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The ongoing coup against American democracy raises serious concerns for democracy worldwide. In this talk, Stanley argues that the history of the United States, as well as its present situation, justifies these concerns. More specifically, Stanley argues that the anti-democratic form that is emerging in the United States is a kind of racial fascism. Europe should prepare for the possibility of a ...

Courage has always been a central virtue in the Western ethical tradition, but its meaning has changed considerably over time. In antiquity, courage signified fearlessness in the face of bodily injury and death, whether passively endured (like Socrates and Christ) or actively risked (like Achilles and Alexander the Great).Today, however, such "physical courage", as it is called, tends to be ...

The inaugural Yehuda Elkana Fellow, Helga Nowotny, gave a lecture at the Central European University, in cooperation with the IWM and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. The lecture was preceded by a ceremony to commemorate Yehuda Elkana.As we move into a world in which algorithms, robots, and avatars play an ever-increasing role, we need to better understand ...

Machine intelligence plays a growing role in our lives. Today, machines recommend things to us, such as news, music, and household products. They trade in our stock markets and optimise our transportation and logistics. They are also beginning to drive us around, play with our children, diagnose our health. How do we ensure that these machines will be trustworthy? This lecture explores various ...

Why has anger become such a dominant theme in today's world that people have even spoken of an "age of anger"? Is it conceivable that this emotionalization could also have a positive effect, under what conditions? In terms of the history of philosophy and religion, two approaches to this topic can be identified. On the one hand, a complete rejection, in Buddhism, for example, and in Stoicism; on ...

There is order on the internet, but how has this order emerged and what challenges will threaten and shape its future? This study shows how a legitimate order of norms has emerged online, through both national and international legal systems. It establishes the emergence of a normative order of the internet, an order which explains and justifies processes of online rule and regulation. This order ...

The conference will discuss basic principles and problems of algorithmic knowledge production in contemporary science and society. Witnessed by most recent breakthrough research, quantum algorithms introduce new ways of processing information entirely at variance with traditional classical computation. Also, algorithms are now utilized in proving mathematical theorems. This forces us to scrutinize ...

The investigation of plant intelligence and sentience is here to stay. And yet, despite the growing body of literature on the subject, we appear not to be making headway. Controversies over plant intelligent behavior and consciousness are part of a long botanical tradition. But things are only getting worse in today’s academic culture of “fast science”. The result is a lack of a common ...

There was a moment in the 1990’s, in the era of high postmodernism, when it seemed that social reality has had no stable foundations and as such it can be freely and totally transformed by interventions in the registers of symbols and images. Various social, political and economic developments of the last two decades – from 9/11 terrorist attacks to the 2008 financial crisis to the recent ...

The future of Europe after the crisis caused by COVID-19 according to Ivan Krastev, political scientist, IWM Permanent Fellow and president of the Centre of Liberal Strategies in Sofia, and Jordi Vaquer, political analyst of the Open Society Initiative for Europe. Conversation in Catalan and English, with subtitles in Catalan and Spanish. ...

All over the world, elections are manipulated by fake news, public opinion is radicalized via social media and electronic voting processes are subject to hacker attacks. The Internet was once seen as an opportunity for more democracy, but today concerns about the future of free elections prevail. Eric Frey, editor of Der Standard, will speak with his guests about the transformation of mass media ...

Pamela Newkirk - Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business —In Conversation with Jonathan Capehart In her latest book Newkirk, a journalist, professor of journalism at New York University and author of the award-winning Spectacle and Within the Veil, tracks the efforts of three predominantly white elite industries —Hollywood, corporate America, and academia— to ...

The volume centres on the debates on digital encryption in Germany and the USA, during the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s leaks, which revolved around the value of privacy and the legitimacy of surveillance practices. Using a discourse analysis of mass media and specialist debates, it shows how these are closely interlinked with technological controversies and how, as a result, contestation ...

After the publication of Hans Jonas' Das Prinzip Verantwortung forty years ago, the principle of responsibility has become a key concept in moral and political debates. Yet the unconditional responsibility for the possibility of the existence of future generations – not only of humans, but also of other living beings – is invariably accompanied by the "heuristics of fear," which presupposes ...

A decade ago social networks, big data and artificial intelligence were welcomed for their promise of progress and democratization of access. Today, the focus has shifted to their dark side as a threat to our privacy, a danger to democracy and as a new form of surveillance. Three of the world’s leading activists of the electronic age gather to discuss our digital future. Roger McNamee, an early ...

In the fifth event of the series “Geopolitical Talks” IWM Permanent Fellow Ivan Krastev will talk with Ambassador William J. Burns, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, about America’s changing role in the world and the purpose of American diplomacy. William J. Burns is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of The Back Channel: A ...

Big data analytics is a remarkable new field of investigation. However, the effectiveness of the new field seems to encourage an aggressive “philosophy” or “methodology” based on the dictum that “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves”. We show, using Ramsey theory and algorithmic information theory, that this view is radically wrong. Specifically, we prove that, exactly ...