Announcement and Call for Abstracts
Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to announce that the
1st International Witten Seminar on Philosophy and Medicine will be organized at the University of Witten/Herdecke, Germany,
together with the 3rd International Seminar on Biocosmology.
It will held in
Witten on Saturday, June 30th and Sunday, July 1st, 2012.
The general topic will be:
Aristotle, Biology, and Medical Anthropology in the 21st Century
The first overall aim is to explore whether and how Aristotelian concepts such as the
four causes, the unity of form and matter, the four functional levels of the human
being, as well as organicist cosmology – Biocosmology – as a form of neo-
Aristotelism (for details see http://en.biocosmology.ru/), can provide a more profound
understanding of nature, the cosmos and the human being than has been made
possible by reductionism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Contributions from various
fields are welcome: philosophy, physics and chemistry, biology, psychology,
medicine, and medical anthropology, including theoretical considerations as well as
results from empirical studies. At the seminar 30 minute slots will be assigned to
each contribution, 20 minutes for presenting and 10 for discussion.
The second aim is to lay grounds – with this seminar as a beginning – for the
development of a sustainable network for mutual cooperation between scientists
working in the fields and interfaces of biology, medicine and philosophy in Germany,
Russia, and other countries, with the goal to find new conceptual solutions for the
scientific understanding of the human being and its relations to its environment, and
to contribute to the mutual understanding between the different cultural approaches
to such basic questions internationally.
We kindly invite you to submit abstracts for contributions to this topic until
December 31th, 2011 to peter.heusser@uni-wh.de
The abstracts should not exceed 1 page, and must include: 1. title of the contribution,
2. names, academic titles, departments, institutes/universities, and cities of authors,
email address of corresponding author, 3. key words (3-5), 4. abstract text (1 Ѕ
spaced, 11 pts.)
We need to receive your abstracts until December 31th, at the latest. We will then
compose the program which we will publish and disseminate and use to apply for
international academic exchange grants.
In case of questions do not hesitate to contact us. Looking forward to receiving your submissions,
Kind regards
Prof. Dr. Peter Heusser, MME,
Center for Integrative Medicine
Faculty of Health, Witten/Herdecke University
Herdecke, Germany
PhD Dr. Konstantin Khroutski
Institute of Medical Education
Medical Faculty, Novgorod State University after Yaroslav-the-Wise
Veliky Novgorod, Russia
PhD Dr. Bernd Rosslenbroich
Institute for Evolutionary Biology
Faculty of Health, Witten/Herdecke University
Witten, Germany
Prof. Dr. Matthias Kettner
Chair for Practical Philosophy
Faculty for Philosophy and Liberal Arts, Witten/Herdecke University
Witten, Germany