Jan Olof Bengtsson

The University of Warsaw has a department of philosophy of culture, and that department has a humane philosophy project, in collaboration with Oxford. All who have followed this blog will understand how promising that sounds to me. I just came back from a one-day conference on Saturday organized by the department as part of the project, on Personhood, Law and the Idea of the Tragic, to which, at a late stage, I had been kindly invited as a guest. The speakers were Przemysław Bursztyka (Warsaw), Janusz Ostrowski (Warsaw), Marcin Rychter (Warsaw), Ferenc Hörcher (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Jonathan Price (Leiden and Oxford), Randall Auxier (Southern Illinois University), Marija Selak (Zagreb), Ralph Weir (Cambridge and Oxford), and Mikołaj Sławkowski-Rode (Warsaw and Oxford). To some extent a political dimension was added to the discussion at the excellent dinner at Akademia Smaku when I discovered that three of the speakers, Hörcher, Price, and Sławkowski-Rode, were members of the Vanenburg Society, or the Centre for European Renewal.