KiC Lectures #2: Absences

Join us for a public lecture on the philosophy of absence by acclaimed author and Philosophy Bites co-founder, Nigel Warburton.

We typically think perception reveals what is in front of us. But all of us are haunted to different degrees by what is not there as well as by what is present. Some things disappear over time and hardly anyone notices; others are felt as gaps or losses, and their absence pierces the present. As we age, the number of people no longer here increases, even as new people enter our lives. Many of us struggle to imagine a future in which we will become an absence for others: we lack the resources to think about a world without our first-person perspective.

In this lecture, freelance philosopher Nigel Warburton, co-founder of the Philosophy Bites podcast (which has had over 50 million unique episode downloads) and author of A Little History of Philosophy (translated into 30 languages), will explore some of the meaning, ethics and aesthetics of these phenomena.

KiC Public Lectures is organized by the Knowledge in Crisis project, which is supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under the Clusters of Excellence programme (10.55776/COE3). We're a collaboration between the University of Graz, the University of Salzburg, and the University of Vienna, led by Central European University.