled “Is there a Field for Philosophy?.” In this seminar, Anne-Françoise Schmid makes the hypothesis that relating philosophy to its supposed fields allows us to pose in a new way the question of invention in philosophy and its relation to other disciplines as well as to other philosophies or, better, to the multiplicity of right of philosophies. 

Philosopher and epistemologist, Anne-Françoise Schmid works on the multiple interactions between sciences and arts, between epistemology and the multiplicity of philosophies. These dynamic relationships can only be understood and systematized by a science of terms and relationships, a modality of Design. AFS sees in philosophical invention, rather than a result of criticism, the effect of a conception of and in philosophy, which occurs when philosophy touches another discipline. The Design, rather than a method external to the philosophy, allows it to manifest its construction in its links to the other knowledge, doctored or indoctrinated. Philosopher among scientists (EPFL, INSA, INRA, MinesParisTech), more recently philosopher among artists (vimeo film Letre, Philosophical Scripts for a festival of lost films (Gwangju), collaborations with Robin Mackay, Benoît Maire, Alice Lucy Rekab, Gallien Déjean, Ivan Liovik Ebel). A specialist in Poincaré and editor of Russell and Couturat, she has taught philosophy and epistemology at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre, and mathematical logic at the University of Geneva. She has been teaching at the New Center of Research and Practice since 2016. Her problem is the question of how to avoid exclusions, exclusions of emerging scientific methods in science in view of what she saw in laboratories and research centers, exclusion of philosophies in the name of the supremacy of one of them. To this end, she has manifested the hypotheses of classical epistemology and has made extensions of them to take into account the generalized interdisciplinarity of contemporary sciences (in collaboration with Jean-Marie Legay, biologist, Muriel Mambrini-Doudet, biologist, Armand Hatchuel, management sciences, Nicole Mathieu, geographer, Maryse Dennes, Russian philosophy).  At the same time, she works on a philosophical style not in but with philosophies considering their multiplicity (Philo-fiction, La revue des non-philosophes).

The School of Materialist Research (SMR) is an informal graduate and post-doc level program that offers seminars and workshops that address the materialisms running through contemporary science, philosophy, art, mathematics, design, architecture, and politics. SMR is an international platform, founded by the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje and Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics at TU Wien that functions as a global online school combining education, research, and mentorship to advance academic study at the intersection the Social Sciences and Humanities and the STEM sciences. Two more institutions from Europe are expected to join the platform in the upcoming months. The Spring and Summer Sessions are offered for free and open to the public serving as promotional events that illustrate the programmatic commitment and style of work offered by the School for Materialist Research. Some of the confirmed speakers in the Spring/Summer series of seminars include: Paul Cockshott, Greg Michaelson, Ray Brassier, Anne-Françoise Schmid, John Ó Maoilearca, Guiseppe Longo, Agon Hamza, Adam Nocek, Katerina Kolozova, Vera Buhlman, Iris van der Tuin and many many more.