In June 2022 I had the privilege of giving a keynote address for the NaturArchy: Towards a Natural Contract conference at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, with the title “Renewing our Mental Models with Michel Serres”.
The talk is now available as a podcast below.
Abstract:
As our understanding of the world changes over time, our mental models and philosophical categories must also change. No-one, perhaps, has done more to challenge out-of-date mental models and engineer new, creative, and practical alternatives than the late Michel Serres (1930-2019), member of the prestigious French Académie Française. This talk explains how Serres helps us to rethink three fundamental oppositions that structure almost all Western thinking across the sciences and the arts: nature and culture; knowledge and myth; the subject and the object. The effort constantly to renew our conceptual toolbox is not just a dry philosophical exercise: the complex problems that we and future generations will face cannot be solved with the rusty old intellectual implements invented by our great grandparents.
