On September 21, 2023, at Vaidilos Theatre (Vilnius) the sixth Leonidas Donskis Conference will be held, organized by The Andrei Sakharov Research Centre at VDU. The conference will bring together a select group of experts to discuss Russia topic based on learned lessons from the past, putting them in a contemporary context and suggesting what steps should be taken to facilitate the above-mentioned processes. The conference will be followed by a concert in memory of Leonidas Donskis. More information and registration here.
Viktorija Voidogaitė, an educator and nun, was elected the Tolerance Man of the Year 2021 by the decision of the board of the Sugihara Foundation “Diplomats for Life”. The annual Leonidas Donskis Prize is awarded to writer, journalist and translator Rimantas Vanagas.
In honor of Leonidas Donskis, a professor at Vytautas Magnus University (Vytautas Magnus University), one of the most outstanding European thinkers, the third conference dedicated to the memory of the philosopher “Mind the Gap. Emotional Well-being and Social Solidarity during COVID-19“. Information and registration: https://www.sakharovcenter-vdu.eu/events/third-leonidas-donskis-memorial-conference/
No matter how popular Oswald Spengler is deemed to become again due to Europe`s profound crisis, one thing does not allow me to take him seriously. True, he made many subtle points regarding the decline of Europe between the two world wars, yet one of the most dubious ideas defended by the author of The Decline of the West was on the parallel and separate existence of cultures. (Read more...)
It was more than once that I felt astonished by and ashamed of some of my colleagues’ choices for the Sakharov Prize, the supreme award of the European Parliament for human rights defenders and activists.(Continue...)
Zygmunt Bauman, commenting on Michel Houellebecq’s novel “The Possibility of an Island,” singled out this novel of warning as a genuine dystopia of our time which exposes our frame of mind with its insecurities, phobias, and discontents. Most telling was his emphasis on what he described as a new sense of fatalism, powerlessness and helplessness in the face of the new pattern of technology and politics, the latter being merely a derivative and subordinate of the former.(Tęsti...)