Author Archives: YetiK

Zijin Xiao at the Philosophy of Religions Workshop

Posted on by
Reply
Zijin Xiao
MA Student, UChicago Divinity School
Benjamin, Rilke, and the Problem of Experience in Modernity
 
Thursday, November 20th, 5:00 PM, Swift Hall, Room 207
 
The workshop will consist of a brief introduction followed by discussion. We will focus on pre-circulated book chapters, which can be accessed here 
Abstract
Walter Benjamin and Rainer Maria Rilke are two well-acknowledged thinkers and artists among those who seek to tackle the question of modernity. Though Benjamin, who is slightly younger than Rilke, seldom comments directly on Rilke’s works and thoughts, a comparison between the two scholars can appear insightful as a continuation of the tension between Marx and Kierkegaard, with the former being an unorthodox Marxist and the latter an admirer of the Danish philosopher. In this paper, I seek to present how the problem of experience in modernity appears differently in both thinkers’ works. Focusing mostly on Benjamin’s essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” and Rilke’s Duino Elegies as well as his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, this paper examines how memory or the past plays a central part in perception in both thinkers, and seeks to compare how subjectivity is either excluded or reconstructed in relation to the past, for a seemingly common goal of redemption.
 
_____________
The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Halley Haruta (haruta@uchicago.edu) or Yeti Kang (hkang01@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Joe Troderman at the Philosophy of Religions Workshop

Posted on by
Reply
Joe Troderman
MA student, UChicago Divinity School
“Ajase’s Salvation: re-examining evil in Shinran’s soteriology through his application of the Nirvana Sutra”
 
Friday, October 31st, 12:30 PM, Swift Hall, Room 200 
(unusual time and location)
 
The workshop will consist of a presentation, followed by discussion and Q&A. With the author’s permission, the paper is attached in this email and is also accessible here 
Abstract
 
This paper examines Shinran’s radical reframing of evil within the context of Pure Land Buddhism, particularly in relation to Other Power (他力 tariki). Drawing on Tiantai and Pure Land sources such as Zhili, Genshin, Shandao, and Tanluan, it argues that Shinran articulates a vision of “thoroughgoing commitment” in which Amida’s vow universally infringes on all possible acts, leaving no remainder of jiriki (self-power). In Shinran’s soteriology, evil is not overcome through human effort—indeed, any effort to overcome evil is itself evil, entangled in greed, anger, and ignorance. Instead, Amida’s vows operate as the sole guarantor of liberation, extending even to those who commit the five gravest transgressions. This stance marks a decisive shift from earlier Chinese Pure Land interpretations by rejecting the salvific efficacy of auxiliary practices and radicalizing exclusive reliance on Amida’s primal vow.
The paper demonstrates this through a close reading of Shinran’s creative manipulation of the story of Ajase in the Nirvana Sutra. By reinterpreting Ajase’s patricide and eventual salvation, Shinran foregrounds the paradoxical dynamic by which the deepest expressions of evil are already encompassed by Amida’s compassionate activity. In doing so, Shinran both affirms the universality of Buddha-nature and dismantles the notion of moral qualification for salvation. This reading also demonstrates that Shinran’s distinctive soteriology resonates with Tiantai Zhiyi’s nuanced response to antinomianism: evil is neither negated nor excused but enfolded within the workings of a vow that renders all beings, without exception, the site of liberation.
 
_____________
The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop. Please contact Workshop Coordinators Halley Haruta (haruta@uchicago.edu) or Yeti Kang (hkang01@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

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

Posted on by
Reply

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★

_____________

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

Posted on by
Reply

 

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 ★

_____________

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

_____________

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.