Category Archives: Papers

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Eun Young Hwang (PhD Student, Religious Ethics): “A Constructive Comparative Religious Ethical Analysis of Augustine and Xunzi: The Sacred Origin of Human Rights and Its Demand for Just Society”

Posted on by
Reply

Wednesday, February 3, 4:30, Swift 106 (co-sponsored with Global Christianities Workshop)

ABSTRACT:

While referring to some contemporary theoretical concern for human rights grounded on the person’s potential for sacred experience (Joas) and their implication to the institutional demand not to violate the entitled access to flourishing according to some universal criteria of minimal justice (Pogge), this project engages with a comparative reading of two historically unrelated traditions, Augustine and Xunzi. I will show how Augustine and Xunzi show differences and similarities when dealing with the sacred capability of human person as the source of entitlement for human flourishing and the institutional demand of securing basic rights for human flourishing according to their culture-specific visions of personal fulfillment and social order, which all resonate with the universal concern for human rights and universal criteria of thin justice.

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.

 

 

Dan Wyche on Georges Friedmann and the Politics of Self-Overcoming

Posted on by
Reply

 Dan Wyche: “The Politics of Self-overcoming: Notes on Georges Friedmann.”

Tuesday, January 19 4:30pm, Swift 106

Pub reception to follow

PAPER (TO BE READ PRIOR TO WORKSHOP)

ABSTRACT:

For this workshop meeting, I will be presenting the sections of the first Chapter of my dissertation dealing specifically with the work of the French sociologist of science Georges Friedmann, from whom Pierre Hadot would adopt the term “spiritual exercises.” This material deals with the experiences and reasons for Freidmann’s interest in the question of practices of the self, focusing specifically on the political motivations for his turn towards these themes. By focusing on the politics of his conception of spiritual exercises, this section of the chapter will attempt to set up what I take to be two of the primary questions that confront any contemporary engagement with the question of spiritual exercises, and thus to sketch the beginnings of a response to those challenges through Friedmann’s work in this area.

 

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.

Jason Cather on Anselm’s Ontological Argument

Posted on by
Reply

Jason Cather (University of Chicago)

“Anselm and the Existential Fallacy”

Wednesday, December 2, 4:30 pm

Swift 200

RECEPTION TO FOLLOW AT IDA NOYES PUB

after Unknown artist, line engraving, late 16th century

Virtually every critic of the ontological argument agrees that it is fallacious, but it is hard to find consensus on the fallacy (or fallacies) committed.  This paper covers a number of these accusations, and explains why we should not find them troubling. It then turns to an objection, offered by John Hick, that the argument in Anselm commits the existential fallacy. In focusing on this fallacy in particular, I offer a defense of Anselm against these charges. Since Anselm’s day, there has been a shift from Aristotelian understanding of existential syllogisms to Boolean interpretations. This paper will examine the significance of that shift for Anselm’s argument, and suggest how we might rescue Anselm from trouble caused by this development. No prior experience with formal logic is assumed. Reading Hick’s objection would be appreciated, though not required.

Franklin I. Gamwell (University of Chicago): “Comparative Philosophy of Religion: The Foreword Revisited”

Posted on by
Reply

Franklin I. Gamwell (University of Chicago): “Comparative Philosophy of Religion: The Foreword Revisited”

Wednesday, November 11, 2015, 4:30pm: Swift 106; reception to follow

Two decades ago, a series of publications called “Toward a Comparative Philosophy of Religions” helped spawn the Philosophy of Religions program at the Divinity School. Professor Gamwell, then Dean of the Divinity School, contributed “A Foreword to the Comparative Philosophy of Religions” that still resonates with the work that goes on in the PR program today. Professor Gamwell will look back on that essay and the intervening years to reflect on where the Philosophy of Religions at Chicago has come from and might be going, and what comparison has to do with it.

Please read Professor Gamwell’s “Foreword”, which is Chapter 1 of the volume Religion and Practical Reason.

 

Anil Mundra on Naturalness and Normativity in Religious Studies

Posted on by
Reply

Anil Mundra (University of Chicago):

“The Natural, The Normative, and the Study of Religion”

Wednesday, October 28th, 4:30pm: Swift 200

The religious studies academy routinely opposes descriptive or historical to prescriptive or constructive methodologies—witness the categories of the AAR’s book awards, and the committees of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. Such a bifurcation reflects an ambivalence about the nature of religion: some of us are to conceive of religion as naturally or historically determined, such that it is subject to an explanatory analysis; others must view it as a free activity, such that it is susceptible to injunctive intervention. The dilemma, in short, is whether the academic study of religion is to be normatively evaluative or not. Integrating the insights of thinkers from Hegel to Donald Davidson, I will argue that normativity is an ineliminable (even if often implicit or invisible) element of humanistic description; and that, insofar as religious studies claims to study human agents it inevitably has humanistic dimensions. These dimensions depend on the ability of scholars to recognize the equal humanity of those that they study, which proceeds not only from an imperative to fairness, but more rigorously from the admission that both scholars and their subjects are at once historically conditioned and free.

Stay Tuned!

Posted on by
Reply

The workshop would like to extend a thank you to all the students, faculty, and visiting scholars who helped to make this year such a success by joining into our ongoing discussion on the intersections of religion and philosophy.

We have yet another exciting and stimulating academic year on the horizon, and can’t wait to see our friends and colleagues for another round of rigorous interdisciplinary conversation!

Please stay tuned to the blog and mailing list for imminent updates, the upcoming schedule, and more!

-The PR Workshop

Eric Ziolkowski on “Kierkegaard and the History of Religions”

Posted on by
Reply

Eric Ziolkowski (Lafayette College)

“Kierkegaard and the History of Religions”

Co-sponsored with the Religion and Literature Club

Thursday, May 21, 3:30 pm

Swift Hall, 106

Abstract:

Kirkegaard’s life coincided with the period that led up to the emergence of comparative religion or Religionswissenschaft, a.k.a. the “History of Religions,” as an academically recognized scholarly pursuit.  This talk considers the bearing of Kirkegaard’s writings, and of their reception, upon the development of HR, mainlty from the early twentieth century up through Eliade.  For better or worse, far from figuring as an irrelevant or theological persona non grata in relation to HR, Kierkegaard was embraced by some of its formative contributors as a datum, as a theorist, and ultimately, in one notable case, as an existential soul mate.