The Initial Impulse
– What does the French philosopher have to do with this?
– Why was Prof. Söder encouraged to found the Academy?
An initiative for new school
Prof. Dr. Hans Peter Söder was fascinated by a philosopher who took action. The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler was not content merely to interpret the world; he wanted to change it. He was deeply concerned about the direction contemporary society was taking. In his many books, he described our present as a hyper-industrial era destined to lead to the disempowerment of people trapped in the networks of media and digital technology.
In 2010, he founded a school of philosophy—not in glamorous Paris, but in a silo of a former grain mill near Epineuil-le-Fleuriel, a town of about 400 residents, centrally isolated in central France. Deeply impressed by his magnum opus *La technique et le temps* (1994; English: *Technics and Time*, 1998), Prof. Soeder contacted him to learn more about his philosophical academy.
As a philosophical “calling card,” he set out to write a declaration of love for philosophy (Metalogicon, 2016), which he dedicated to Bernard Stiegler. Prof. Söder was eager to go to Epineuil-le-Fleuriel to experience the summer academy firsthand, but he already had a prior commitment in the summer of 2017. Since he was not very fluent in French, he did not understand Bernard Stiegler’s suggestion that he should come sooner rather than later. For in 2020, he died suddenly.
Encouraged by Rolf Beuting, mayor of the market town of Murnau, and Barnabas Bögle, abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Ettal, Prof. Söder subsequently founded the European Alpine Academy in Ettal in the spring of 2022, a small community in Upper Bavaria with a current population of 827. This also fulfilled a long-cherished dream of the founder of the James Loeb Society, Dr. Hermann Mayer. As a former student of the Benedictine boarding school at Ettal Abbey, it had always been a matter close to his heart to unite this bastion of humanistic education with the legacy of James Loeb and his Loeb Classical Library.