Jeffrey Kosky

Professor of Religion, Washington and Lee University

Henry David Thoreau’s Recovery: An Ordinary Happiness and “The Phenomena of the Lake”

Friday, May 25, 12:00pm, Swift 403

Please join the Philosophy of Religions Workshop for a roundtable discussion with Jeffrey Kosky (Professor of Religion, Washington and Lee University). Professor Kosky works in the areas of phenomenology and religion; theories of modern disenchantment and the possibilities of re-enchantment; and traditions of mystical theology in Christian thought and culture. He is the author of Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity (The University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Levinas and the Philosophy of Religion (Indiana University Press, 2001). He has also translated several books and articles by Jean-Luc Marion.

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

Professor Emmanuel Falque

Honorary Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, Catholic University of Paris

Thursday, November 30, 10:00am, Swift 403

For our last meeting of the quarter, Professor Falque will  be leading a discussion with graduate students on his book Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology. Participants are encouraged to read chapters 1 and 6 from the book found here. Coffee and pastries will be served.

Emmanuel Falque is Honorary Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Paris. He specializes in patristic and medieval philosophy and phenomenology. Professor Falque’s books in English include The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An essay on Birth and Resurrection and most recently The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist.

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

Professor Ryan Coyne

Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religions and Theology

Grand Politics and the Question of Survival in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks

Tuesday, November 28, 4:30pm, Swift 201

(N.B. the date and room change)

Food and refreshments will be served

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

Russell Johnson

PhD Candidate, Philosophy of Religions

“It Masquerades as a Religion”: Islamophobia, McCarthyism, and the American Imagination

Wednesday, November 15, 4:30pm, Swift 208

Discussions surrounding the recent “Muslim Ban” have brought up deeper disagreements about the status of Islam in America. One group sees Muslims as an ethnocultural group and equates Islamophobia with xenophobia. Another group sees Islam as a “political ideology” that “hides behind being a religion,” to use the words of Trump advisor Michael Flynn. The former group draws parallels between Islamophobia and Nazi-era anti-Semitism, while the latter group interprets Islam through a comparison with global Communism. Drawing on rhetorical analysis and cognitive linguistics, I argue that these historical comparisons are essential to the ways anti-Islamic actions are understood in America. The legacy of the Red Scare in particular has been underappreciated in analyses of contemporary anti-Muslim prejudice. I propose that a comparative theological approach ought to include references to political ideologies like Communism in order to resolve ambiguities in the concept “religion.”

Refreshments will be served

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

Kristóf Oltvai

MA Student, Divinity School

Good without Being? Communion, Personhood, and Evil in Jean-Luc Marion’s Theology

Wednesday, November 1, 5:00pm, Swift 400 (please note the time and room change)

The paper can be read here

From Augustine to Aquinas and beyond, central figures in Christian theology are often interpreted as advancing an ontological definition of evil, setting evil’s deprivation or nothingness against God’s ipseity as the summum ens. Recent work in the continental philosophy of religion has stigmatized such “ontotheological” readings for importing an almost deistic eudaimonism into Christian ethics. Among these, I argue that Jean-Luc Marion’s “phenomenology of the gift” reframes personhood as a property of phenomenality, not being(ness). Glimpsing Christ as the icon of the Father initiates the givee into seeing beyond both φύσις and οὐσία; this “enhypostasization” serves as the prototype for the ethical encounter with the face of the Other and, perhaps even more fundamentally, with all given phenomena. The hypostatic moment can thus be understood as a transubstantiation of the “besought” (interloqué) into a phenomenal field governed only by the horizon of charity. A radical question for philosophical theology follows: does defining any metaphysical constitution for the person imprison them within solipsistic subjectity (or worse, objectity)? Is being–evil?

Refreshments will be served

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

Dhruv Raj Nagar

PhD Student, Philosophy of Religions

On the Various Branches of An Other Philosophy: Thinking Otherwise & thinking the Othered in Western Metaphysics“

Wednesday, May 17, 4:30pm, Swift 201

The paper can be read here

A critique of Western metaphysics, whether directed at its ocularcentrism or logocentrism, ontotheology or metaphysics of presence, may be negotiated in two ways. Firstly, as has been done, by identifying and exposing precisely the elements that contribute to it and recommending remedial substitutes. Or secondly, by simply circumventing the very project of recuperative dialogue and instead initiating another way of doing philosophy that shares almost nothing with the language, premises and content of Western philosophy, while still addressing similar concerns. Only through such an other thinking, which is quite possibly an other of thinking, may it be possible to execute the critical project without in some way being already complicit with the ideology such a project seeks to critique.

An outline of such an other philosophy will be presented here (inspired by the system of Advaita Vedānta). Thus, instead of being constrained by traditional categories of metaphysics, epistemology, theology or ethics dealing with well-established themes of substance, being, presence, autonomy, knowledge, existence and essence, a new branching and thematization of philosophy will be introduced which speaks of magic (magistics), of light and darkness (photology), caves and caverns (speleology), of sleep (somnology), and finally of matters of the heart (cardiology), themes that have often stood neglected in the historical preoccupations of Western philosophy.

Refreshments will be served