The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events

Thursday, 29 October 2015 - Friday, 30 October 2015
Conference room of the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften

Forschungsnetzwerkt »Saisir l'Europe - Europa als Herausforderung« in cooperation with the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften der Goethe-Universität
International Conference

Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Pierre Monnet, Rosa Sierra
»The Normative Grounds of Sustainability«

The subject
A minimal content of the concept of sustainability refers to the quality of a process or practice being able and/or worthy to be carried on. However, it is not to this minimal content that the more debatable aspects of the idea of sustainability – as it is used in society and politics – are attached: on what grounds is a practice or process to be recognized, accepted and promoted to be sustainable is the key question that needs to be discussed from a moral and political perspective. The conference thus aims to discuss the ideas and claims that surround the concepts of sustainability and of sustainable development, especially those ones that can form a normative basis for these concepts, if they are to be defended as regulative ideas for both individual and collective action. Claims about nature conservation, preservation of natural capital, intergenerational equity, quality of life, environmental protection, environmental limits, as well as arguments defending or rejecting them as the suitable basis for sustainability will be topics of discussion. Since debates in this field have been conducted in the last decades both in academic and non-academic contexts, one important focus of the conference will be to analyze the contribution of recent discussions about issues such as climate change and energy transition to the further understanding and conceptualization of sustainability and sustainable development. Another central focus will be on recent discussions from the perspective of environmental ethics, political theory and environmental history that could contribute to determine the core philosophical problems attached to the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development. In this last sense, the discussion is expected to provide a better – also critical – insight into the philosophical interest of the idea of sustainability and its normative content.

Organizers of the conference
Professor Dr. Dr. Matthias Lutz-Bachmann is Professor of Philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. He is Director of the Forschungskollegs Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg. From 2009 till 2015 he was Vice-president of Goethe University.

Professor Dr. Pierre Monnet is Professor of History and Directuer d'Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris as well as Director of the Deutsch-Französisches Institut der Geschichts- und Sozialwissenschaften – Institut Franco-Allemand de Sciences Historiques et Sociales in Frankfurt am Main.

Dr. Rosa Sierra is reearch assistant at the Institute of Philosophy of Goethe University and Coordinator of the graduate programme on sutainability of the project »Saisir l’Europe – Europa als Herausforderung«.

Confirmed speakers
Chaterine Larrère (Paris), Konradt Ott (Kiel), John O’Neill (Manchester), John Nolt (Tennessee) Andreas Niederberger (Duisburg-Essen), Susanne Hiekel (Duisburg-Essen), Dirk Lanzerath (Bonn) Hannes Peltonen (Tampere) and Rosa Sierra (Frankfurt).

Please find more about the conference: here.

Advance registration required. Contact: Ursula Krüger: krueger@em.uni-frankfurt.de.