Keynotes 2025

Jeff Malpas (University of Tasmania), online
Panel on Arnold Berleant’s work
Mădălina Diaconu (University of Wien)
Ted Toadvine (Pennsylvania State University)

Tuesday, June 10

There is something strange about horror – it both repeals and attracts us. This idea appears in various places: in the discussion of religion, for instance, in the work of Rudolf Otto, where it is identified as evident in the experience of the numinous and, in film criticism, in Noel Carrol’s treatment of cinematic and literary horror. I want to connect both Otto’s and Carrol’s discussions to the eeriness or uncanniness, also both repulsive and attracting, that arises in the experience of place and landscape. Central to my argument is the idea that horror’s conjoining of repulsion and attraction is founded in our essential embeddedness in place – an embeddedness that is sometimes manifest in a form of melancholia (most obvious in the experience of nostalgia), but which can also carry over into a horror from which we are nevertheless unable to turn away. What is at issue here is a very particular form of ‘environmental experience’ that provides clues to the very nature of such experience and its own sense of the eerie or uncanny. Beginning with Otto and Carroll, the discussion will draw on Robert Macfarlane’s work, as well as Arthur Machan, Otto Bollnow, Sigmund Freud, and Ernst Jentsch.

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Jeff Malpas is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania, and Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland as well as Latrobe University. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a Distinguished Fellow of the Australian Association of Humboldt Fellows. Trained as a philosopher and historian, he publishes on a wide range of topics in philosophy as well as other disciplines, including architecture, art, and geography. His most recent book is In the Brightness of Place (SUNY, 2023).

16:30-18:00 (Helsinki, EEST, UTC +3)
Panel on Arnold Berleant’s work
Panelists: Fotini Vassiliou, Max Ryynänen, Harri Mäcklin, and Arnold Berleant
Chair: Arto Haapala

Wednesday, June 11

The succession of seasons has for centuries provided a rich source of artistic and literary inspiration, and its spatiotemporal patterns epitomize the complexity of environmental interconnectedness. Nevertheless, the Stoic principle of living in accordance with nature (including its seasonal cycles) has nowadays ironically survived only in form of seasonal holidays, seasonal tunes, and further similar clichés. After highlighting philosophical aspects of seasonality, from rhythmicity to analogies with the stages of life, the talk discusses three dimensions of living “in tune with the seasons”: involuntary emotional contagion, practical and rational adaptation, and finally ecological commitment in an age of disquieting seasonal disruption.

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Mădălina Diaconu studied Philosophy and Theology, holds two PhD degrees from the University of Bucharest and the University of Vienna, as well as the venia legendi for Philosophy from the latter, and is Dozentin at the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Intercultural Philosophy of Religion of the University of Vienna. She is member of the editorial boards of Contemporary Aesthetics, Studia Phaenomenologica and polylog. Zeitschrift für interkulturelles Philosophieren. She authored eleven monographs and (co)edited several books on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, the ontology of art, the phenomenology of the senses, the aesthetics of touch, smell and taste, urban sensescapes, environmental ethics, the phenomenology of place, environment and atmosphere, the philosophy of animality, etc. Her main publications are Tasten, Riechen, Schmecken. Eine Ästhetik der anästhesierten Sinne (2005, ²2020), Sinnesraum Stadt. Eine multisensorische Anthropologie (2012), Phänomenologie der Sinne (Reclam 2013) and Aesthetics of Weather (Bloomsbury 2024). She co-curated in 2021 the exhibition “Olfactor. Scent is Present” at the Städtische Galerie Bremen and is currently editing the issue 25 of Studia Phaenomenologica on “Eco-Phenomenology”.

Thursday, June 12

09:30-10:30 (Helsinki, EEST, UTC +3)
Ted Toadvine (Pennsylvania State University)
Chair: Fotini Vassiliou