The Saint-Emilion festival explores all forms of space

“” It all started from a quote from Blaise Pascal (1623-1662): “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces scares me”, writes the mathematician, physicist and philosopher in his Thoughts. The organizers of the Philosophia festival were not more necessary to develop the menu for their 2025 edition. “These are the silences that we are going to be talked about,” promises the writer, essayist and philosophy teacher Mazarine Pingeot, her president since 2020.

Cosmic, intimate, geometric, scenographic, public and private, political, urban, imaginary … Three days of conferences, round tables, interviews, workshops and walks will not be too much to take the measure of the questions posed by the concept of space. Faithful to the mission that it has set itself to “decompartmentalize philosophy”, the demonstration once again invites Saint-Émilion (Gironde) of academics and practitioners, personalities of culture and political and economic worlds, with the ambition to arouse the interest of a curious audience, without age limit.

Everywhere and nowhere

In the historical setting of the city Aquitaine set with vines, speakers from different disciplinary horizons will feed reflection. Large names of astrophysics (Jean Audouze, Pierre Léna) will mark the infinite and the representations that the different cultures have made from the sky and the space. The challenges of their conquest and their defense will also be on the program, enlightened by General Stéphane Abial and the diplomat Didier Le Bret. Our workspaces will be revisited by Alban Gonord, Director of Macif engagement, and Christophe Harrigan, CEO of CNP Social Protection Assurances; The creation space will be invested during a performance-performance by a philosopher (Sophie Geoffrion), a musician and composer (Karol Beffa) and a visual artist (Franck Cazenave); While the geographer Jacques Lévy will present the challenges of justice in terms of spatialization … As we can see, space is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It contains everything and it is a question of giving it shape.

Think wide

The festival does not ignore the vertigo that can grasp us, nor on “the fear of emptiness” (conference of the philosopher and psychoanalyst Hélène l’Heuillet). The intimate will also have its place in particular with the philosopher Maxime Rovère. To those who are afraid of getting lost, let us point out two guided walks in the vines, one philosophical-insolite, along the hedges with the writer Sonia Feertchak and Christophe de Galzain, journalist to Our time (monthly edited by the Bayard group as The pilgrim), and another to apprehend “the spaces of wine” with Jérôme Baudouin, of La Revue du Vin de France .

“We offer you the 2025 Odyssey”, underlines Mazarine Pingeot, in reference to the title of the film 2001, the space of space, From Stanley Kubrick, “because any trip, was it interior, is in its own way a discovery of space”. An odyssey for a long spring weekend, in an exceptional site, where everyone is invited to follow their inspiration to think wide.

Philosophia Festival From May 23 to 25, 2025, in Saint-Émilion (Gironde).

Program and Rens. :: Festival-philosophia.com