The international congress aims to bring together experts, young scholars and students of ancient philosophy and related disciplines from Europe and overseas in Switzerland for a multi-day professional exchange. The theme of Being and Appearance in Antiquity offers a broad basis for a range of philosophical and literary topics – from metaphysics and epistemology, to the philosophy of language, logic and argumentation, to imitation in art and poetics – and for establishing links to current debates such as those on ‘alternative truths’ and artificial intelligence.
The contrast between being and appearance is one of the central tensions in ancient thought. It is closely related to other – no less important – pairs of opposites, including knowledge and opinion, real object and appearance, truth and falsehood, sincerity and deception, reality and unreality (or non-being), original and imitation, and paradigm and image. The first known formulation of the contrast between being and appearance can be found in the philosophy of the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, which is characterized by the contrast between being (ἐόν) and appearance (δοκοῦντα) and which also strongly influenced the atomists, Plato and Aristotle. The being–appearance dichotomy preoccupied ancient Western philosophy in various respects from its beginnings until late antiquity and has echoes in literature and in other arts.