Julita Skotarska
Petr Urban
Prague
As the 2022 documentary Wild Prague beautifully captured, the inhabitants of Prague share the city with many animal species. Some of them are well-hidden and require much care and attention to be spotted, but others made their home in the capital of the Czech Republic in a plain sight and do not seem to mind being observed, or even actively engage in interaction with humans. Perhaps due to this variety and uniqueness of their situations, we are still in the process of deciding which of them will take a centre stage in our endeavours. We are hoping to link these actual multispecies stories to the thinking of Mary Midgley through careful close reading at an open seminar led by an expert who will introduce her philosophy and context of her life. We will also organise a day out in the city, following in the footsteps of nonhuman inhabitants of Prague in an attempt to better understand their lives and the intricacies of human-nonhuman entanglements.
Julita Skotarska
Julita Skotarska is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Charles University in Prague. She obtained a master’s degree in philosophy from the Jagiellonian University, as well as a master’s degree in applied translation from the University of East Anglia. Between finishing her MA and beginning her PhD, she worked in translation industry, both as a freelancer and for a leading international corporation.
Dr. Petr Urban
Petr Urban is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, as well as a Project Coordinator of the Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics – Prague (CETE-P).
Programme details coming soon
Pardubice
What happens when we pay attention to non-human animals, and how can the fruits of that attention be expressed? Combining Midgley’s and Murdoch’s insights on poetry, attention, and the imagination, we will take a trip to Pardubice’s animal sanctuary Pohádková Zahrada (Fairytale Garden) to spend some time in attentive engagement with animals. After some exercises guided by the philosophy of attention, we will sit down among the animals for a poetry workshop, using different structural and thematic prompts. The poems may be shared freely by participants without any demand that they do so, and will be followed by an open discussion about the experience of attending to and with animals and of animal attention, exploring the specificities of a context where animals are, unusually in our society, not used for human purposes but free to pursue their own lives – albeit in a human-controlled setting. This experience will be followed by a panel conversation among some invited speakers at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of the University of Pardubice.
Dr Silvia Caprioglio Panizza is Senior Researcher at the CORE project, Department of Philosophy, University of Pardubice. She is the author of The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real with Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil (Routledge 2022) and of a number of papers on attention, Murdoch, Weil, and animal ethics. She has co-edited and translated Simone Weil’s literary works (Bloomsbury 2019 and 2024)
Dr. Laura Candiotto is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Centre for Ethics of the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. Her main research field is philosophy of emotions. She leads the project "Vicious Epistemic Cultures" founded by the Czech Science Foundation and the Research Team “Loving is caring” at the Upce. She is also a member of the CORE project (WP7: Environmental Emotions in the Anthropocene). As a member of Mind and Life Europe, she is contributing to the development of an enactive ethics of sense-making grounded on affects as what disclose existential concerns and values, especially regarding environmental issues and shared sentience. For her publications, see centreforethics.upce.cz/en/doc-laura-candiotto-phd
The PhD students Lisa Hall and Nina Colin will also take part to the planned event. They are both working on animal and environmental ethics and education.
Programme details coming soon
Corvids