A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Tagged: public philosophy

Beyond the Ivory Tower / Public Philosophy / Reflections on Ukraine / Teaching Philosophy / War

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Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Orysya Bila

Of course, history is important, but it is not decisive. As we are not slaves to the current conditions, we are not slaves to our history. We are not really defined by what was said. We are creators of ourselves. I think it is in the dialogue, in thinking and in the exchange of thoughts that we can decide what we want to be, what is really important to us. And that is the moment where philosophical thinking becomes not just a matter of academia but a matter of public strength.

This is the latest interview in the Beyond the Ivory Tower series and part of our series dedicated to the war in Ukraine. Costanza Porro spoke with Professor Orysya Bila about the value of teaching philosophy and her experience of teaching in wartime Ukraine. Bila is the director of the philosophy department at the Ukrainian Catholic University. She holds degrees from Ukrainian Catholic University and a PhD from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Her research interests include the philosophical legacy of Michel Foucault, ethics and global political theory, the ethics of memory, as well as Christian theology in a postmodern context. Together with Joshua Duclos, she wrote an essay on teaching philosophy, originally published in a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica dedicated to the war in Ukraine, which we published in an edited form as part of our ongoing series on the Russia-Ukraine War.

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Beyond the Ivory Tower / International / Liberty / Reflections on Ukraine / War

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Thinking About Freedom in Wartime Ukraine

This lecture was delivered by Professor Timothy Snyder (Yale University) as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic initiatives at Kyiv Mohyla Academy and thereby counteract the destabilizing impact that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had on Ukrainian higher education and civilian life. The lecture has been lightly edited for the purpose of publication in Studia Philosophica Estonica and the original presentation can be found on the Munk School’s YouTube channel. Several themes from this lecture have been developed and expanded upon in Professor Snyder’s forthcoming book: On Freedom.

Contributors to the conference have published their work in an edited volume of Studia Philosophica Estonica. Justice Everywhere will publish edited versions of several of the papers from this special issue over the next few weeks.

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Beyond the Ivory Tower / Public Philosophy / Reflections on Ukraine / War

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Beyond the Ivory Tower Interview with Aaron James Wendland

Soldier with Javelin, Odesa, July 2022. Photograph by Aaron James Wendland

This is the latest interview in our Beyond the Ivory Tower series and the first post of a new series dedicated to the war in Ukraine. For this interview, Diana Popescu-Sarry spoke to Professor Aaron James Wendland. Aaron is currently a Vision Fellow in Public Philosophy at King’s College London and Vice President of International Affairs and Professor of Public Philosophy at the Kyiv School of Economics. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Aaron has spent considerable time in Kyiv and has published in Ukraine World and The Kyiv Independent, where he is currently the Head of Ideas. In March 2023 Aaron organised a benefit conference for the Ukraine academy, the proceedings of which were published in a special issue of Studia Philosophica Estonica last month – featuring an interview by Aaron with Margaret Atwood as well as essays by Timothy Snyder, Volodymyr Yermolenko, Orysya Bila, Joshua Duclos, Jeff McMahan, and Jo Wolff to name but a few. Over the course of the next few weeks, Justice Everywhere will feature these contributions, as well as an interview with Orysya Bila about the value of teaching philosophy in wartime Ukraine.  

Besides his work in Ukraine, Aaron has also published numerous pieces of public philosophy in The New York Times, The Toronto Star, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The Moscow Times and The New Statesman, where he edited the popular philosophy column Agora from 2018-2022. Aaron is currently working on editing The Cambridge Critical Guide to Being and Time for Cambridge University Press as well as being an Associate Producer at Ideas on CBC Radio, and the Co-director of the Centre for Philosophy and Art at King’s College, London.

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