12.12.12. philosophy at the end of the world

This year's 'Philosophy in the World' lecture will take place a week before the end of the world, on 12.12.12, becoming LUC's first ever 'Philosophy at the end of the World' lecture.  The first two lectures in this series, by Simon Blackburn and then Raymond Geuss, were great successes.  This one also promises to be a special event that LUC will share with our colleagues from the Honours College in Leiden and the wider public of The Hague.  Hence, the special venue in the city centre: the Nieuwspoort.

All are welcome!

12.12.12 coming soon ...

Remember, the world will end on 21.12 ...

In collaboration with the Political Arts Initiative, the LUC Research Centre brings you the annual 'Philosophy in the World' lecture on 12.12.12.  Prof Chris Goto-Jones, dean of Leiden University College in The Hague, will speak on 'Life at the End of Days: Philosophy and Apocalypse' at 18.00 (venue tbc).  The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.
Please mark the date of the beginning of the end in your diaries, and check back to find out where it will happen ...

Raymond Geuss opens Visiting Speaker Series 2011/2012

Dear students and staff,

The LUC Research Centre is delighted to start its new season of visiting speakers on 16 September with the eminent Raymond Geuss, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, who is a political philosopher and scholar of 19th and 20th century European philosophy. This lecture is the second in our series, ‘Philosophy in the World,’ which was inaugurated by Simon Blackburn in March 2011.
Professor Geuss will talk about 'The Authority of Democracy and Human Rights'.
For more details please go to LUCRC's 'events' page and download the poster for this exciting lecture there.

Because of the special nature of this event, it will be held in our Stichthage building, on the first floor of the The Hague Central Station main hall from 19.00 hrs onwards.

Registration is recommended: events@lucresearch.nl

I hope to see many of you there!

Esther
(LUCRC research officer)

First ever LUC poster conference!

The first ever cohort of students of Leiden University College The Hague are in the midst of an interdisciplinary methodology course entitled "Designing Academic Inquiry", which springs off disciplinary building blocks to reach higher planes of academic thinking. This systematic mapping of method and knowledge will not only equip our honours students with concrete skills in research design and analysis in a liberal arts and sciences framework, but will also culminate in the first ever LUC student research poster conference on 12 May 2011.

Having completed the lecture component of the course, with individual assignments based on the themes below,
* Objectivity + Subjectivity
* Deduction + Induction
* Causation + Correlation
* Language + Representation
* Structure + Agency

all LUC students are now applying their conceptual and methodological understanding by finalising their group research project. Each seminar will present a set of academic posters on one of the following topics pertaining to the city of The Hague:
* Public transportation
* Healthcare
* Recycling and waste management
* Sporting and leisure facilities
* Museums and cultural provisions
* Parks and open public spaces

With the guidance of their course instructors, the students are excited to deliver their findings to an audience within and beyond LUC, including key representatives from City Hall. It will be a pleasure to welcome you to this special event; please do join us on 12 May, 13:00 - 15:00, at Lange Voorhout 44 for a glimpse into a foundational step towards addressing global challenges.

Posted by Cissie Fu

Reparations for your soul

LUC is happy to invite you to the final seminar in our Visiting Speakers Series 2010/2011.

We are delighted to be able to host Dr. Claire Moon of the London School of Economics, to talk about 'Who will pay reparations for my soul? Compensation, Social Suffering and Social Control in Argentina.' In her seminar, Dr Moon will discuss how state reparation to victims of (state) atrocities can work to administer and control social suffering but can, in some cases, intensify the trauma rather than ameliorate it. She will use the refusal of state reparations by the Argentinian mothers of the Plaza de Mayo as an example to make this argument.

 

Claire Moon is senior lecturer in the sociology of human rights at LSE, a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, LSE. She is the convenor of the Atrocity, Suffering and Human Rights Research Group and has been reviews editor of the British Journal of Sociology since 2007. Dr. Moon is also a member of the British Sociological Association.

As usual, this seminar will take place in the LUC Manor, Lange Voorhout 44, at 16.15-18.00.

Fighting terror

LUC is excited to welcome Sir Nigel Rodley, Professor of Law and Chair of the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex, to talk about 'Fighting Terror' on Wednesday 4th May, 16-18.00, in the college Manor (LV44).

After various academic and professional positions in the US and Canada and after receiving his 2nd LLM degree in 1970, Nigel returned to the UK to become the first Legal Adviser of the International Secretariat of Amnesty International, a position he held until 1990; during the same period he taught Public International Law at LSE. In 1994 he became Professor of Law at the University of Essex.
In March 1993 he was designated Special Rapporteur on Torture by the UN Commission on Human Rights, serving in this capacity until 2001. Since 2001 he has been a member and vice chair of the UN Human Rights Committee. He was elected a Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists in 2003 and is a member of Council of its British Branch, JUSTICE. He is a Trustee of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. Nigel Rodley was knighted ‘for services to human rights and international law’ in 1999.

Espinoza on inequality in Latin America

Professor Espinoza is professor at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile and holds the Andres Bello Chair at Leiden University in 2011. He is well known for his work on inequality, social networks, social mobility and community.

LUC is delighted to be able to host Professor Espinoza during his stay in The Netherlands. He will talk about the reasons for the persistency of inequality despite great advances in affluence in Latin America, and also about the reasons why such inequalities are considered problematic. He will consider this situation from the standpoint of policy and social mechanism.
The seminar will be at the usual time and place: at LUC's manor building (LV44) at 16.15-18.00 on Wednesday 20th April. A poster with further information is here.

Students will be interested to know that LUC's first current affairs evening will take place after this event in the college lounge, from 19-21.00.

Suganami on the causes of war

Wednesday 13th April, 16.15-18.00, and LUC The Hague (LV44). 
Hidemi Suganami studied International Relations at Tokyo University, University of Wales, and the London School of Economics. He taught International Relations at Keele University in England (1975-2004) where he held a personal chair in the Philosophy of International Relations. He currently teaches at Aberystwyth University, Wales, where he is Professor in the Department of International Politics. His publications include The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (1989), On the Causes of War (1996) and, with Andrew Linklater, The English School of International Relations (2006). He is currently working on the relationship between history, theory and ideology in the study of international relations.
In his seminar, Professor Suganami intends to cover questions such as: (1) Are there some standard ways in which war comes about? (2) How should we respond to the finding, which has caused much excitement among IR scholars, that there is no war between democracies? (3) Isn’t there a case for suggesting, as historians tend to do, that each war has its unique set of causes? (4) What is the relationship between the accounts we give to the occurrences of war and the ways in which they come about? And, finally, (5) how does our analysis change its content when we shift our focus away from war between sovereign states towards different kinds of war?
More details are here (poster).
Students interested in doing some preparatory reading can look here and here.

Japan panel follow up

Many people expressed the desire to help on Friday, and we hope that such people can use this site as a way of communicating with each other and hence as a way to facilitate follow-up meetings and events. Feel free to post comments to that end; we can use this thread to find each other again.

Courageous men and women

'Courageous men and women had for many decades defied state terror... Today they are joined by the masses'


Listen to Dr Elizabeth Kassab

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2011/02/110228_kassab.shtml

Dr Kassab is the author of Contemporary Arab Thought: Cultural Critique in Comparative Perspective published by Columbia University Press.

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14488-9/contemporary-arab-thought

For a review of Dr Kassab's book, see

http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-levant&month=1009&week=e&msg=opEoQuUesNZ2g9dx4PWyCw&user=&pw=

Thomas Bundschuh

Japan, tsunami, earthquake panel

On Friday 1 April, LUC and MEARC will collaborate to host an expert panel to provide information, news and analysis about the recent events in Japan and their repercussions. The event will be held at 19-21.00 in our Stichthage building, above the Central Train Station in The Hague. It will be chaired by Prof Laurens Jan Brinkhorst, the former EU Ambassador to Japan.
Although the occasion is primarily informational in intention, we also hope to take the opportunity to discuss possible ways to launch new fund-raising projects.

The poster is here
All are welcome.

Joris Voorhoeve lecture

LUC Research Centre is delighted to announce a seminar by Prof.dr. Joris Voorhoeve, formerly the Dutch Minister of Defence, who will talk on the topic of 'Early Warning and Prevention of Violent Conflict' at LUC (Lange Voorhout 44, The Hague) on Wednesday 30 March, 16.15-18.00.

Those who are interested should also note that a Japan Benefit Concert featuring Genzo Okabe will start after this seminar at 19:00 across the street at Pulchri Studio (Lange Voorhout 15, 2514 EA Den Haag)

Japan earthquake benefit concert

Dear LUCers,

Since we are all so concerned about recent events in Japan, since we're gearing up for our own information and analysis evening this Friday, and since this concert is taking place just across the street from our building, I wanted to share this event with you. Please show your support by attending.

Some samples of the music are here: http://www.genzookabe.com/index.html

"Benefit Concert for Japan"
Date & Time: Wednesday 30 March, 2011, at 19:00
場　所: Pulchri Studio (Lange Voorhout 15, 2514 EA Den Haag)
主　催: Genzo Okabe、Luciano Poli、Dick Brongers
連絡先: Genzo Okabe（e-mail: info@genzookabe.com, Tel: 06-467 666 34）、Luciano Poli（e-mail: bass.poli@gmail.com, Tel: 06-156 314 32）
料金: Free donation

Message from organiser:
We sincerely hope you will be able to attend this important event. All received funds will be sent directly to the Japanese Red Cross. Performing will be Ellister van den Molen trio, Walter Wolff trio and Genzo Okabe quartet.

Let us pause

“The horrible and heartbreaking events in Japan present a strange concatenation of disasters”, writes Jonathan Schell in his article From Hiroshima to Fukushima. “First, the planet unleashed one of its primordial shocks, an earthquake, of a magnitude greater than any previously recorded in Japan. The earthquake, in turn, created the colossal tsunami, which, when it struck the country’s northeastern shores, pulverized everything in its path, forming a filthy wave made of mud, cars, buildings, houses, airplanes and other debris. In part because the earthquake had just lowered the level of the land by two feet, the wave rolled as far as six miles inland, killing thousands of people.

In a stupefying demonstration of its power, as the New York Times has reported, the earthquake moved parts of Japan thirteen feet eastward, slightly shifted the earth’s axis and actually shortened each day that passes on earth, if only infinitesimally (by 1.8 milliseconds).”

Yet, as Schell observes, “this was not all. Another shock soon followed.” Schell then draws our attention to the “chain of events at the [Fukushima] reactors now running out of control” – events that provide “a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature and the force we imagine we can control.” Read more at TheNation.com

Jonathan Schell is the Doris M. Shaffer Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale University. He is the author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People, an analysis of people power, and The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.

Thomas Bundschuh

Japan information and appeal evening

Japan, Earthquake, Tsunami, Nuclear Crisis
Information, News, Analysis and Panel Discussion sponsored by MEARC and LUC The Hague

The catastrophic and tragic events that have been developing in Japan over the last few days have sent shockwaves around the world. The scale of the disaster is difficult to comprehend, especially at distance, and particularly through the abstractions of the international media. It is impossible to imagine the powerful viscerality of living through such massive demonstrations of the destructive power of nature, and difficult to understand the anxiety and fear of nuclear disaster that has followed the earthquakes and tsunami. From the privileged safety and calm of The Netherlands, we should remember that these events are first and finally about real people struggling for their lives.

While we wish the people of Japan every strength for the time ahead, it is important for us to understand the meaning and significance of the events so far as well as their possible repercussions for the future. With that in mind, MEARC and LUC The Hague are collaborating to bring together a panel of experts on: international security; Japanese history, politics, economics and society; the science of earthquakes and tsunami; and the physics of nuclear power. As well as providing a forum for information, news and analysis, we hope to be able to start a discussion about further activities that can be conducted to help those impacted by these terrible events.


We can also use this occasion to bring together those actors who would like to organize and coordinate fund-raising activities.

The panel will convene on the evening of 1 April 2011, 19-21.00, in Stichthage, Campus Den Haag (entrance in Den Haag Central Station's main hall). All are welcome.