Philosophy with/out a School 2025: CORRUPTING THE YOUTH 

Philosophy with/out a School (read as with and without) is a summer school programme for all levels of ESPhil students and, if there are leftover spots, for anyone else interested in philosophy. The programme, originally initiated by tutors but now a collective effort of tutors and students, will this year see its third iteration. 

Our programme is called Philosophy with and without a school, because during the summer school we bend and stretch educational structures to explore how philosophy, and philosophy education, could be done differently. We do this, for example, through an assignment repository of 40+ art assignments rewritten for philosophy education, helping student (un)structure their own personal learning processes, micro-workshops attuned to student interests and needs, collective learning activities, close contact with teachers, conceptual lunches and whatever else seems worthy to pursue or implement! We aim for co-ownership and co-responsibility of teachers and students over the learning process. In addition to this, the programme includes daily talks or workshops by speakers and practitioners from inside and outside academia according to one overarching theme.

This year’s theme is CORRUPTING THE YOUTH. Socrates was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth. Asking too many questions could lead the youth away from the God’s of the city. Socrates thought his death would hurt the city more than it could ever hurt him. They probably thought the same, given that corruption is almost synonymous with vice. But philosophy’s corruption is a gesture to the ‘otherwise’ of what is common and homogenous – dangerous only to some, but very necessary to all. Badiou proposes to reinstall corruption as philosophical focus, exactly because it is “not for the sake of money, pleasure, or power but to show the young that there is something better than all those things: the true life. Something worthwhile, something worth living for, that far outstrips money, pleasure, and power.” (Badiou, The True Life, 7) We join in on this reclamation of corruption as a proper philosophical task by inviting guests capable of corrupting your youth with ideas, practices and stories for the sake of the True Life!  

Important information

• The summer school is preluded by an introduction day on Saturday the 19th of July (Location: TBA).  
• The summer school itself takes place Monday the 28th of July to Friday 1st of August at Buitenplaats Brienenoord. 
•  No costs are involved. You’ll be fed food and ideas. Lunch on all days, dinner on most. The only thing we ask in return is an attitude of active participation and care for the space, time and each other.  
• You can sign up until 23:59 on Monday the 23rd of June through this form: https://forms.office.com/e/ntRvLAHRPd. More information on the program follows via this webpage and other media outlets. Further questions, suggestions or concerns you can email to tuns@esphil.eur.nl. We hope to see you there! 

Programme update

Below you find a small selection of the programme

• Cultural worker Clara Balaguer, artist Kari Robertson, healer Pi Villaraza, and digital researcher Sofia Boschat-Thorez. Canons, academies, caste intellectuals, corporation-states, and traumatized institutions refuse to be held accountable for the conditions they have created. They scoff at the youth (or the innocent) because their implements—TikTok or LLMs or Amazon’s shopping cart or MMORPGs or Adderall or Zionism or junk food or call-out culture or post-modernity—have rendered a generation “unteachable.”
• Dimitri Goossens will guide you through some writers and philosophers in the margins of mainstream philosophy (John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester; Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille) to explore the relationship between philosophy and transgression and transgression in literary-philosophical writing.
• Experimental philosophy of language incl. city dérive, by Sonia de Jager. Have you ever wondered how site and setting influence the way thoughts form? How, for example, eye movements affect cognitive processing? How the pace of your walk changes the way you interpret someone else's speech? Or how the way we breathe affects the length of our thoughts?