Thinking the Float Tank
24.08.2023 — 26.08.2023
Randolph Dible is a lecturer in philosophy at St. Joseph’s University, New York, and a philosophy doctoral student at The New School for Social Research. His work is in phenomenology and Ancient Greek philosophy. His Master’s thesis is titled Phenomenology of the Spheres: from the Ancient Spherics to Philosophical Cosmology (2018), and his dissertation is titled Universal Ontology of the Infinite Sphere.

A native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Claire Ortiz Hill is the author of several books and over 50 articles about the Austro-German roots of 20th century philosophy. She holds a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Paris, Sorbonne as well as degrees from the University of California, Riverside. She has been a religious hermit with the Archdiocese of Paris for 40 years. Her books include Word and Object in Husserl, Frege and Russell; Rethinking Identity and Metaphysics; Husserl or Frege (with G. Rosado Haddock); The Roots and Flowers of Evil in Nietzsche, Baudelaire and Hitler; Facing the Light; The Road Not Taken (with J. da Silva); and the translations of Husserl’s Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge and his Logic and General Theory of Science.

Francesca Greco studied Philosophy in Italy and continued her research in Germany. She works currently at the University of Hildesheim as research member of the DFG Koselleck-Project “Histories of Philosophy in Global Perspective” (2019-2024) and is PhD student in the field of intercultural philosophy with a focus on meontology and Japanese philosophy. Her major fields of specialization are negativity, relationality, and the history of philosophy in global perspective. She is co-editor of the 10th volume of Frontiers in Japanese Philosophy Transitions. Crossing boundaries in Japanese Philosophy (2021) and is the author of several papers and presentations also available on YouTube.

John Krummel is a Associate Professor in Religious Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Author of Nishida Kitarō’s Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of Place (Indiana University Press); and of essays on Heidegger, Nishida, Kyoto School, phenomenology, and Buddhist philosophy. Translator of works from Japanese and German. Editor of Contemporary Japanese Philosophy: A Reader (Roman & Littlefield International) and co-translator and introduction author of Place and Dialectic: Two Essays by Nishida Kitarō (Oxford University Press). Associate Editor, International Journal of Social Imaginaries (Brill), Editor, Journal of Japanese Philosophy (SUNY Press), and President, International Association for Japanese Philosophy.

Irene Breuer has a degree both in Architecture and in Philosophy from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina, and a PhD in Philosophy from the Bergische University Wuppertal (BUW), Germany. She was first a lecturer, then professor for Architectural Design and Theory at the UBA and later a lecturer for Theoretical Philosophy and Phenomenology at the BUW. As part of a DAAD scholarship, she has conducted research on the reception of the German Philosophical Anthropology in Argentina. She is presently working on mentioned research subject, with the support of the BUW.

Dermot Moran (Boston College) is the Inaugural Holder of the Joseph Chair in Catholic Philosophy, Boston College. He was previously Professor of Philosophy (Logic & Metaphysics) at University College Dublin. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and Institut International de Philosophie (IIP). Publications include: Introduction to Phenomenology (2000), Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (2005), Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (2012) and, co-authored with Joseph Cohen, Husserl Dictionary (2012). Edited works include: Husserl’s Logical Investigations, 2 vols. (Routledge, 2001), The Shorter Logical Investigations, The Phenomenology Reader, co-edited withTim Mooney (Routledge, 2002), Phenomenology. Critical Concepts in Philosophy, 5 Volumes, co-edited with Lester E. Embree (Routledge, 2004), The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy (Routledge, 2008); The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity (Springer 2014) co-edited with Rasmus Thybo Jensen,; Empathy, Sociality, and Personhood. Essays on Edith Stein’s Phenomenological Investigations, co-edited with Elisa Magrì (Springer, 2017); Conscious Thinking and Cognitive Phenomenology, co-edited with Marta Jorba (Routledge, 2018); and, with Anya Daly, Fred Cummins, James Jardine, Perception and the Inhuman Gaze. Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology, and the Sciences (Routledge, 2020).

Jerry Swatez holds degrees in philosophy, psychology, and sociology, respectively, from University of Minnesota (BA), Penn State (MA), and University of California, Berkeley (PhD). His dissertation research was on the intersection of contrary constraints imposed on a high-energy physics research team by bureaucratic organization and the scientific method with its ethos. After a year of research at the University of Chicago Industrial Relations Center, he taught Sociology for several years at University of Illinois, Chicago. While there, he co-edited a book of readings entitled The Quality of Life in America: Pollution, Poverty, Power & Fear. He did research on the confrontation between large-organization approaches to boundaries and mass-movement approaches, producing a film report, Conventions: The Land Around Us (available on YouTube). After attending an Esalen workshop with John Lilly on interspecies communication, where he was introduced to Tai Chi Ch’uan and Laws of Form, he traveled throughout Mexico with his spouse and sons, searching for the mythical Don Juan for a sabbatical project on The Significance of Spiritual Discipline for Social Change. While there, on a deserted beach near Tulum, he entered the Void and his vehicle exchanged essences with an iguana. In 1973, with some colleagues and their families, he founded the Syzygy Cooperative Community on an Island in the Salish Sea. In 1987, he moved to California to work at two holistic healing centers and then to return to college teaching, online. He is currently living in the Arizona desert near the site of two rivers crossing called by the natives there Ts-iuk-shan.

James Guy:Surviving the “psychedelic sixties” as an accomplished advertising art director, James added “accidental mystic” to his resume and, in 1980, published Metasphere: The Altered State of Word, presenting his discovery of an essential structure to historical representations of the geometry of mind. After retiring his art career, in 2016, he published What Always Comes to Mind, The Visualist’s Guide to a Metaspheric  Perspective on Reality. James has presented at “The Science of Consciousness, 2018,” Tucson, AZ, USA, and at “Psychedelic Science 2017,” Oakland, CA, USA. At this conference, he is presenting his 2023 book Toward Repurposing Mind, a Phenomenological Narrative by an Accidental Mystic.

Elizabeth Brient grew up in the deserts of the Southwest United States and received her PhD in philosophy from Yale University, taught at Yale and Boston College, and is currently an associate professor in the philosophy department at the University of Georgia.  She is the author of The Immanence of the Infinite: Hans Blumenberg and the Threshold to Modernity (2002) and has written articles on late medieval Neoplatonism (Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa), the epochal transition to modernity with particular emphasis on the thought of Hans Blumenberg, and Hannah Arendt, the problem of new beginnings, metaphysics of the infinite, and infinity and metaphor.

Courtney Stephens is a writer/director of non-fiction and experimental films. The American Sector, her documentary (co-directed with Pacho Velez) about fragments of the Berlin Wall transplanted to the U.S., was named one of the best films of 2021 in The New Yorker. Her essay film, Terra Femme, comprised of amateur travel footage shot by women in the early 20th century, premiered at MoMA and has toured widely as a live performance. Stephens is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholarship to India. She is collaborating, with Michael Almereyda, on an essay film about John C. Lilly.

Louis H Kauffman is Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was born in Potsdam, New York on 2/3/45 and grew up in Norfolk, New York. He graduated valedictorian from the Norwood-Norfolk High School in 1962, obtained a B.S. in Mathematics from M.I.T. in 1966, obtained a PhD in Mathematics from Princeton University in 1972. He began teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1971 and retired from UIC in 2017. He has had numerous visiting positions around the world. Kauffman is Founding Editor and Editor in Chief of the World Scientific Journal of Knot Theory and its Ramifications and Editor of the World Scientific Book Series on Knots and Everything. His research is devoted to topology and the theory of knots where he has discovered new connections between knot theory and statistical mechanics, new invariants of knots and links and new extensions of the field of knot theory. He works on the concepts of form and distinction, reference and self-reference and their relations with cybernetics and with human thought. Kauffman is the recipient of the Warren McCulloch Award and the Norbert Wiener Medal of the American Society for Cybernetics, Lester Ford and Paul Halmos writing awards from the Mathematical Society of America, served as Polya Lecturer for the Mathematical Society of America, and he is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Ion Soteropoulos is an independent research philosopher and scientific metaphysician who was born in Greece and studied social sciences and philosophy at the University of Paris, where she founded the Apeiron Centre (2002) (www.apeironcentre.org), the first philosophical organization in the world that studies the idea of infinity in dynamic connection with the finite as presented in our physical universe, society and mind. She is also the author of the titles i) Metaphysics of Infinity: The Problem of Motion and the Infinite Brain (2013) and ii) The Infinite in Act (2007) and has written the scenario of the prize-winning short film Mind and Galaxy (2016), which she co-directed with Shiho Minami. Her most recent article is Apeiron Civilization: The Irruption of Infinity in Science and the Universe (2021). The research work of Ion Soteropoulos is a deep meditation on the nature and organizing principles of the physical universe, human perception, and accelerating growth in the light of Greek Ionian philosophy.