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%%(wacko wrapper=text wrapper_align=center)**Thinking with Ivan Illich, 2025**
San Cerbone Lucca, Italy
**Abstracts of talks**%%

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**Illich and Jung**
//David Cayley// (June 19, 9.15-12.15 pm)
  In his late writings, most notably Aion and Answer to Job, C.G. Jung called for a reformulation
of Christianity. Once, he said, it made sense to “ignore the dark side of the Apocalypse” in order to
conserve the “Christian achievement,” but now “a universal religious nightmare” had made the
question of the nature of God “burningly topical.” Christians, he went on, must stop “squander[ing]
their energies in the mere preservation of what has come down to them” and begin to explore the
possibility of “building on to their house and making it roomier.”

  Ivan Illich was more tentative, more circumspect, and more concerned to preserve the
appearance of orthodoxy in his thinking than was Jung, but Illich’s identification of a “mystery of
evil” as a mainspring of Western history seems to me to point, finally, in the same direction as Jung
was tending. In this open-ended talk – a consultation as much as a definite proposal – I would like to
read Jung and Illich together to see what light the two thinkers can shed on one another."

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**Illich historian of philosophy: Technology and Nature from Hugh of St. Victor to biomimicry**
//Alessio Gerola// (June 21, 9.15-12.15 pm)
  The goal of this paper is to highlight the relevance of the work of Ivan Illich to reflect on the
legacies and mutual relations of concepts and metaphors employed nowadays in the field of
biomimetics and biomimicry. While bio-inspired disciplines attempt to imitate, learn from and
transpose ideas from nature to technology, Greek thought already considered the possibility
that techne is an imitation of nature. At the same time, techne could be conceived as supplementary to
nature, bringing to perfection what nature could not. Mechane, on the other hand, represented
attempts at outwitting nature through mechanical devices such as water clocks. In the Middle Ages,
Hugh of St. Victor presents a reflection on tools that connects technical making and human need
through ecology.
  How do these conceptual legacies clarify the stakes in the ambitions of biomimicry to make
technology more ecologically compatible by imitating nature? By retracing this history, it becomes
possible to reveal the roots of a normative ambiguity behind different bio-inspired disciplines. The
paper will conclude with a constructive proposal to address such ambiguity by building upon Ivan
Illich’s reading of Hugh of St. Victor’s philosophy of technology, who understands the normative
task of technology as the critical pursuit of remedies that draw inspiration from nature."