Watch the live event
(DAY 2)
Watch DAY 1
Second Delphi Dialogues
Under the patronage
of H.E. the President of the Hellenic Republic
Ms. Katerina Sakellaropoulou
European Cultural Delphi Centre, 21-22 June 2024
Organizer
Grand Sponsor
Media Sponsors
The Initiative
Τhe Delphi Dialogues, initiated by the European Cultural Delphi Centre in 2023, explore systematically and shed new light on important aspects of humanity’s way towards its emerging future. They also aim at highlighting the everlasting relevance of the Delphic maxim “know thyself” not only for individual but also for collective ‘selves’, for the very existence of contemporary humanity and its collective self-knowledge in this markedly transitional period of its history.
Delphi Dialogues 2024
The Second Delphi Dialogues, under the patronage of H.E. the President of the Hellenic Republic, Ms. Katerina Sakellaropoulou, will extend the theme of the First Dialogues focusing on the transition of societies to the technologically determined ‘post-human’ age.
Important questions to be discussed include the following:
1) How will this transition redefine key structures and functions of democratic institutions and the ways in which citizens relate to decision-making centers?
2) Could this transition involve practices and mechanisms of cultural, social, and political homogenization?
3) How will the dialectic of indigenous cultural traditions and cultural globalization be shaped?
4) In what ways can fundamental human freedoms and rights be safeguarded in the face of dramatically evolving and widely adopted and applied technological mechanisms of monitoring citizens’ choices both in their private lives and in the public sphere?
5) How could humanistic values and ideals inform/influence “digital ethics” and vice versa?
6) Can we predict the changes that developments in digital technology and artificial intelligence (e.g. “deepfakes”) will bring about to hitherto established ontological and epistemological categories?
Programme
Friday 21 June
17.30 – 17.45
Addresses
17.45 – 18.45
First session
Opening speech
Panagiotis Roilos, Harvard University
«Neomedieval Metacapitalism» and Mechanisms of Anti-Democratic Homogenization
Kate Hayles, University of California, Los Angeles
Are AIs a Threat to Democracy?
18.45 – 19.15
Discussion
19.15 – 19.30
Break
19.30 – 20.30
Second session
Luciano Floridi, Yale University
AI for and against Democracy
Patrice Maniglier, University Paris-Nanterre
Citizens of the Earth: Rethinking Cosmopolitanism in a Planetary Age
20.30 – 21.00
Discussion
Saturday 22 June
10.00 – 11.30
Third Session
Rosi Braidotti, University of Utrecht
Posthuman Convergence and Affirmative Ethics
Melani Cammett, Harvard University
The Promises and Pitfalls of AI for Divided Societies
Martin Crowley, University of Cambridge
Political Agency in the Age of the Posthuman
11.30 – 12.00
Discussion
12.00 – 12.15
Break
12.15 – 13.30
Roundtable discussion
Biographical Notes
Rosi Braidotti is a feminist Continental philosopher and Distinguished University Professor Emerita at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
Posthuman Convergence and Affirmative Ethics
She holds degrees in philosophy from the ANU and the Sorbonne and Honorary Degrees from Helsinki, (2007) and Linkoping (2013). She is an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA) and also a Member of the Academia Europaea. In 2022 she received the Humboldt Research Award for life-long contribution to scholarship.
Main publications: Nomadic Subjects (2011a), and Nomadic Theory (2011b), Columbia University Press. The Posthuman, 2013, Posthuman Knowledge, 2019; Posthuman Feminism, 2022 Polity Press. The Posthuman Glossary (2018) and More Posthuman Glossary (2022), Bloomsbury Academic.
Melani Cammett is Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs in the Government Department and Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.
The Promises and Pitfalls of AI for Divided Societies
Her books include The Oxford Handbook on Politics in Muslim Societies (co-edited with Pauline Jones, Oxford University Press, 2022), Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon (Cornell University Press 2014); A Political Economy of the Middle East (co-authored with Ishac Diwan, Alan Richards, and John Waterbury, 2015); The Politics of Non-State Social Welfare in the Global South (co-edited with Lauren Morris MacLean, Cornell University Press 2014); and Globalization and Business Politics in North Africa (Cambridge University Press 2007).
Her research explores identity politics, development, migration, and authoritarianism in the Middle East and other contexts. She is currently working on a book project on how people live together after violence, focusing on Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland.
Martin Crowley is Professor of Modern French Thought and Culture at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Anthony L. Lyster Fellow and Director of Studies in Modern and Medieval Languages at Queens’ College.
Political Agency in the Age of the Posthuman
His most recent book is Accidental Agents: Ecological Politics beyond the Human (Columbia University Press), and he serves as General Editor of the journal French Studies.
Luciano Floridi is the Founding Director of the Digital Ethics Center and Professor in the Cognitive Science Program at Yale University.
AI for and against Democracy
He is world-renowned as one of the most authoritative voices of contemporary philosophy, the founder of the philosophy of information, and one of the major interpreters of the digital revolution.
His more than 300 works about the philosophy of information, digital ethics, the ethics of AI, and the philosophy of technology have been translated into many languages. In 2022 he was made Knight of the Grand Cross OMRI for his foundational work in philosophy.
Kate Hayles is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the James B. Duke Professor Emerita from Duke University.
Are AIs a Threat to Democracy?
Her research focuses on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Her twelve print books include Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (Columbia, 2021), Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017) and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Univ. of Chicago Press 2015), in addition to over 100 peer-reviewed articles.
Her books have won several prizes, including The Rene Wellek Award for the Best Book in Literary Theory for How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Literature, Cybernetics and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Writing Machines. She has been recognized by many fellowships and awards, including two NEH Fellowships, a Guggenheim, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, and two University of California Presidential Research Fellowships. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is currently at work on Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts.
Patrice Maniglier is Associate Professor at the Philosophy Department of Paris Nanterre University (Paris, France). A former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), he was a Lecturer at the University of Essex (UK), before joining Nanterre in 2012.
Citizens of the Earth: Rethinking Cosmopolitanism in a Planetary Age
His works articulate various fields of research: history of 20th C. French philosophy, philosophy of social sciences (linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis), aesthetics (film theory and contemporary art), and more recently Earth system sciences. He defends a historical reinterpretation as well as a contemporary reactivation of “structuralism”. More recently his collaboration with Bruno Latour led him to defend a pluralist conception of the “Earth” backed on structuralist concepts, arguing that the Earth is both one and multiple. He often contributes to public discussions in French media (France Inter, France Culture, Le Monde, Libération, etc.). After having been a member of the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes (which ended in 2018), he launched in 2024 Les Temps qui restent : https://lestempsquirestent.org/en.”
He is the author of many books, including La Vie énigmatique des signes: Saussure et la naissance du structuralisme (Léo Scheer, 2006), La Perspective du Diable, Figurations de l’espace et philosophie, de la Renaissance à Rosemary’s Baby (Actes Sud, 2010), Foucault at the movies (Columbia UP, 2018), La Philosophie qui se fait (Le Cerf, 2019), La Terre, le philosophe et le virus, Bruno Latour expliqué par l’actualité (Les Liens Qui Libèrent, 2021), Sœurs, Pour une psychanalyse féministe (co-authored with Silvia Lippi, Seuil, 2023).
Panagiotis Roilos is Professor of Greek Studies and Comparative Critical Theory and Literature, and holds the George Seferis Chair at Harvard University.
«Neomedieval Metacapitalism» and Mechanisms of Anti-Democratic Homogenization
At the same university, he is a Research Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, where he co-founded (2007) and co-directs the Cultural Politics Seminar Program.
International awards for his research work include the Forschungsstipendium für erfahrene Wissenschaftler of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and an honorary doctorate from the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.
He has authored and edited ten books, including the monographs Towards a Ritual Poetics (2003; co-author) ‘Amphoteroglossia’: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel (2005), C. P. Cavafy: The Economics of Metonymy and the volumes Medieval Greek Storytelling: Fictionality and Narrative in Byzantium (editor, 2014) and From Byzantium to the Early Greek Enlightenment: Books, Writers, and Ideologies in Early Modern Greek Contexts [Late 15th–Early 18th C.] (editor, 2024). He is currently completing Neomedieval Metacapitalism and Postclassical Imaginaries: A Cognitive Anthropology of Late Antique and Byzantine ‘Phantasia’.