{"id":847,"date":"2020-12-31T18:54:48","date_gmt":"2020-12-31T18:54:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/?p=847"},"modified":"2020-12-31T18:54:48","modified_gmt":"2020-12-31T18:54:48","slug":"institute-for-advanced-dialectical-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/?p=847","title":{"rendered":"Institute for Advanced Dialectical Research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Moira MacKenzie, the communications coordinator for the newly established Institute for Advanced Dialectic Research<\/a> wrote to us with the following press release: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thinking Positively about the Power of Negative Thinking
<\/strong>World’s first Dialectical Research Institute Established on World Philosophy\u00a0Day<\/em><\/p>

SEATTLE, Washington<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 Philosopher Herbert Marcuse described dialectic as \u201cthe power of negative thinking,\u201d but that hasn\u2019t stopped the founders of the newly-established Institute for Advanced Dialectical Research from thinking positively about their new endeavor.\u00a0They chose World Philosophy Day (Nov. 19) during a worldwide pandemic to launch the world\u2019s first institute dedicated to dialectical thinking … and they think the timing couldn\u2019t be better.<\/p>

\u201cOne thing we’ve learned from the response to the is that we aren\u2019t limited to interacting with people locally or at big conferences in far-away places,\u201d says Jersey Flight, the institute\u2019s Director of Interdisciplinary Research. Discussion groups, book clubs, lectures, even those big conferences, he notes, have all moved online. \u201cConnecting from quarantine has taught us that distance is no longer a barrier to intellectual engagement and collaboration, whether it\u2019s with people in our own neighborhoods or in other countries around the world.\u201d Dealing with the virus has been challenging for everyone, Flight says, \u201cbut it has also created unexpected opportunities for forging fruitful partnerships and developing dialectical thinking.\u201d<\/p>

Dialectic is one of the oldest branches of philosophy\u2014with roots in ancient Greece, China and India\u2014but its modern form begins with the 19th century German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel, who showed how our thoughts and experience can develop through a process of contradiction and negation that leads to higher levels of thinking and awareness.<\/p>

\u201cDialectic is relevant in a surprisingly wide variety of fields,” says Executive Director, Justin Burke, DPhil, \u201cfrom philosophy and psychology to physics and linguistics, but it\u2019s rarely studied in its own right.\u201d Dr. Burke, who did his doctoral research on Hegel at Oxford, recalls, \u201cAs a student, I used to think of dialectic in purely philosophical terms, but I\u2019ve come to understand what Hegel meant when he said it’s all around us.\u201d<\/p>

Several years ago, after a lecture, someone in the audience asked Dr. Burke about Hegel and Martin Luther King. \u201cI had to admit I wasn\u2019t aware of a link between them,\u201d he says. \u201cLater, I was surprised to find that Dr. King had written about Hegel and dialectic in his autobiography.\u201d And King wasn\u2019t the only one\u2014Dr. Burke says he discovered that Nobel Prize-winning physicists have written about dialectic: Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg; there are dialectical biologists, psychologists and sociologists; there is a journal of\u00a0Dialectical Anthropology<\/em>; there are emerging fields of dialect, such as neurodialectics and dialectical linguistics. There are also established disciplines, such as dialectical education and Critical Theory, plus non-western traditions, including Chinese, Indian and Russian dialectics. Considered as a group, Dr. Burke says, \u201cThere are dozens of potential areas ripe for research and, hopefully, the propagation of dialectical thinking.\u201d<\/p>

To carry out this research, the institute has established an international forum\u2014the first of its kind\u2014for discussion and debate about dialectic under headings such as \u201cHegelian Dialectics\u201d, \u201cQuantum Mechanics\u201d and \u201cDialectical Psychology\u201d. In another first, the institute has also launched a journal of dialectical research, and will organize an annual symposium on dialectic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moira MacKenzie, the communications coordinator for the newly established Institute for Advanced Dialectic Research wrote to us with the following …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-links-of-interest"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=847"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":848,"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions\/848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adornostudies.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}