XXIX International Philosophy Olympiad, Slovenia, May 27th – May 30th, 2021
TOPIC 1
“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown
through the window.”
Brian Massumi, Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy.
РIn: Gilles Deleuze & F̩lix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum, p. xii.
TOPIC 2
“[The World] could not have come into existence of itself, without the help of some Agent to
produce it. And that this Agent needs be such an one as cannot be apprehended by our Senses; for if he should be the Object of Sense, he must be Body, and if Body, then a Part of the World, and consequently a Created Being; such an one as would have stood in need of some other Cause to create him; and if that second Creator was Body, he would depend upon a third, and that third upon a fourth, and so ad infinitum, which is absurd. Therefore the World stands in need of an incorporeal Creator.”
Abu Bakr Ibn Tufail (c. 1105 – 1185). The History of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan.
Translated from the Arabic by Simon Ockley, 1708.
New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers, 1929, p. 101-102.
TOPIC 3
“Given that the soul of a human being is only a thinking substance, how can it affect the bodily spirits, in order to bring about voluntary actions.”
Letter from Princess Elisabeth to Descartes, May 6/16 1643. – In:
The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes (The Other
Voice in Early Modern Europe), Transl. and ed. by Lisa Shapiro,
Chicago University Press 2007, p. 62.
TOPIC 4
“The ‘technification’ of our being: the fact that to-day it is possible that unknowingly and indirectly, like screws in a machine, we can be used in actions, the effects of which are beyond the horizon of our eyes and imagination, and of which, could we imagine them, we could not approve–this fact has changed the very foundations of our moral existence. Thus, we can become ‘guiltlessly guilty’, a condition which had not existed in the technically less advanced times of our fathers.”
Burning Conscience: The case of the Hiroshima pilot,
Claude Eatherly, told in his letters to Günther Anders.
Letter 1: Günther Anders to Claude Eatherly. June 3rd, 1959. Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, 1961.