Living together in the Absurd: Making sense when the world doesn’t make sense (University of Cambridge)

Living together in the Absurd

Making sense when the world doesn’t make sense



Workshop

Tuesday 21 April 2026

University of Cambridge
Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

In collaboration with 
University of Heidelberg and Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Call for Abstracts and Participation

This workshop aims to revisit Albert Camus’s notion of the Absurd through the lens of today’s multi-crises and multifarious challenges. 
According to Camus, the world we live in is absurd. While this can become manifest to us in nearly any situation, Camus is adamant that the world’s absurdity is not owing to any specific features. Rather, it is intrinsically relational and results from the unresolvable tension of two elements: the unbridgeable hiatus between a reason that seeks understanding and a world that remains strictly irrational. If it is our understanding that opens up the world for us, at the same time, the world irrevocably resists being fully grasped. The absurdity thus creates a human desire for clarity that will never see its fulfilment. The experience of the Absurd posits an existential shock that shatters any worldview and destroys all hope for a safe harbour.

But if Camus thought of the Absurd as a universal existential condition, he also acknowledged that history, and especially the modern times, provided a qualitative intensification of this experience of the Absurd. In 1945 Europe, the widening gap between hopes and reality could seem at first to threaten the very possibility of any understanding, and discourage any ambition to contribute actively to change. Eighty years later, with the acceleration of the environmental crisis, the impending return of fascism and the weakening of the social fabric under the pressure of technology and ideology, new hopes have tarnished and the experience of the Absurd is invoked from nearly all sides.
How should we act in such a world that cannot possibly make sense?


The aim of the workshop is to address this question by bringing together different perspectives from philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry on existentialism and the Absurd. It explores how reflecting on the Absurd may disrupt and challenge contemporary debates on self, world, and others but also significantly inform approaches in social philosophy, political philosophy, ethics, and psychotherapy.

Papers are welcomed on themes including:

• Emotions in the Absurd
• Existential despair and the power of literature
• The Absurd and self-understanding
• Reason and action
• Facing the Absurd: from vulnerability to resilience
• The Absurd and (dis)empowerment
• Alterity in the Absurd
• Living today in the crisis of meaning
• The Absurd and care
• The Absurd, revolt and the political


This 1-day workshop combines invited and open contributions. Confirmed speakers:
Colin Davis
Philipp Schmidt-Boddy
Samuel Buchoul

To present a paper at the workshop, please submit an abstract before 20 March 2026 (max. 300 words) with personal details via the following Google form. Talks should be 20–25 minutes in length.

Organisation and Contact:
Samuel Buchoul
sjmb5@cam.ac.uk
Philipp Schmidt-Boddy
philipp.schmidt-boddy@uni-heidelberg.de