Dhruv Raj Nagar

PhD Student, Philosophy of Religions

Sanskrit in between Prior & Posterior Hermeneutics: Śankara’s Apophatic Depth-Grammar & its Contribution to Vedic Hermeneutics

Following Nietzsche’s cautionary remarks in the Genealogy of Morals, Henri Bergson, A.N.
Whitehead and other philosophers have been wary of and sensitive to the way in which language may be implicated in metaphysical discourse, entrenching and naturalizing a substance metaphysics based, for instance, on such grammatical structures as the subject-predicate schema. Later David Bohm dreamed of a language— the rheomode— naturally suited to denote processes and activities as a more accurate description of the world. Now if substance metaphysics may be a product of a substance-centered grammar then already the linguistic preconceptions of the Vedic milieu, as manifest in Vedic Sanskrit, lead us away from a substance-centric grammar to one centered on activity, an insight later explicated in the school of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā, the Prior Hermeneutics of the Veda, according to which language denoting action, accomplishment and ritual creation is language par excellence. Sanskrit, indeed, displays many features of the Bohmian rheomode. The prior-hermeneutists take recourse to various such resources and features of Sanskrit language in order to argue for the fundamentally processual and dynamic character of reality. However I will argue that, in contradistinction to both substance-metaphysical and process-oriented uses of language, the eighth-century philosopher Śaṅkara discovers and develops a Posterior Hermeneutics (Uttara Mīmāṃsā) of the Veda that argues for a quietist and niṣkriya (actionless) explication of Sanskrit and therefore of reality itself by way of foregrounding certain linguistic heterotypes marginalized by the prior-hermeneutic tradition in their exploitation of Sanskrit grammar. Śaṅkara’s Vedānta will thus be found to be grounded in an “apophatic depth-grammar” which, by revealing various depth features of linguistic and sentential cognition makes genuinely new contributions to the discipline of vākyaśāstra. I will discuss some of these features as employed by Śaṅkara, the extent to which they are indebted to and carry forward the Mīmāṃsā project of developing a hermeneutics of the Veda and of language per se, and lastly the question of whether and to what extent the historical articulation of substance metaphysics and its overcoming is peculiar to Western thought and what bearing, if any, it has on the schools of thought under discussion.

Wednesday, March 6, 12:30 PM, Swift 400

Refreshments provided

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to maintaining itself as a fully accessible and inclusive workshop.  Please contact Workshop Coordinator William Underwood (wunderwood@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Mendel Kranz

PhD Student, Philosophy of Religions

On the Borders of Europe: Zionism and (Post) Colonialism in Memmi and Levinas

This paper tracks the shifting articulations of Judaism as it emerges in France in the latter half of the 20th century—a France, that is, still contending with the Shoah and already deep within the throes of decolonization. This historical moment, I suggest, offers a particularly illuminating window through which to understand how the figure of the Jew is established, paradoxically, inside and outside of Europe, perpetuating a European colonial project in the State of Israel while concomitantly functioning at the site of a political-philosophical critique of the West. In the thinkers and writers analyzed here, the figure of the Jew emerges in a surprising series of moves in a liminal space between these two poles—critique and engagement, antagonists and protagonists, inside but not of the West. It is this series of movements that I want to track here.

Part theoretical exploration part critical genealogy, I ask how this double movement took place. By first engaging with and critiquing recent attempts to think about postcolonialism and Jewishness together, I turn to Albert Memmi and Emmanuel Levinas, who serve as fertile examples for why such models fail to adequately account for the complexity of the problem. For both of them the question is the same: how were they theorizing the position of the Jew in relation to the West and what role did Zionism play? Finally, I ask what such reversals might indicate about our attempts to consider the intertwined histories of Europe, (post) colonialism, Jewishness, and Zionism.

Wednesday, February 20, 12:30 PM, Swift 400

Refreshments provided

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to maintaining itself as a fully accessible and inclusive workshop.  Please contact Workshop Coordinator William Underwood (wunderwood@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Tamsin Jones

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Trinity College

“Is Academic Theology an Answer to the Problem of Philosophy of Religion?”

Wednesday, February 13th, 4:30 PM, Swift 201

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to maintaining itself as a fully accessible and inclusive workshop.  Please contact Workshop Coordinator William Underwood (wunderwood@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.