Tadej Pirc

Tadej Pirc (1988)

I studied Philosophy in Ljubljana, Burgundy, Sarajevo, and Tübingen. I completed my PhD in metaphysics in 2015. As a post-doc, I spent a year in Sarajevo, a semester in Graz, and two semesters in Bratislava. Parallel to that, I got some BA-level training in Economics and International Relations.

In the past, I was mostly interested in the very fundamental question of being, and the overlaps of the biological, psychological, and the political. Later, my philosophical curiosity expanded into the fields of anthropology and education.

Currently, the foci of my research are the ontology of future, and the intertwined concepts of progress and sustainability. I usually employ the discourse of metaphysics to tackle these notions and their social, political, cultural, and epistemological embeddedness. My other research activities are concentrating on the analysis of language of difference in South African philosophy, and the technological and scientific advancements in Africa.

Besides academia, I am very much active in the field of sustainable development in Slovenia and the EU, my work stretching from consulting on development policies and strategies, development projects implementation, to the research into the ontological and epistemological foundations of long-term development planning.

Institutionally, I am a hybrid of academia and development practice. Formally habilitated as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, I have not been teaching there since the summer semester of 2020, mostly due to my involvement with the development activities in Slovenia. Furthermore, I have been collaborating with the Institute of African Studies at the University of Leipzig for a couple of years now, my work there being supervised by Prof Rose Marie Beck.

Throughout the past decade, I went down many interesting paths. Passionate about logistics, I organized several conferences in Ljubljana, Krakow, Vienna, and Tbilisi, established an academic society, and started an academic publishing house. I co-founded a couple of co-ops and an environmental protection NGO. Recently, I have also been trying my entrepreneurial luck with setting up a zero-waste venture.