Aesthetic comes from the Greek, meaning ‘perceived by senses’: it refers to a prereflective dimension of experience and to a way of knowing by the senses. The process of intrinsic evaluation of the Gestaltung is based on aesthetic criteria.

Otherness refers to a process of emerging subjectivities, a process of mutual co-creation at the contact-boundary. In this process are rooted the ethical, clinical, social and political dimensions of experience. How is this process supported or prevented in a desensitized world? How does this affect our practice when occurring in therapy, in organisations and communities, in learning and teaching, in social and political dimensions? We will be inspired by Dostoyevsky’s provoking question: “will beauty save the world?” And which beauty? We will explore these themes, raise our awareness, make new contacts and develop ourselves in the process of meeting each other at the contact boundary. And we will be exploring these together at the historic crossroads of civilizations – the Hellenic, Roman, and Islamic. By our gathering at this joint conference, we ourselves will be bringing our own different civilizations to the crossroads we will co-create at the boundary of this conference.