The World Phenomenology Institute
William S. Smith, Executive President
Jadwiga S. Smith, Co-President of American Division
Daniela Verducci, Co-President of European/Asian Division
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Founder †
together with
The Department of Humanities
IULM University, Milan (Italy)
Renato Boccali
INVITE YOU TO
The 66th International Congress of Phenomenology
Milan
October 27-28-29, 2022
TOPIC:
Eco-Imagination for a Sustainable Future
The aim of the conference is to explore the role of imagination in forming and interpreting our world-in-transformation in a new way. The classical phenomenological approach to imagination has focused on the different modes in which we can experience the world and the correlating modes in which the world can appear to us, so that the imagination was strictly conceived in relation to perception. Furthermore, imaging can be considered as an act of experiencing something as possible, opening the virtualities that are latently present in the world. This is particularly true if we consider the life-world and the processes of individualization on the vital level. Using Tymieniecka words, the ontopoietic spread of the logos of Life appears caught up in the turmoil of generative progress that implies a creative imagination that enable the human being to go beyond the simple framework of the life-world, to surpass himself and open a new form of design thinking. This kind of imagination can be also defined as eco-imagination, stressing the importance of the “ecological” dimension of imagination conceived as an ontopoietic creative dynamic, grounded in the human condition within the totality of life’s spread. The expansion of the human condition is thus based on the eco-imagination that activates creative virtualities and thus relates to reality in a new way, deepening the productive dynamic of life.
Such an eco-imagination seems therefore to be a useful tool to frame in a new and profitable way our living, or rather the relationship that we have with our world-environment. Eco-imagination is thus the privileged way to the ontopoiesis of life conceived as an eco-phenomenology.
A new form of phenomenology of life arises based on eco-imagination in relation to a more general eco-phenomenology. It means a new way of considering the development and genesis of life, promoting environmental sustainability conceived on a large scale.