Duration
30 Sep 2026 - 02 Oct 2026
The conference Knowledge and Non-Knowledge in Society: Conditions of Knowledge Formation takes the 100th anniversary of Max Scheler's Sociology of knowledge as an opportunity to revisit fundamental questions of social knowledge orders. Scheler's work has left a significant mark on philosophy and sociology and contributed decisively to the founding of the sociology of knowledge. His distinction between the forms of knowledge of performance knowledge, educational knowledge and redemptive knowledge is an integral part of sociological theory formation. Scheler's insight that knowledge is always anchored in social conditions forms a historical starting point for the conference, but is embedded in a broader intellectual panorama of the last hundred years.
The conference will focus on the question of how knowledge and non-knowledge are structured, produced and regulated in modern and late modern societies: through institutional arrangements, communicative forms, technological infrastructures or cultural patterns of interpretation. At the same time, the productive role of non-knowledge comes into focus – for example, in the form of uncertainties, blind spots or strategic non-knowledge.
The conference continues the series ‘Opinion and Public Opinion,’ which has been held at the IUC since 2023. Following Tönnies' Critique of Public Opinion (2023), Plessner's Limits of Community (2024) and Cassirer's Mythical Thinking (2025), Max Scheler's The Forms of Knowledge and Society, which was almost forgotten after his untimely death in 1928, will be used as a common point of reference in 2026.
