The lecture is an introduction to a seminar of prof. Cezary Wodziński, which will be conducted in Lublin in the 2012/13 season. The first half of the seminar will concentrate on the Odyssey by Homer.

The word “hospitality” is one of the most mysterious words in the dictionary of the (post)modern world. The question about the “sense” of hospitality is asked in the world, in which this word has been denied its sense. The world, which does not respect the rights of hospitality, that it the rights of the Other to be in our world.
The question about “the sense” of hospitality is made even more urgent by the historical context, that is destroying the Other, as well as in the perspective of challenges posed by modern times.
The experience of the Other and its otherness provides our being in the world with a lot of potential sense. What is at stake in this attempt to answer the question of the sense of hospitality is the hospitality of the sense (of our world and our being in this world).
The aim of the series of lectures is to discuss the ambiguous and aporetic concept of hospitality in the critical discussion between tradition (Socrates, Kant, Nietzsche, among others), contemporary philosophy (Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, among others) and maybe even future. What is more, we would like to recognize and describe the archaic, therefore challenging for the (post)modern ways of being, strategies of hospitality (Odysseus, Abraham, Socrates, Christ; Penelope, Sarah, Xanthippe, Maria Magdalena).

Cezary Wodziński