Author Archives: YetiK

Elad Lapidot: Forthcoming Book Workshop: State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel

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Elad Lapidot

Professor of Hebraic Studies, University of Lille, France

Forthcoming Book Workshop: State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel by Elad Lapidot

Monday, April 21st, 12:00PM, Swift Hall Room 208
The workshop will consist of a short presentation, followed by discussion and Q&A. We will focus on a pre-circulated book chapter,  which can be accessed here.
 
 
Book Description
 
State of Others: Levinas and Decolonial Israel explores the relations between post-Holocaust Jewish thought and postcolonial thought through the work of Emmanuel Levinas. In the last decade, thinkers have criticized Levinas for his Eurocentrism; however, author Elad Lapidot argues that Levinas anticipated this critique and, from the 1960s onward, began setting the foundations for decolonial Jewish thought—and for decolonial Zionism.
State of Others offers an innovative analysis of Levinas’s intellectual project as articulated around a turn in the year 1968. This turn relates to the relationship between Judaism and Western civilization. Prior to 1968, Levinas considered the historical Jewish collective, Israel, as the avant-garde of Western humanism. After 1968, with the rise of decolonial discourse, Levinas’s concept of Israel shifts roles and becomes the paradigmatic victim of Western imperialism.
State of Others demonstrates how Levinas simultaneously developed his dual narratives—before and after the pivotal year of 1968—across his philosophical and Jewish writings, with a special emphasis on the Talmudic Readings. It presents for the first time a cohesive overview of Levinas’s writings, both early and late, as interconnected components of a singular intellectual endeavor. The ethical principles concerning the other, as articulated by Levinas, are conceptually linked to his reflections on the State of Israel.

★This event is co-sponsored by The Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, the France Chicago Center, and the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Modern France and the Francophone World★

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The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Taryn Sue (tarynsue@uchicago.edu) or Yeti Kang (hkang01@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Dawid Rogacz: The Revival of Confucian Philosophy Through Its Interaction with Daoism

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Dawid Rogacz

Faculty of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

The Revival of Confucian Philosophy Through Its Interaction with Daoism: The Case of Sixth‐Century Master Liu (Liuzi)

Tuesday, April 15th, 5:00 PM, Swift 400A
The workshop will consist of a short presentation, followed by discussion and Q&A. We will focus on a pre-circulated paper,  which can be accessed here.
 
Abstract
 
This paper offers the first English‑language philosophical treatment of Master Liu (Liuzi 劉子)—a treatise that gives a unique insight into the intellectual life of sixth‑century China. Most probably written by Liu Zhou (d. 565) and known at the Tang court, the work was later neglected due to its eclectic label. This article argues that Liuzi integrated Confucian moral philosophy with selected Daoist ideas and responded to post‑Buddhist transformations of key categories of Chinese thought in a manner that anticipates many solutions characteristic of neo‑Confucian lixue. This includes an innovative understanding of such categories as spirit (shen) and heart‑mind (xin), feelings (qing) and desires (yu), and, finally, reliability (xin) and balancing (quan).

★This event is co-sponsored by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies with support in part by grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI National Resource Centers program. The event’s content does not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and one should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government ★

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The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Taryn Sue (tarynsue@uchicago.edu) or Yeti Kang (hkang01@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Danica Cao: Freedom beyond Resistance and Autonomy

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Danica Cao

PhD student, UChicago Divinity School

Freedom beyond Resistance and Autonomy: Reading Zhang Taiyan’s Minbao-Period Revolutionary Morality through Kant’s “Ethical Community”

Tuesday, February 25th, 5:00 PM, Swift 207
 
The workshop will consist of a short presentation, followed by discussion and Q&A. We will focus on a pre-circulated paper,  which can be accessed here 
 
Abstract
 
In the tumultuous transition from the late Qing to the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, Chinese thinkers from Liang Qichao to Zhang Taiyan debated the task of “establishing a religion” for modern China, in addition to their better remembered political theories. These understudied theories of religion, similar to their Western counterparts, played pivotal roles in the transition of Chinese and more broadly East Asian moral thought to their modern forms. This paper is an attempt at characterizing Zhang Taiyan’s proposal in the larger arena of modern East Asian philosophical and religious re-workings of premodern ideals of freedom in conversation with the new ones imported from the West. By departing from two later, more developed, and politically opposed models of freedom for East Asian modernity, that of autonomy in the New Confucian Mou Zongsan and that of resistance in the literary critic Takeuchi Yoshimi, I show that Zhang’s position can be said to prefigure both, and that a better characterization of its modernity forces us to ask what philosophical modernity is and how it is related to freedom beyond its orthodox formulations with attention primarily to actors within the Euro-American geographical sphere. With such concerns in mind, I put Kant’s notion of “ethical community” in the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793) into dialogue with Zhang’s advocation for a revolutionary morality in the Minbao period (1906-08), which have been linked to the French Revolution and the Xinhai Revolution respectively. I abstract from them a potentially productive fourfold modern structure of the political-religious and the private-public, which then serves as a prelude to future work on Zhang’s philosophy of religions and the trans-modern conversations I hope to contribute to.

Hosted by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago.

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The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Taryn Sue (tarynsue@uchicago.edu) or Yeti Kang (hkang01@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Yiting Tang: On Being Attuned: A Reading of Zhuangzi II

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Yiting Tang

MA student, UChicago Divinity School

On Being Attuned: A Reading of Zhuangzi II

Thursday, February 13th, 5:00 PM, Swift 207
 
The workshop will consist of a short presentation, followed by discussion and Q&A. We will focus on a pre-circulated paper,  which can be accessed here (password: “Zhuangzi”).
 
Abstract
 
It is well-known that, in classical Chinese philosophy, qing 情 does not always and primarily mean emotions. At the same time, many studies still approach the discourse on qing 情 in the Zhuangzi under the rubric of something like the philosophy of emotion. The aim of this paper is not so much to criticize that approach to the Zhuangzi but to explore the aspects of qing 情 in the Zhuangzi that don’t neatly fit into the categories of emotions, moods, and affects. My attempt will be to illustrate the discourse on qing 情 in the Zhuangzi through the concepts of being and attunement. My main questions are: What if to be is to be attuned? What is the relationship between attunement and rhythm, frequency, intensity, and valence? And what kind of philosophy might result if the opening of Zhuangzi II is read as a phenomenological account of being as various and varying modes of attunement?

Hosted by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago.

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The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Taryn Sue (tarynsue@uchicago.edu) or Yeti Kang (hkang01@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Nathan Mulder Bunce: Specters and the Image

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Nathan Mulder Bunce

Ph.D. Candidate, University College Dublin

Specters and the Image: Ethical Injunction as Apparition of the Inapparent

TUESDAY, December 3, 5:00 PM, Swift 207
 
The workshop will consist of a short presentation, followed by discussion and Q&A. We will focus on a pre-circulated paper,  which can be accessed here (password: “Specters”).
 
Abstract
 
By now, which is to say since Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, denunciations of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ are widespread. This context demands a radical rethinking of the image or appearance for a conception which does not rely on the value of presence to support its meaning. How should the image be understood in the wake of the disappearance of this grounding support? Does the significance of this uprooting of the image transform the image into the simulacrum? Drawing on Derrida’s Specters of Marx, I suggest the logic of the ghost—a hauntology—offers a conception of the image adequate to the demands of the post-metaphysical situation without falling into the nihilism of simulacra. Images, and more generally phenomena, as specters reverse the process of total depletion through the ethical injunction, calling us to reinvest the significance of images without certain knowledge. To be sure, this reinvestment requires interpretation, but an interpretation deprived of its end and without hope for itself. This unassured end would constitute the chance, which is the risk and promise, of justice.

Hosted by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago.

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The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Taryn Sue (tarynsue@uchicago.edu) or Yeti Kang (hkang01@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.