In partnership with Warwick university, the Chair in Intercultural and Interreligious Relations at
Monash University, held by Professor Yasmin Haskell, is holding a workshop on 16-17 July 2025, titled, Composing the Self: Writing and the Cultivation of the Human in the Shadow of AI.
About the workshop
All human cultures have deep traditions of language arts, literatures and oratures, to transmit community values and vocabularies of the self. From Greco-Roman antiquity through to early modern Europe, Western “humanism” has been explicitly associated with the study of languages and the cultivation of the arts of poetry, rhetoric, letter-writing, moral philosophy and history. But literary arts were also fundamental to self-cultivation in the Islamicate world and East Asia. Classical Chinese ideas about writing, composing, and artistic expression more generally had a particularly profound and lasting impact on the development of conceptions, values and practices of self and community in East Asia. A shared feature of these traditions is the deeply held conviction, reasserted continuously over the centuries, that the literary arts are central to the enterprise of realising what it is to be human; that the act of composition brings the self to realisation.
Confirmed speakers:
- Associate Professor Andrew Cooper (Philosophy, Warwick)
- Professor Eileen John (Philosophy, Warwick)
- Professor Yasmin Haskell (History, Monash)
- Associate Professor Aydogan Kars (History, Monash)
- Professor Anna Shields (East Asian Studies, Princeton)
- Associate Professor Curie Virag (Philosophy, Warwick)
Respondents:
- Dr Sandra Field (Philosophy, Monash)
- Professor Jakob Hohwy (Centre for Consciousness and Contemplative Studies, Monash)
- Associate Professor Christopher Watkin (French Studies, Monash)
Followed by the Postgraduate Masterclass
Comparing Apples and Persimmons: Challenges and Opportunities in Cross-Cultural Research.
Contact organisers: Prof. Yasmin Haskell (Yasmin.haskell@monash.edu) and A/Prof. Curie Virag (curie.virag@warwick.ac.uk)