Assisted thinking in the Alps, and the rest of philosophy's late September

The German phrase betreutes Wohnen means assisted living: the sheltered flat, the warden on call, the meals arranged by somebody else. The twenty-ninth Philosophicum Lech, which opens today in the Vorarlberg village of Lech am Arlberg and runs until Sunday 27 September, has swapped one noun for another. Betreutes Denken, assisted thinking, is its title, and the subtitle tightens the screw: Die neue Lust an der Unmündigkeit, the new pleasure in immaturity. The last word is Kant's. In the Berlinische Monatsschrift of December 1784 he defined enlightenment as humanity's exit from its self-incurred Unmündigkeit, the condition of being unable to use one's own understanding without somebody else's guidance, and he blamed the condition on laziness and cowardice rather than on any shortage of intellect. The organisers' concept note asks, in so many words, what Kant's summons to find the courage to think independently and without tutelage can still mean when apps, algorithms and AI systems stand ready to take the decision off one's hands, and when handing it over feels less like a defeat than a relief.

That framing makes Lech the natural place to begin a survey of the week, because the same question surfaces, in other vocabularies, at the two meetings that open within the next three days. In Vancouver the fifth World Congress on Logic and Religion has a keynote on what it means to believe through an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent machine. In Philadelphia a two-day symposium marks the centenary of Michel Foucault, whose last published essay was a commentary on Kant's 1784 text. Our earlier surveys of the season, the autumn calendar with its November dates and the mid-month account of philosophy's interdisciplinary edges, took in none of the three. A note on the week just finished, in Ghent, Lublin, Bucharest and Berlin, closes the piece.

Lech has become a festival that sells out on the promise of examining why people would rather not think#

The Philosophicum was founded in 1997 by the then mayor of Lech, Ludwig Muxel, with the novelist Michael Köhlmeier, Guntram Lins and Wolfgang Häusler, and the Viennese philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann has directed its programme from the first year. Since 2024 he has shared the direction with the Swiss philosopher Barbara Bleisch. The organisers put the first audience at about a hundred; recent years have drawn more than six hundred, the programme has stretched from four days to six, and the sessions now take place in the Lechwelten, a new hall at Dorf 164 in the centre of the village. A full-week pass costs 495 euros, or 145 for students, and by the end of April the tickets were sold out, with a waiting list. A festival that fills five months in advance on the promise of asking why people are content to have their thinking done for them has, at the very least, found its audience.

The first two days are warm-up. On Tuesday 22 September the Philosophicum Dialoge put Claus Leggewie and Susanne Schröter together on "Wie ist die Lage?", roughly "where do things stand?", and Stefan Gosepath and Anna Schneider on "Was ist zu tun?", what is to be done. On Wednesday Patrick Bahners, Faika El-Nagashi, Mirna Funk, Ulli Kulke and Robert Misik debate whether thinking for oneself is "a concept from yesterday", and in the evening Bleisch and Liessmann talk to the novelist Raphaela Edelbauer about how much truth a human being needs. The symposium proper is opened at four o'clock on Thursday 24 September, after the mayor has spoken and the village band has played, by a staged argument between the two directors over the title theme.

Friday's speakers are Richard David Precht, on "illiberal liberalism" and the paradox of defending freedom; Marie-Luisa Frick of Innsbruck, who asks whether Mündigkeit is "a thorny ideal"; Roland Reichenbach of Zurich, on judgement in the kingdom of opinions and the place of eloquence in education; and Romy Jaster of Berlin, whose paper is now titled "Angriff auf die Mündigkeit", an attack on maturity, on disinformation and the conditions of reasonable judgement. Saturday belongs to the criminal lawyer Frauke Rostalski of Cologne, asking whether the "vulnerable society" spells the end of personal responsibility; to Catherine Newmark of Berlin, asking whether we are simply too tired for maturity; to Michael Butter of Tübingen, the historian of conspiracy theories, who reads them as a symptom of crises everywhere; and to the Viennese sociologist Laura Wiesböck, on psychiatric diagnoses and the loss of contradictory interpretations of self and world. Sunday morning closes with Anna-Verena Nosthoff of Oldenburg on "cybernetic authoritarianism" and digital arts of government "in the age of techno-fascism", followed by Rüdiger Safranski under the one-word title Entgeistert, which in German means both aghast and, read literally, drained of mind, on the effects of artificial intelligence. The programme is dated 18 September and marked subject to change.

Read as a whole, the list is not of one mind, which is to its credit. Rostalski's question presupposes that a culture of vulnerability erodes responsibility; Wiesböck's presupposes that the diagnostic vocabulary has replaced something richer; Nosthoff's title takes techno-fascism as the name of the present. Whether the pleasure in immaturity the subtitle names is a moral failing, a sociological fact or a reasonable response to information overload is precisely what the week will fail to settle, and a festival that wanted the question settled would not have invited these people.

The Tractatus essay prize, worth 25,000 euros and funded by private sponsors, is presented on Friday at nine in the evening, with free admission, and goes this year to Maria-Sibylla Lotter for Opfer. Über Verwundbarkeit als Selbstbild (Hanser, 2026), a book about victimhood as a self-image. The jury's citation says she sharpens our eye for the dangers of "an image of humanity that knows only victims and perpetrators and leaves no room for ambivalence and self-empowerment"; Daniela Strigl gives the laudation. Set beside the last two winners, Philipp Hübl's Moralspektakel in 2024 and Eva Weber-Guskar's Gefühle der Zukunft, on emotional AI, in 2025, the choice tells you what this jury thinks the German-language essay is for: diagnosing a public mood.

Vancouver: the logicians ask what kind of god a chatbot would be#

The World Congress on Logic and Religion is the creation of the Logic and Religion Association and of Jean-Yves Béziau, the Brazilian-based logician who chairs this fifth edition with Maira de Cinque as co-chair. The series began in João Pessoa in 2015 and has since met in Warsaw (2017), Varanasi (2022) and Sinaia in Romania (2023). Vancouver's edition runs from Wednesday 23 to Sunday 27 September across three downtown venues: University Canada West at 1461 Granville Street, the Fletcher Challenge Theatre at Simon Fraser University's Harbour Centre, and the University of British Columbia's Robson Square Theatre. Registration and a film open the first afternoon at one o'clock, with the opening ceremony at three. Regular participants pay 400 US dollars; attending without presenting costs 170. Our report of 1 September described the ten workshop themes when the call was still open; what has since appeared is the keynote list, and it is the reason to pay attention.

Stanisław Krajewski of Warsaw speaks on inconsistencies in theology and in other fields. Paul Bartha of UBC takes up infinite utility and Pascal's wager. Daniel Dombrowski of Seattle University asks whether the ontological argument is worthless and answers, from process theism, that it is not. Susana Gómez of the Javeriana in Bogotá applies paraconsistent logic to the identity claims of the Eucharist, which sounds like a parlour game until one remembers that transubstantiation was the test case for medieval theories of substance for four hundred years. Philip Clayton of Claremont compares Rāmānuja and Śaṅkara with contemporary panentheism, and Samir Gandesha of Simon Fraser borrows Walter Benjamin's title "Capitalism as Religion".

Two keynotes carry the Lech question across the Pacific. Alfred Hermida, a scholar of journalism at UBC, is billed under the title "The New Pantheon: Believing Through Omnipresent, Omniscient, and Omnipotent AI"; Kathryn Agnes Huether of UCLA speaks on "Artificial Witness: AI and the Politics of Trust". The omni-attributes were worked out by theologians as descriptions of a being whose judgement one had no standing to second-guess. Hermida's title proposes that ordinary users now attribute something like them to systems whose judgement they could, in principle, check and do not. That is the pleasure in immaturity again, in the vocabulary of natural theology. One practical note: an Eventbrite listing for the congress shows as cancelled, but the organisers' own site, which handles registration directly, carried no such notice at the time of writing.

Philadelphia: Foucault at a hundred, and his own reading of Kant's 1784 essay#

The Foucault Century meets on Thursday 24 and Friday 25 September in the Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center at the University of Pennsylvania, hosted by the Kislak Center for Special Collections. We set out the programme and the sponsors earlier this month and will not repeat them; the ten speakers run from Niki Kasumi Clements of Rice, whose public lecture on the archives opens proceedings at three on Thursday, through Daniele Lorenzini, Amy Allen, Penelope Deutscher and Amy Hollywood, to David Halperin and Lynne Huffer on Friday afternoon. Two details have firmed up since. Thursday, which runs from half past two to nine in the evening and ends with two documentaries, is in person only. Friday, from ten to half past five, is hybrid, with 57 places in the room and 219 online, and each day needs its own registration.

What connects the room in Philadelphia to the hall in Lech is a text. Foucault's "What is Enlightenment?", published in English in 1984, the year he died, is a close reading of the same Kant essay whose key word the Austrians have put on their posters. Foucault took Kant's Ausgang, the exit from immaturity, not as a doctrine but as an attitude, a way of belonging to one's own present by interrogating it, and he called the result a critical ethos rather than a body of knowledge. The contrast with Lech's speakers is instructive. Most of them treat maturity as a condition a society can possess and then lose, to therapy culture or to algorithms; Foucault's Kant makes it a practice that has to be performed again each time and is never finished. A centenary symposium and an Alpine festival, five thousand miles apart, are having the same argument without knowing it.

The week just gone#

Four meetings that the diary would otherwise have missed have just closed. In Ghent, the Lacan Today conference met on 18 and 19 September at Campus Dunant 2, Henri Dunantlaan 2, with keynotes from Darian Leader, Bracha L. Ettinger and Jamieson Webster on the Friday and Stijn Vanheule and Isabel Millar on the Saturday; Derek Hook of Duquesne was also on the organisers' list. The brief asked what Lacanian psychoanalysis has to say "under contemporary conditions", naming capitalism, violence, digitalisation and ecological crisis.

In Lublin, the Institute of Philosophy at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University held Philosophica II, "Words and Language", on 17 and 18 September at pl. Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej 4, organised by Kamil Lemanek, with Matti Eklund of Uppsala, Luca Gasparri of the CNRS, J. T. M. Miller of Durham and Julia Zakkou of Düsseldorf. The topics, the ontology of words, how words are individuated, metasemantics, are as far from the interdisciplinary frontier as philosophy gets, and a two-day meeting on them drew four of the field's better-known names to eastern Poland.

In Bucharest, the East European Network for Philosophy of Science held its sixth biennial conference on 18 and 19 September at the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Philosophy, with New Europe College as co-host. The keynotes were Dana Jalobeanu, of Bucharest and the University of Technology Nuremberg, and Sabina Leonelli of the Technical University of Munich, and the call ran to seven areas, including the philosophy of formal sciences, mathematics and AI.

And in Berlin, the seventh Conference on AI Music Creativity ran from 16 to 18 September at the Musikinstrumentenmuseum, hosted by TU Berlin, the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung and the Universität der Künste, under the theme "The Generative Turn: Mediated Musicianship in a Hyper-reproductive Age". Peer-reviewed papers sat alongside lightning talks, two concerts and installations, and the call asked for work on prompt-based practice, platform infrastructures and distributed agency. Assisted composition, one week before the Alps took up assisted thought; the musicians, to their credit, were treating it as a technique to be examined rather than a fate to be lamented.