Dag Hasse: What is 'Europe'? Towards a Multilingual History of the Concept

Colloquium lecture by Dag Hasse (Würzburg), organized by the Department of the History of Philosophy

When we talk about Europe today, we normally use either a rather stable geographical concept or a cultural concept, which is much less stable. The cultural concept, in most cases, has its roots in enlightenment or in romanticism traditions. Past research has done a lot to elucidate the fate of the geographical concept in antiquity and the Middle Ages and the emergence of the cultural concept in the early modern period. The focus, or bias, of this research, however, is decidedly Western European. I shall try to contribute to our understanding of the concept by analyzing sources in other languages: in Byzantine Greek, Arabic and Hebrew in particular. Many cultural concepts of 'Europe' today are based on an imaginative geography. Is it possible to use a meaningful cultural concept that it based on a historically adequate geography?

Dag Nikolaus Hasse is Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Würzburg since 2005. He was educated at Göttingen and Yale, received his PhD at the Warburg Institute in London (1997) and his Habilitation in Freiburg im Breisgau (2005). He is the author of Avicenna's 'De anima' in the Latin West (2000) and of Success and Suppression: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance (2016) and the editor of the online lexicon Arabic and Latin Glossary (2009-).

When & where?

Wednesday 12th September, 16:00-17:45
Room Omega, Faculty of Philosophy