Events
All upcoming events
► Fri, 26 April 2024: Global Encounters Workshop "Neighbourhoods"
► Fri, 26 April 2024: Semester Opening Event with a Lecture by Professor Vittorio Gallese: "Embodying neural representations: Neural reuse and embodied simulation"
► Tue, 7 May 2024: Workshop with Melissa Frazier "Pushkin in the African-American Imagination" in cooperation with the d.a.i
► Wed, 8 May 2024: Lecture by Professor Vittorio Gallese: "Bodily self and interpersonal relationships in schizophrenia" in the colloquium of the Center for Mental Health
►9 – 11 May 2024: Annual Conference of the Society for Intercultural Philosophy (GIP) "Topoi, Places, and Spaces in an Intercultural Perspective"
►20 – 21 June 2024: Workshop "Landscape and Imaginary: philosophy, arts, literature" organized by Dr. Lorena Grigoletto
Fellow Life
Semester Opening
Semester Opening Event Summer Term 2024
Fri, 26 April, 4:00pm
Alte Aula (Münzgasse 30, Tübingen)
With a Lecture by Professor Vittorio Gallese: "Embodying neural representations: Neural reuse and embodied simulation"
Afterwards, we invite you to enjoy a glass of wine and exchange with international fellows and Tübingen researchers. The event offers the opportunity to meet and network with both international and Tübingen based scholars and guests, and to learn about the College of Fellows offers for international fellows currently based in Tübingen.
Abstract & Bio
Abstract
In the last decades technological advancements providing new tools to study the brain in humans and non-human animals boosted the enormous progress of Neuroscience. This progress brought along a diversity of approaches, levels of description and the focusing on different granularities, so that a unified theory of brain function and its relationship to behavior is currently not available. Thus, the notion of neural representation is a topic of ongoing debate and controversy within the field of cognitive neuroscience. The relevant literature includes very diverse theoretical approaches, ranging from the neo-phrenological approach, assigning to specific brain modules specific cognitive functions, to dynamic system theory-inspired approaches, holding that brain neural activity emerges from the interactions among interconnected neurons, rather than being solely determined by fixed neural representations.
In my lecture the notion of neural representation will be addressed from an embodied perspective, discussing embodied simulation theory within the framework of neural reuse. It will be argued that being, feeling, acting, and knowing describe different modalities of our relations to the world, all sharing a constitutive underpinning bodily root that maps into dynamic ways of functioning of the brain-body. Brain architecture does not respect the boundaries of standard mental terms and categories. Mental terms and categories are the loose and imprecise verbal descriptions of a variety of complex cognitive behaviors that we are not yet able to fully explain in terms of their underlying neural and bodily mechanisms.
Bio
Vittorio Gallese, Professor of Psychobiology at the Università degli Studi di Parma since 2006, is recognised as one of the world's leading experts in the field of social neuroscience. He was Professor of Experimental Aesthetics at the University of London (2016-2018), Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain (2016-2020), KOSMOS Fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin (2013-2014) and Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, USA (2002). Gallese is an expert in neurophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and philosophy of mind and one of the discoverers of mirror neurons. In his research, he seeks to understand the functional organisation of brain mechanisms underlying social cognition, such as empathy and sympathy, language, and aesthetic experience. His interdisciplinary work incorporates findings and approaches from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.
"Giving Voice" - CoF events during Pride Month
June is Pride Month, and this year, the University of Tübingen and the city of Tübingen are organising a joint program. The goal is to celebrate diversity in general, and the history, culture, and importance of the LGBTQAI+ community at the university and in the city, to address discrimination, provide education, and promote solidarity.
We as College of Fellows are part of this, and under the theme "Giving Voice" are organising an exhibition with stories related to queer identities and LGBTQAI+ experiences, as well as a film screening on 12th June 2024 showing the two films Mary and Manju by Sarala Emmanuel, a feminist activist from Sri Lanka, and which tell the stories of older transgender people from Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka.
CONTRIBUTE to our exhibition!
For our exhibition, which highlights LGBTQAI+ experiences from an intercultural perspective, we invite you to contribute your own stories - whether it's about coming out, struggles with acceptance, moments of freedom, or dreams for the future.
Share your narrative texts, poems, images, or any form of expression by 5 May, 2024 by writing an email to yanti.hoelzchen@cof.uni-tuebingen.de.
You can choose to remain anonymous or include your name.
Exhibition "Giving Voice"
CONTRIBUTE to our exhibition!
For our exhibition, which highlights LGBTQAI+ experiences from an intercultural perspective, we invite you to contribute your own stories - whether it's about coming out, struggles with acceptance, moments of freedom, or dreams for the future.
Share your narrative texts, poems, images, or any form of expression by 5 May, 2024 by writing an email to yanti.hoelzchen@cof.uni-tuebingen.de.
You can choose to remain anonymous or include your name.
The exhibition will be shown throughout June 2024 at Tübingen's Brauwerk Freistil.
Film screening "Mary" and "Manju"
Join us for our film screening on 12th June 2024 showing the two films Mary and Manju by Sarala Emmanuel, a feminist activist from Sri Lanka, and which tell the stories of older transgender people from Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka.
12 June 2024, 5.30 pm
Brauwerk Freistil
(Wöhrdstraße 25, 72072 Tübingen)
Detailed information will follow shortly.
Fellow Lunch Talks
The Lunch Talk Series is a great opportunity to meet other fellows and Tübingen scholars during lunch break and to discuss a topic that one of our Fellows is currently researching.
Every month, a Fellow of the University of Tübingen presents his or her research at a different location in Tübingen to get to know each other and network beyond the conventional lecture halls and seminar rooms.
Interested in presenting your research? Contact us: info@cof.uni-tuebingen.de
Lectures and Lecture Series
Humboldt Lecture Series
The Humboldt Lecture Series invites Fellows of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to present their research in an interdisciplinary context, and serves as meeting point for all international scholars at the University of Tübingen.
The Humboldt Lecture Series is organized by the College of Fellows and the Welcome Center at Tübingen University, and in cooperation with the Humboldt Club Tübingen and with the support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Find the complete Program for the Humboldt Lecture Series of the Winterterm 2023/24 here.
Global Encounters Lecture Series
The Global Encounter Lecture Series is co-organized by the College of Fellows and the Global Encounters research platform of the University of Tübingen. The platform brings together researchers from the social sciences and humanities who investigate the social and cultural effects of mobility and communication.
GIP Lecture Series
Online lecture series in cooperation with the Gesellschaft für Interkulturelle Philosophie (GIP). The GIP strives to make intercultural philosophy known as a methodological point of view. This way, they want to facilitate the rapprochement of all world philosophies, in lectures, in research and teaching and in discussion rounds.
Conferences and Workshops
Projects with our cooperation partners
An overview of our cooperations can be found here.
d.a.i.
Workshop
"Pushkin in the African-American Imagination"
With Professor Melissa Frazier (Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY)
Tue, 7 May 2024, 14:30 Uhr
Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut Tübingen, d.a.i.-hall (d.a.i., Karlstr. 3)
African-Americans have long identified with Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) both as a great poet and as a poet of partly African descent. Join us for a combined screening and discussion that will focus on the work of two Black artists in particular.
Melissa Frazier is a professor of Russian Language and Russian and Comparative Literature. Current projects include Dostoevsky and the detective novel and the intersections of Russian and African American literature. Frazier is a DAAD visiting professor at the Slavic Department in Tübingen during the summer semester 2024.
Admission is free. Please register online: www.dai-tuebingen.de/frazier
Read detailed information about this workshop here or on the website of the d.a.i.
In collaboration with the d.a.i. and the Slavic Department of the University of Tübingen and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Download the full summer program of the d.a.i. here.
Society for Intercultral Philosophy (GIP)
Annual Conference of the Society for Intercultural Philosophy
“Topoi, Places, and Spaces in an Intercultural Perspective”
Organized by Niels Weidtmann and Abbed Kanoor
9–11 May 2024
University of Tübingen, online (via Zoom)
The conference will be held in English
Keynotes: Augustin Berque, Edward Casey, Nathalie Depraz, Tao DuFour, Workineh Kelbessa Golga, Anke Graness, Tim Ingold, Ikechukwu Anthony Kanu, Kwok-ying Lau, Rita Segato, Jaroslava Vydrová
Theme: The study and intercultural comparison of topoi, places and spaces are of great importance for intercultural philosophy: (i) intercultural thinking itself can be described as topographical, building on the stronger turn to space in philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. (ii) Differently designed places and spaces can open up new and non-textual accesses to other cultural life-worlds.
Read more about the conference here or download the detailed program here. The conference will take place in-person at Tübingen University. However, online participation via ZOOM will be possible as well. Please register for free via info@cof.uni-tuebingen.de. You will receive the invitation link a few days prior to the conference. The link allows you to participate in all sessions.