Our welcome meet & greet will take place Tuesday, October 4 at 6pm at the campus pub. Let’s get to know each other and talk philosophy, religion, philosophy of religion, and life over some pitchers and sweet potato tots.
Hector Varela-Rios — Between God and nothingness: shifting meanings of res in Descartes’ Meditations
Hector Varela-Rios
Between God and nothingness: shifting meanings of res in Descartes’ Meditations
Tuesday, May 31, 4:30pm
By closely tracing the varied conditions placed on the concept res throughout the Meditations, one can make a parallel framework of one of its main arguments: ‘Ego sum, ego existo’. To wit: Descartes starts by doubting things in general, then allowing the possibility of certain things (or certainty in/through things), continues by looking for the essence of things, and ends arguing for their existence. Interestingly enough, this existence is based on the facticity of the body, Descartes’ own body. Could he have been referring to his body’s ‘thingness’ (as constituted by all the conditions he uses), furtively but all along, as basis for ‘Ego sum, ego existo’? We will explore this together.
Symposium on “Heidegger’s Confessions”
Thursday, May 26, 4:30pm
Swift Hall, 3rd Floor Lecture Hall
1025 East 58th Street
Ryan Coyne (University of Chicago)
Jean-Luc Marion (University of Chicago)
Gregory Fried (Suffolk University)
Moderator Mark Alznauer (Northwestern University)
Hosted by the Lumen Christi Institue
Cosponsored by the Philosophy of Religions Workshop and the Theology & Religious Ethics Workshop
Although Martin Heidegger is nearly as notorious as Friedrich Nietzsche for embracing the death of God, the philosopher himself acknowledged that Christianity accompanied him at every stage of his career. In Heidegger’s Confessions, Ryan Coyne isolates a crucially important player in this story: Saint Augustine. Uncovering the significance of Saint Augustine in Heidegger’s philosophy, he details the complex and conflicted ways in which Heidegger paradoxically sought to define himself against the Christian tradition while at the same time making use of its resources.
Ryan Coyne is Assistant Professor of of Philosophy of Religions and Theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He holds an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. Prof. Coyne studies the relationship between modern European philosophy and the history of Christian theology, and is author of Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in “Being and Time” & Beyond (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and A Spectacle for the Gods: Nietzsche and the Question of Faith (forthcoming).
Jean-Luc Marion is the Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Professor of Catholic Studies and Professor of the Philosophy of Religions and Theology and professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, and holds the Dominique Dubarle chair at the Institut Catholique of Paris. He is also Professor Emeritus of Modern Philosophy and Metaphysics at the University of Paris IV (Sorbonne) and is a member of the Académie Française. Among his books are In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, God Without Being, and The Erotic Phenomenon. In 2014 he delivered the Gifford Lectures on Givenness and Revelation.
Gregory Freid is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Suffolk University in Boston. He holds an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago and a BA from Harvard University. His research focuses on the history of Philosophy, particularly Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Kant, and Heidegger. He is co-author with Charles Fried of Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror, co-editor of A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, and is author of Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics.
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.
Jonardon Ganeri: “Why Philosophy Must Go Global”
Alexandra Matthews, “Ineffability and the Transmission of Knowledge in Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and Plato’s Seventh Letter”
Alexandra Matthews (Divinity School), “Ineffability and the Transmission of Knowledge in Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and Plato’s Seventh Letter”
Thursday, May 5th, Swift Hall room 106
Co-sponsored with the Islamic-Studies Workshop
A vegetarian lunch will be provided.
Alain de Libera (Collège de France): Two Public Lectures
Save The Dates! (Spring ’16)
Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions
Spring Quarter Schedule Preview
Tuesday, April 5, 4:30pm, Swift Common Room
John Cottingham (University of Reading)
“Transcending Science: Humane Models of Religious Understanding”
Tuesday, April 26, 4:30pm, Swift Hall, 3rd Floor Lecture Hall
Alain de Libera (Collège de France)
“Philosophical archeology and deconstruction. Towards an archeology of the
subject.”
Responses by Jean-Luc Marion and Ryan Coyne.
Thursday, May 19, 12:00pm, Swift Hall Common Room
Jonardon Ganeri (NYU)
“Why Philosophy Must Go Global”
Lunch served.
Thursday, May 26 4:30pm, Swift Hall, 3rd Floor Lecture Hall
Symposium on Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in “Being and Time” and Beyond
Ryan Coyne (UChicago)
Gregory Fried (Suffolk University)
Jean-Luc Marion (UChicago)
Tuesday, May 31, 4:30pm, location TBA
Hector Varela-Rios (Theology)
Title TBA
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.
John Cottingham – “Transcending Science: Humane Models of Religious Understanding”
Benjamin Y. Fong – “Religion and the Mind: The Co-Delimitation of Concepts in the Eighteenth Century”
Benjamin Y. Fong (Assistant Collegiate Professor, The College, University of Chicago)
“Religion and the Mind: The Co-Delimitation of Concepts in the Eighteenth Century”
Wednesday, March 9th, 4:30 pm
Swift 106
Refreshments served
In The Meaning and End of Religion, Wilfred Cantwell Smith famously argued that the concept of “religion” gained its contemporary meaning in the Enlightenment. In this paper, an expansion of Smith’s basic contention, I will attempt to demonstrate the immense importance of the new theory of a bodily, mortal, and fallible mind that emerged in the eighteenth century to the delimitation of the concept of religion. Couching Smith’s argument in the history of psychology allows us to see more clearly what precisely is involved in the Enlightenment “reification” of religion, and also to better understand the basic features of the category of religion that contemporary religious studies scholars have come to know and lament.
[The paper will be distributed in advance of the event via the Workshop’s listerv]
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.