Please join the Philosophy of Religions Workshop on Wednesday, June 9^th for a talk with translator Matthew J. Peterson (PhD Candidate, Divinity School) on Jean Vioulac’s Apocalypse of Truth: Heideggerian Meditations, released this month by the UChicago Press. The talk will be followed by a reading group discussion, which will simply be an opportunity for those who have read the book to discuss it with others in the workshop community. You are welcome to attend one or both events.

Book Launch & Reading Group
Apocalypse of Truth: Heideggerian Meditations

Wednesday, June 9th

4:00pm CT
Talk with translator Matthew J. Peterson

5:00pm CT
Reading group discussion

Virtual Event
RSVP to rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu for Zoom link to one or both sessions.

The book may be purchased through the Seminary Co-op Bookstore or other booksellers.

About the book: We inhabit a time of crisis—totalitarianism, environmental collapse, and the unquestioned rule of neoliberal capitalism. Philosopher Jean Vioulac is invested in and worried by all of this, but his main concern lies with how these phenomena all represent a crisis within—and a threat to—thinking itself. In his first book to be translated into English, Vioulac radicalizes Heidegger’s understanding of truth as disclosure through the notion of truth as apocalypse. This “apocalypse of truth” works as an unveiling that reveals both the finitude and mystery of truth, allowing a full confrontation with truth-as-absence. Engaging with Heidegger, Marx, and St. Paul, as well as contemporary figures including Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek, Vioulac’s book presents a subtle, masterful exposition of his analysis before culminating in a powerful vision of “the abyss of the deity.” Here, Vioulac articulates a portrait of Christianity as a religion of mourning, waiting for a god who has already passed by, a form of ever-present eschatology whose end has always already taken place. With a preface by Jean-Luc Marion, Apocalypse of Truth presents a major contemporary French thinker to English-speaking audiences for the first time.

About the translator: Matthew Peterson is a doctoral candidate in the philosophy of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Continental Philosophy Review and The Journal of Religion.

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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 Tyler Neenan (tjneenan@uchicago.edu) or Rebekah Rosenfeld (rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Sonam Kachru

Assistant Professor, University of Virginia

Non-Presentism in Antiquity: South Asian Buddhist Perspectives

Sooner or later in one’s exploration of early Buddhism one will come across a suggestion to the effect that, at the end of the day, early Buddhism comes down to an endorsement of the following injunction: One should attend only to the present. What is the argument behind either the injunction or believing that Buddhism comes down to an endorsement of it? Here’s one. (Buddhists believe that) (1) The present uniquely exists; (Buddhists also believe that) (2) one should attend only to what exists or to what one can affect and control: for one can only control or affect what exists. I discuss ancient and contemporary variations on this argument, while noting the instability of it.  For not all early Buddhists believed (1), and even among those that did, not all believed (2). And in any event, the idea of “attention to the present” turns out not to be all that clear, even in cases where we are not dealing with the far more involved varieties of temporal and modal content that can characterize some early Buddhist modes of attention. In the talk based on the pre-circulated essay, I’ll analyze these claims briefly and discuss why the failure to reduce early Buddhism to a combination of ontological and practical presentism matters.

Thursday, April 29th, 4:30pm CT
Please note the new start time of 4:30pm.

Virtual Event
This workshop will focus on a pre-circulated paper (available here) and will be largely discussion-based.
Please contact rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu for the paper password and the Zoom link.

Sonam Kachru (Assistant Professor, University of Virginia) studies the history of philosophy, with a particular focus on the history of Buddhist philosophy (and literature) in Ancient South Asia. He is particularly interested in philosophy of mind (consciousness, attention, imagination), metaphysics, and philosophical anthropology. His first book (forthcoming from Columbia University Press) is entitled Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism. He is currently working on a history of norms of attention in Indian Buddhism, a project that also involves a reconsideration of conceptions of self-control and inner purity in practices of self in antiquity, from Athens to Pataliputra.

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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 Tyler Neenan (tjneenan@uchicago.edu) or Rebekah Rosenfeld (rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Ryan S. Bingham

PhD Student, Religion, Literature, and Visual Culture

The Critics of Metaphysics and the Power of their Judgment
Part II: Heidegger and Derrida

At the outset of his critical project, Immanuel Kant describes his age as “the genuine age of criticism,” claiming that the “power of judgment” belonging to this age calls for the institution of a peculiar “court of justice”: namely, “the critique of pure reason itself.” Among the critiques of his age, this critique was to have the power to decide “the possibility or impossibility of a metaphysics in general,” which is “the culmination of all culture of human reason.” This critique, demanded by the age’s power of judgment, reached its third and final stage in the critique of the “power of judgment” itself. What did this critique grant to the “power of judgment,” and what judgments concerning metaphysics did it thus make possible? When inheritors of the Kantian critical project have made critique of the power of judgment integral to their own attempt at a critique of metaphysics, what judgments have they made concerning the power of judgment, and how has this immanent critique of critique affected the project of a critique of metaphysics? In this two-part essay, I first situate the critique of the power of judgment within the Kantian critical project, specifically attending to its importance to Kant’s effort to decisively ground a metaphysics. I then attend to the tradition of the critique of the power of judgment as part of a critique of metaphysics on the part of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. I argue that the critique of the power of judgment comes to serve as a site for the critique of critique itself. For Heidegger, from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, this critique entails the uncovering of what is “unthought” in Kant’s transcendental idealism for the sake of either an essential grounding of metaphysics or an overcoming of metaphysics toward his “other beginning.” For Derrida, however, this critique entails the detection of cultural prejudices (e.g., Platonic, Christian, German) as these inform the critique of metaphysics itself in Kant and Heidegger. Far from either pretending to a lack of prejudice or abandoning the critical project, Derrida’s pursuit of the critique of the power of judgment as a critique of the critique of metaphysics promotes renewed critical attention to cultural prejudices, including, notably, those of the critic. Derrida thus uniquely alters the task of criticism.

The paper may be accessed here.

Tuesday, March 9th, 12:30 PM

Hosted by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago. To RSVP and receive a Zoom link and password for the paper, please email Rebekah Rosenfeld (rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu).

Anna M. Duong-Topp

MA Student, Divinity School

Ontological Homelessness as a Phenomenology of Belonging: Comparing the Nihilisms of Martin Heidegger and Keiji Nishitani

This analysis investigates how Kyoto School philosopher Keiji Nishitani utilizes the phenomenological framework of Martin Heidegger to express a Zen philosophical perspective on ontological homelessness. An articulation of this framework, herein termed the Structure of Being, summarizes the relationship between ontology, nihilism, and German-Japanese inter-philosophy. Ontological homelessness expounds the nihilistic experience of spatial disillusionment which affects humanity in response to modernity. Further emphasis is placed on the spatial approaches to ontology which Zen Buddhism serves to enhance, particularly through the mystical employments of śūnyatā and samādhi. I conclude that an appropriation of these insights by public praxis can aid in reversing the ontological homelessness experienced in the 21st century. Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness and Heidegger’s Being and Time are most central to this study, though a few of their later works in conjunction with secondary sources are employed for analytical purposes.

The paper may be accessed here.

Tuesday, February 23rd, 12:30 PM

Hosted by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago. To RSVP and receive a Zoom link, please email Rebekah Rosenfeld (rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu).

Michael S. Allen

University of Virginia

When Good Philosophers Make Bad Arguments:
Examples from Nyāya and Vedānta

Thursday, January 28th, 4:00pm CT

Virtual Event

RSVP to Rebekah Rosenfeld at rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu for Zoom link.

Michael S. Allen (Assistant Professor, University of Virginia) works on philosophy, religion, and environment in South Asia. He is founder and co-chair of the Hindu Philosophy unit at the American Academy of Religion. He is currently working on a book titled The Ocean of Inquiry: Niścaldās and the Premodern Origins of Modern Hinduism, which focuses on the neglected genre of vernacular Vedānta.

The Workshop is committed to being fully accessible and inclusive.  Please contact Tyler Neenan (tjneenan@uchicago.edu) or Rebekah Rosenfeld (rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in Workshop events.

Mat Messerschmidt

PhD Candidate, Committee on Social Thought

The Nietzschean Body and “Incorporation”

with a response by David Kretz,

PhD Student in the Committee on Social Thought & Germanic Studies

In this chapter I examine Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, observing how Heidegger’s sense of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a “detheologization” of Christian thought depends on the notion that both Protestant Christianity and Nietzsche participate in the continual advancement of a subjectivist metaphysics, a process that culminates in the Nietzschean “body,” the last Western “subject.” Through a critique of Heidegger’s understanding of “incorporation [Einverleibung]” in Nietzsche’s work, I argue that the Nietzschean detheologization that takes place in his notion of the body in fact does not make Nietzsche an unwilling participant in some Christian metaphysics, as Heidegger believes; rather, the Christian legacy in Nietzsche’s body is an emphasis on a human finitude that has more resonances in Heidegger’s own thought than Heidegger would care to admit.

Tuesday, October 13, 12:30 PM

Virtual Meeting via Zoom

To RSVP and receive a Zoom link, please contact Rebekah Rosenfeld at rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu.

The paper may be accessed here. Note: The workshop will be discussing pgs. 19-43.

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop.  Please contact Workshop Coordinators Tyler Neenan (tjneenan@uchicago.edu) or Rebekah Rosenfeld (rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Tyler Neenan

PhD Student, Philosophy of Religions

“The Jiji / Weiji Dyad and the End of the Changes”

Wednesday, April 22, 12:30 PM

Virtual Meeting via Zoom

Please contact rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu for Zoom link and dial-in.

Tyler’s paper may be accessed here.

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop.  Please contact Workshop Coordinators Rebekah Rosenfeld (rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu) or William Underwood (wunderwood@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

William Underwood

PhD Student, Philosophy of Religions

“On the Jewish Question”: Marx at the End of Reason

with a response by Samuel Catlin,

PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature & Religion, Literature, and Visual Culture

Monday, February 24, 12:30 PM, Swift 200

Refreshments provided

William’s paper may be accessed here.

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop.  Please contact Workshop Coordinators Rebekah Rosenfeld (rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu) or William Underwood (wunderwood@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Ryan Bingham

PhD Student, Religion, Literature, and Visual Culture

Grammēsis: Time and Writing in Derrida’s “Ousia and Grammē“

Monday, November 11, 12:30 PM, Swift 200

Lunch provided

Ryan’s paper may be accessed here. Please contact rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu for password.

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop.  Please contact Workshop Coordinators Rebekah Rosenfeld (rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu) or William Underwood (wunderwood@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.