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5 Great Thinkers: A Summer Experience with Anna Gát
August 1, 2022 at 10:00 pm - August 5, 2022 at 11:00 pm CEST
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Join Interintellect founder Anna Gát in this summer experience and explore the worlds of five great thinkers. One week, five short evening salons, five important intellectuals from the past century. A cosy online retreat for the mind… Come and learn, make friends, build a foundation that can open your knowledge to the world of great ideas!
This is a five-day series of 1 hour salons—booked together in one price below. Each salon runs from 10 PM to 11 PM CEST.
5 thinkers, 5 worldviews, 5 introductions: Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) | Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) | Martha Nussbaum (b. 1947) | Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952) | Cornel West (b. 1953)
During each discussion, we will focus on the key ideas of one of these five thinkers, through what stages they developed their ideas, how those ideas continue to be relevant to us, and their public and private personas.
Click through to individual days for extended descriptions and suggested readings:
| # | Date | Episode |
| 1 | Monday, August 1 |
Borges: The Labyrinths of Reality This master of the metaphysical quirk is not only the obvious person with whom to kick off our weeklong series because of his unique combination of theory, fiction, and fame, but also because Jorge Luis Borgès was a pioneer of what “public thinker” would come to mean in the 20th century. |
| 2 | Tuesday, August 2 |
Arendt: The Cruelty of the Crowd Arendt is always trending when, according to an era’s leading thinkers, fascism resumes being an active thread in society. Famously a lover of the Nazi-proximate Heidegger, herself a fierce Jewish-European thinker who reported from the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and forever established the concept of the “banality of evil”, her contradictions and achievements feel as timely as ever. |
| 3 | Wednesday, August 3 |
Nussbaum: The Beauty of the Good The writer of some of the most poignant and poetic ethics of our times, Nussbaum might first appear as a good-natured defender of good behaviour to you. But when you zoom in, her thought is filled with surgical examinations of justice, anger, oppression, and the burden of choice. |
| 4 | Thursday, August 4 |
Fukuyama: History Keeps Ending Ever since Francis Fukuyama published his 1992 opus The End of History and the Last Man, an important theoretical coda to the Cold War that had just ended, every time history seems to not have ended (which is very often) someone surely brings him up, snarks, and basically reveals that they haven’t read it. |
| 5 | Friday, August 5 |
West: The Reason to Worry On the last day of Five Great Thinkers Week we will look at the overlap between philosophy and activism, and the stardom achievable as a thinker. We will compare the archetypal thinker who lives in an ivory tower of some kind of seclusion versus a public thinker like West who’s a dynamic and engaging pundit on ongoing events, and generally investigate where – if anywhere – does the arena of philosophy within public life end. |
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