Book Launch for "The Artist-Philosopher in the Age of Addiction: Heidegger’s Climatology" by George Smith

The Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts is pleased to host the first online book launch of The Artist-Philosopher in the Age of Addiction. Heidegger’s Climatology (Routledge, 2025) by IDSVA’s founder Prof. George Smith.  The author will participate in a conversation with Prof. Howard Caygill (IDSVA) and Dr. Amy Schuessler (IDSVA). 

George Smith argues that modern humanity suffers from a late-stage, pre-fatal addiction to scientific-technological thinking. Like most pre-fatal addictions, this one will most likely result in one of three ways: misery, extinction, or human transformation. The question remains, wherein lies the third way?

According to Smith, mankind’s chronic and as yet undiagnosed sickness originates in early Western metaphysics and has long been thoroughly globalized. It explains unstoppable extractionism and its relentlessly increasing by-product, carbon dioxide. It also explains today’s ever-increasing rate of species extinction and the likely collapse of the biosphere. Citing climate change tolerance and denial as symptomatic of pre-fatal addiction, Smith turns his analysis to Heidegger’s "question concerning technology" and shows that even Heidegger had become "hooked" on scientific-technological thinking. Surrendering to his disease, Heidegger "steps back" into "meditative thought." This in turn opens Heidegger to an East-West mode of scientific-poetic consciousness, the thinking of artist-philosophers such as Laozi, Hölderlin, and Rachel Carson. For Heidegger, this way of thinking lays the path to mankind’s transformative emancipation from an otherwise inescapable catastrophe.

This online presentation is free and open to all. Please register here. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information to join the webinar.

GEORGE SMITH is the Founder and President Emeritus of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. IDSVA offers a PhD in art and philosophy especially designed for visual artists, curators, and creative scholars. He is the Edgar E. Coons, Jr., Professor of New Philosophy, serving on the IDSVA Core Faculty. He lectures and writes on literature, the visual arts, visual culture, psychoanalytic theory, philosophy of education, and the history of science and technology. He is the author of The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy (Routledge 2018), The Artist-Philosopher and Poetic Hermeneutics (Routledge 2021), The Artist-Philosopher in the Age of Addiction (Routledge 2025). 

HOWARD CAYGILL is a philosopher, cultural historian and IDSVA core faculty member who was educated at Bristol, Sussex and Oxford Universities in the UK. Most recently serving on the faculties of Goldsmiths, Kingston and Paris VIII, Howard Caygill is the author of several acclaimed books, including A Kant Dictionary (Blackwell 1995); Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (Routledge 2005); On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (Bloomsbury 2013), and most recently Kafka: In Light of the Accident (Bloomsbury 2017). He is currently working on the philosophy and aesthetics of the anthropocene and the role of philosophy in curating and interpreting the art produced by inmates of mental hospitals during the first half of the Twentieth Century. He lives between Athens and Barton-on-Sea on the coast of England.

AMY SCHUESSLER is an artist, writer, and scholar living in Columbus, Ohio. She holds a BFA in photography with a minor in art history from Columbus College of Art & Design, an MFA from Image/Text Ithaca, Cornell University, and a PhD from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. She is the Executive Director at ROY G BIV Gallery for Emerging Artists and teaches philosophy, aesthetics, and art history at CCAD and The Ohio State University. Her dissertation work engages with a revaluation of violence in aesthetic representation to thwart cathartic experience.