Hector Varela-Rios — Between God and nothingness: shifting meanings of res in Descartes’ Meditations

Hector Varela-Rios

Between God and nothingness: shifting meanings of res in Descartes’ Meditations

Tuesday, May 31, 4:30pm

By closely tracing the varied conditions placed on the concept res throughout the Meditations, one can make a parallel framework of one of its main arguments: ‘Ego sum, ego existo’. To wit: Descartes starts by doubting things in general, then allowing the possibility of certain things (or certainty in/through things), continues by looking for the essence of things, and ends arguing for their existence. Interestingly enough, this existence is based on the facticity of the body, Descartes’ own body. Could he have been referring to his body’s ‘thingness’ (as constituted by all the conditions he uses), furtively but all along, as basis for ‘Ego sum, ego existo’? We will explore this together.

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

Symposium on “Heidegger’s Confessions”

9780226419077

Thursday, May 26, 4:30pm
Swift Hall, 3rd Floor Lecture Hall
1025 East 58th Street

Ryan Coyne (University of Chicago)
Jean-Luc Marion (University of Chicago)
Gregory Fried (Suffolk University)
Moderator Mark Alznauer (Northwestern University)

REGISTER HERE

Hosted by the Lumen Christi Institue

Cosponsored by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop and the Theology & Religious Ethics Workshop

Although Martin Heidegger is nearly as notorious as Friedrich Nietzsche for embracing the death of God, the philosopher himself acknowledged that Christianity accompanied him at every stage of his career. In Heidegger’s Confessions, Ryan Coyne isolates a crucially important player in this story: Saint Augustine. Uncovering the significance of Saint Augustine in Heidegger’s philosophy, he details the complex and conflicted ways in which Heidegger paradoxically sought to define himself against the Christian tradition while at the same time making use of its resources.


Ryan Coyne is Assistant Professor of of Philosophy of Religions and Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He holds an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. Prof. Coyne studies the relationship between modern European philosophy and the history of Christian theology, and is author of Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in “Being and Time” & Beyond (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and A Spectacle for the Gods: Nietzsche and the Question of Faith (forthcoming).

Jean-Luc Marion is the Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Professor of Catholic Studies and Professor of the Philosophy of Religions and Theology and professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, and holds the Dominique Dubarle chair at the Institut Catholique of Paris. He is also Professor Emeritus of Modern Philosophy and Metaphysics at the University of Paris IV (Sorbonne) and is a member of the Académie Française. Among his books are In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, God Without Being, and The Erotic Phenomenon. In 2014 he delivered the Gifford Lectures on Givenness and Revelation.

Gregory Freid is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Suffolk University in Boston. He holds an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago and a BA from Harvard University. His research focuses on the history of Philosophy, particularly Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Kant, and Heidegger. He is co-author with Charles Fried of Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror, co-editor of A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, and is author of Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics.

 

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

Alexandra Matthews, “Ineffability and the Transmission of Knowledge in Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and Plato’s Seventh Letter”

Alexandra Matthews (Divinity School), “Ineffability and the Transmission of Knowledge in Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and Plato’s Seventh Letter”

Thursday, May 5th, Swift Hall room 106

Co-sponsored with the Islamic-Studies Workshop

A vegetarian lunch will be provided.

 

Save The Dates! (Spring ’16)

Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions

Spring Quarter Schedule Preview

Tuesday, April 5, 4:30pm, Swift Common Room

John Cottingham (University of Reading)

“Transcending Science: Humane Models of Religious Understanding”

Tuesday, April 26, 4:30pm, Swift Hall, 3rd Floor Lecture Hall

Alain de Libera (Collège de France)

“Philosophical archeology and deconstruction. Towards an archeology of the
subject.”

Responses by Jean-Luc Marion and Ryan Coyne.

 

Thursday, May 19, 12:00pm, Swift Hall Common Room

Jonardon Ganeri (NYU)

“Why Philosophy Must Go Global”

Lunch served.

Thursday, May 26 4:30pm, Swift Hall, 3rd Floor Lecture Hall

Symposium on Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in “Being and Time” and Beyond

Ryan Coyne (UChicago)

Gregory Fried (Suffolk University)

Jean-Luc Marion (UChicago)

Tuesday, May 31, 4:30pm, location TBA

Hector Varela-Rios (Theology)

Title TBA

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

Benjamin Y. Fong – “Religion and the Mind: The Co-Delimitation of Concepts in the Eighteenth Century”

Benjamin Y. Fong (Assistant Collegiate Professor, The College, University of Chicago)

“Religion and the Mind: The Co-Delimitation of Concepts in the Eighteenth Century”

Wednesday, March 9th, 4:30 pm

Swift 106

Refreshments served

In The Meaning and End of Religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith famously argued that the concept of “religion” gained its contemporary meaning in the Enlightenment.  In this paper, an expansion of Smith’s basic contention, I will attempt to demonstrate the immense importance of the new theory of a bodily, mortal, and fallible mind that emerged in the eighteenth century to the delimitation of the concept of religion.  Couching Smith’s argument in the history of psychology allows us to see more clearly what precisely is involved in the Enlightenment “reification” of religion, and also to better understand the basic features of the category of religion that contemporary religious studies scholars have come to know and lament.

[The paper will be distributed in advance of the event via the Workshop’s listerv]

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

Zeke Goggin: “The Idea of Sacrifice in Hegel’s 1793 ‘Volksreligion’ Fragment”

Wednesday February 17th, 4:30pm Swift Hall 106

ABSTRACT:

This paper will focus specifically on some fragments which Hegel began while studying at the Stift in Tübingen and likely completed during a visit home to Stuttgart.  The question of sacrifice arises at the height of a characteristically dialectical difficulty which the young Hegel has not yet developed a logic to conceptualize.  The treatment of sacrifice here indicates certain persistent themes in Hegel’s thought which are sometimes taken to be wholly attributable to the interventions of Hölderlin and Schelling, but which in the context of the Volksreligion Fragment appear some three years prior to the the former, and almost a decade prior to the latter.

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