THIRD DELPHI DIALOGUES
UNDER THE AUSPICES
OF H.E. THE PRESIDENT OF THE HELLENIC REPUBLIC
MR. CONSTANTINE AN. TASSOULAS
Delphi, 20-21 June 2025
Organized by
Grand Sponsor
Media Sponsors
Delphi Dialogues – Day 1
Delphi Dialogues – Day 2
The Initiative
The European Cultural Delphi Centre (E.C.D.C.) is today the foremost cultural institution in Greece where the significance of humanistic thought is consistently explored. It serves as an ideal venue for dialogue on the pressing questions of our time, always centered on the human being and Democracy.
Within this framework, the E.C.D.C. launched in 2023 the international program “Delphi Dialogues,” which aims to explore key aspects of humanity’s journey toward its emerging future, and to contribute meaningfully through concrete proposals and the promotion of global critical thinking.
Renowned thinkers and scientists of global stature gather in Delphi to discuss urgent contemporary issues and challenges that humanity will soon be called upon to face.
The program continued in 2024 and is being held for the third consecutive year in 2025, thanks to the ongoing valuable support of Eurolife FFH.
Delphi Dialogues 2025
Biopolitics, Bioethics, and Democracy
20–21 June 2025 | Delphi
Remarkable developments in many scientific fields – most notably medicine, biomedicine, genetics, computer science, and physics – along with technological breakthroughs including artificial intelligence, have provided political (and economic) centers of power with highly advanced biopolitical mechanisms. These tools allow for the management, regulation, surveillance, and overall shaping of key aspects of human life.
The 2025 edition of the Delphi Dialogues will delve into complex and urgent questions raised by this new reality, including:
- How are the principles and priorities of bioethics being reshaped by these developments, particularly in medicine and genetic technologies?
- To what extent—and in what ways—can we achieve a balance between the concentration of scientific and technological power in a few research and corporate entities, and the preservation and expansion of democratic ideals and civil rights?
- What kinds of threats do advanced biopolitical apparatuses pose to democratic institutions?
Program
Friday 20 June
17.30 – 17.45
Addresses
17.45 – 18.25
First Session
Daniel Wikler, Harvard University
Bioethics in an era of disinformation
Frédéric Keck, CNRS – Collège de France
The democratic potential of cynegetic power: lessons of wisdom from virus hunters
18.25 – 18.45
Discussion
18.45 – 19.00
Coffee Break
19.00 – 19.40
Second Session
Elaine Scarry, Harvard University
Thermonuclear monarchy: can a single speech act destroy all civilization?
Michael Hardt, Duke University
Democracy and the global war regime
19.40 – 20.00
Discussion
Saturday 21 June
10.00 – 10.40
Third Session
Demetrios Yatromanolakis, The Johns Hopkins University
On biopolitics: from Plato’s political pragmatism to post-human cybernetics
James Faubion, Rice University
Antibiopolitics and bioautology
10.40 – 11.00
Discussion
11.00 – 11.15
Coffee Break
11.15 – 11.55
Fourth Session
Didier Fassin, Collège de France
The inequality of lives as an ethical challenge to democracy
Timothy Campbell, Cornell University
The uses of democracy: reframing biopolitics
11.55 – 12.15
Discussion
12.15 – 13.30
Roundtable Discussion
Biographical Notes
Timothy Campbell is Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University, who works at the intersection of contemporary Italian thought, biopolitics, and media studies.
The uses of democracy: reframing biopolitics
His scholarly work includes translations of Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy and Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, as well as the co-translation of Carlo Diano’s Form and Event. Campbell also served as editor of the “Commonalities” series at Fordham University Press and co-edited Biopolitics: A Reader with Adam Sitze.
Campbell’s own authored works include Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben and Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life. His most recent work, The Comic Self: Toward Dispossession, was co-authored with Grant Farred. He is currently completing his next book on the city and planetary governmentality.
Didier Fassin is Professor at the Collège de France, where he holds the Chair “Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies”, and at the Institute for Advanced Study, in the Princeton School of Social Science.
The inequality of lives as an ethical challenge to democracy
At the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, he was founder and director of IRIS, the Interdisciplinary Research Institute on Social Problems. Anthropologist, sociologist and physician, he has conducted research in Senegal, Congo, South Africa, Ecuador, and France, focusing on health, moral and political issues. He gave the Tanner Lectures at Berkeley on punishment, the Adorno Lectures in Frankfurt on life, and the Eric Wolf Lecture in Vienna on conspiracy theories. Recipient of the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award, of the Gold Medal in anthropology at the Swedish Royal Academy of Science, and of the Huxley Memorial Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute, he is a member of the American Philosophical Society. Former Vice-President of Doctors Without Borders, he is currently the President of the French Medical Committee for Exiles.
He edited or coedited thirty collective volumes and authored twenty books, translated into eleven languages, most recently The Will to Punish, Life. A Critical User’s Manual, Death of a Traveler. A Counter Investigation, and Moral Abdication. How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza.
James D. Faubion is Rice University Radoslav Tsanoff Chair Emeritus in Anthropology.
Antibiopolitics and bioautology
He is the editor of Rethinking the Subject (1995); of the second and third volumes of Essential Works of Michel Foucault (1999 and 2000); of The Ethics of Kinship (2001); of the second edition of Michel Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth (2004); of Foucault Now (2014); co-editor of Fieldwork Is Not What It Used To Be (2008) and co-editor of Theory is More than It Used to Be (2015).He is the author of Modern Greek Lessons (1993), The Shadows and Lights of Waco (2001) and An Anthropology of Ethics (2011) and co-author of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (2008).
Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University.
Democracy and the global war regime
His works combine philosophical investigations with analyses of our current political situation. Studying the current forms of social domination, including the mechanisms of capitalist control, which form the bases of contemporary global power structures, is a central focus. Key, too, is engagement with contemporary social movements that refuse domination and present the potential for new, democratic modes of social organization.
His first book was Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (1993). Over the course of several decades, his collaborations with Antonio Negri resulted in six books: Labor of Dionysus (1994), Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), Commonwealth (2009), Declaration (2012), and Assembly (2017). His latest book, The Subversive Seventies (2023), analyzes liberation movements of the 1970s in a wide range of countries throughout the world, highlighting their relevance for political struggles today.
Since 2010 he has served as editor of the South Atlantic Quarterly.
Frédéric Keck is a Senior Researcher at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology (CNRS-Collège de France-EHESS).
The democratic potential of cynegetic power: lessons of wisdom from virus hunters
After studying philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, he investigated the history of social anthropology and contemporary biopolitical questions raised by avian influenza.
He was the director of the research department of the musée du quai Branly between 2014 and 2018.
He published Claude Lévi-Strauss, une introduction (Pocket-La Découverte, 2005), Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, entre philosophie et anthropologie (CNRS Editions, 2008) Un monde grippé (Flammarion, 2010) and Avian Reservoirs: Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts, (Duke University Press, 2020). He has co-edited (with A. Lakoff) Sentinel devices, Limn, 2013 and (with A. Kelly and C. Lynteris) Anthropology of Epidemics (Routledge, 2019). He received the bronze medal of CNRS in 2012 and is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Elaine Scarry teaches at Harvard University where she is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value, and a Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows.
Thermonuclear monarchy: can a single speech act destroy all civilization?
She lectures both nationally and internationally on nuclear war, law, literature, and medicine, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow as well as a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, at the Getty Museum Research Center in Los Angeles, and at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her awards include honorary degrees from Northwestern University and Uppsala University in Sweden, as well as the Truman Capote Prize for literary criticism, and most recently, the Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for a writer “of progressive, original, and experimental tendencies.” Her work has two central subjects, the nature of physical injury and the nature of human creation. Her writings include The Body in Pain (1985), On Beauty and Being Just (1999), Dreaming by the Book (1999), and Thermonuclear Monarchy (2014). In 2005, Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy named her one of the world’s100 leading intellectuals.
Daniel Wikler has been Mary B. Saltonstall Professor of Ethics and Population Health at the Harvard School of Public Health since 2002, where he is also affiliated with university-wide programs including the Harvard Program in Ethics and Health and the Safra Center for Ethics. He was co-founder and second president of the International Association of Bioethics.
Bioethics in an era of disinformation
His research has focused on the identification and investigation of bioethical issues arising in respect to health at the population and global levels, including (but not limited to) value choices embedded in the measurement of the global burden of disease, in methods for priority-setting among health services, and in issues arising in health promotion, including the assignment of responsibility for adverse outcomes of heath-affecting personal choices.Prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 2002, he served as the first staff ethicist for the World Health Organization and as staff philosopher for the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, under Presidents Carter and Reagan.
Among his books, co-authored or co-edited with colleagues in several disciplines, are From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (Cambridge), WHO’s Casebook on Ethical Issues in International Health Research; Inequalities in Health: Concepts, Measures, and Ethics (Oxford), and Measuring the Global Burden of Disease: Philosophical Dimensions (Oxford).
Demetrios Yatromanolakis holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. A former Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University, he has been awarded numerous international fellowships, including the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin.
On biopolitics: from Plato’s political pragmatism to post-human cybernetics
His areas of expertise include ancient Greek vase-painting and art, epigraphy, papyrology, ritual theory, and reception theory. His research and publications have also focused on European intellectual history and history of art (first half of the 20th century), and historical and comparative anthropology. He holds appointments at the Department of Classics, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Comparative Thought, Johns Hopkins University.
He is the author, co-author or editor of 12 books, including Sappho in the Making: The Early Reception (author); Towards a Ritual Poetics (co-author, [translated into several European languages]); Greek Mythologies (author); Politics of Mythogenesis: Art and Thought in the European Avant-Garde (author, [in Greek]); Epigraphy of Art: Ancient Greek Vase-Inscriptions and Vase-Paintings (editor); An Archaeology of Representations: Ancient Greek Vase-Painting and Contemporary Methodologies (editor); Archaic Ontological Past: Pre-Socratic Philosophy and European Avant-Garde Art and Thought (editor); and Inscriptions and Representations on Athenian Vases (editor). He has recently completed a book on cultural politics in the art and philosophy of André Masson and Georges Bataille. He is currently working on biopolitics and Greek antiquity.
