Heyman Center for the Humanities, Common Room
Simona Forti will discuss issues that arise from her new book The New Demons. Rethinking Evil and Power Today (Stanford University Press, 2014). She will be in conversation with Adriana Cavarero, Professor of Political Philosophy at the Università degli studi di Verona and Miguel de Beistegui, Professor of Philosophy at University of Warwick.
Simona Forti is Professor of History of Political Philosophy at the Università del Piemonte Orientale, Italy. She graduated with a degree in Philosophy from the University of Bologna, and she received her PhD in the History of Political Thought from Turin University. She is a founding member of “FINO”, a PhD Program in Philosophy coordinated by the Northwestern Italian University Consortium. She served as the Italian member of the Coordinating International Committee of the European Science Foundation Network Activity on “The Politics and History of European Democratisation” (PHED) for the European Science Foundation. From 2003-2011 she was member of the jury for “Der Hannah-Arendt Preis für politischen Denken”, Heinrich Böll Stiftung, Bremen and Berlin. She is standing President of the International Centre BIOS, research on biopolitics and bioethics, based at the Università del Piemonte Orientale.
She is known for her works on Hannah Arendt’s thought and on the philosophical idea of Totalitarianism and for her more recent work on Biopolitics and on the contemporary reshaping of the notion of Evil.
Adriana Cavarero is an Italian philosopher and feminist thinker. She holds the title of Professor of Political Philosophy at the Università degli studi di Verona. She has also held visiting appointments at the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara, at the New York University and Harvard. Cavarero is widely recognized in Italy, Europe and the English-speaking world for her writings on feminism and theories of sexual difference, on Plato, on Hannah Arendt, on theories of narration and on a wide range of issues in political philosophy and literature.
Miguel de Beistegui was educated in France (BA, MA in Philosophy at the Sorbonne), the US (Ph.D., Loyola University of Chicago), and Germany (Postdoc, Hegel-Archiv, Bochum). He specializes in 20th century German and French philosophy, and has published books and articles in the following areas: ontology, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics and politics. Initially specializing in the thought of Martin Heidegger, and in phenomenology in general, he has become convinced that philosophy needs to resist extreme specialization and develop the conceptual tools to engage with our time, not only bringing together the various branches of philosophy, but also establishing a dialogue between philosophy and the other disciplines, in the social as well as the natural sciences. His publications include Immanence and Philosophy: Deleuze (2010) and Proust as Philosopher: the Art of Metaphor (2012). He is also the Principal Investigator for a joint research project with the Warwick Centre for the History of Medicine and the Warwick Medical School, entitled “Issues in Bioethics and Biopolitics”.
Event is free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first served.
