Tag Archives: philosophy

Noreen Khawaja (Yale University): “Philosophy, Theory, History”

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Noreen Khawaja

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Yale University

Philosophy, Theory, History

Wednesday, April 5, 4:30, Swift Common Room

Noreen Khawaja specializes in 19th and 20th century European intellectual history, and particularly on the shifting status of religious ideas in late modern Western philosophy and culture. Her research examines the collapse of metaphysics both historically and philosophically. She looks at this issue in relation to secularity, the retrieval of theological traditions, and the rise of critical discourses on religion. Her book on existentialism, The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre was published with the University of Chicago Press in 2016. A newer project looks at the emergence of authenticity as a cultural and aesthetic ideal from the early Surrealists to the present day.

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: “Nonviolent Revolution: Gandhi and Kierkegaard on Means and Ends”

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Russell Johnson

PhD candidate, Philosophy of Religions

Nonviolent Revolution: Gandhi and Kierkegaard on Means and Ends

Tuesday, January 24, 5:00pm, Swift 200

Gandhi famously asserted “as the means, so the end” and that the means and the end are inseparable. This idea, though taken up by Martin Luther King Jr., has been widely ignored by scholars, and few (including Gandhi) attempt to make arguments in its favor. This paper shows that Søren Kierkegaard’s theory of communication provides one way to show the connection between means and ends, and points toward a communicative approach to ethics.

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.

Mark Siderits (Illinois State University): “Non-self and ‘Religion’: Buddhism’s anti-essentialist challenge to the category”

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Mark Siderits

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Illinois State University

Non-self and “Religion”: Buddhism’s anti-essentialist challenge to the category

Tuesday, October 18, 5:00pm, Swift 201

Buddhism has been viewed as something of an outlier in the category of major religions. Among reasons given for this judgment are its atheism, its denial of immortality, and its allegedly ‘scientific’ outlook; but these do not stand up to critical scrutiny. Perhaps more significant is the anti-essentialism to be found at the core of its solution to the problem of existential suffering. An investigation of the role of non-self in the Buddhist account of liberation from suffering suggests that what we find in the Buddhist  tradition is soteriology without teleology.

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.

Symposium on “Heidegger’s Confessions”

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9780226419077

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)

REGISTER HERE

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.

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

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 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.

2015-2016 Call For Papers

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 Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions

2015-2016 Call for Papers

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions welcomes proposals for papers, presentations, mock-job talks, and panel discussions for the 2015-2016 Academic Year.  Given the broadly interdisciplinary nature of our endeavor, we welcome work from the Divinity School‘s doctoral programs in Philosophy of Religions or Theology or Ethics, the departments of Philosophy, Comparative Literature, Classics or History, area studies programs such as SALC, EALC or NELC, and so on. The essential criterion for inclusion is a willingness to treat the objects of inquiry with philosophical seriousness, and (what amounts to the same) an interest in mining those objects for lessons of general philosophical import.

Paper or presentation proposals should be submitted to Anil Mundra, Workshop Coordinator (amundra@uchicago.edu) and should be suitable for a 90 minute workshop session (leaving between 45-30 minutes for questions and discussion).  Papers may be distributed to attendees prior to the workshop meeting, but need not be, depending on the author’s preference.  We welcome paper and presentation submissions throughout the year, but please submit your proposal at least 2 months prior to your proposed presentation date.  While each year the Workshop seeks out papers pertaining to our chosen theme, we also welcome papers that do not explicitly address such concerns, particularly work relating to dissertations-in-progress, conference presentations, and mock job-talks.

This year’s theme: Comparison

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions will focus on the theme of comparison during the 2015-2016 academic year.  Throughout the year we will host thinkers who pursue questions including, but not limited to, those regarding epistemological, metaphysical, methodological, ideological, and ethical dimensions of comparison in context of the academy and more broadly.

Many philosophers of religion work comparatively in some way, juxtaposing disparate thinkers, texts, philosophical and religious traditions in hopes of generating a clearer, more critical, or more comprehensive philosophical understanding of religion and the ways that religion accords with and departs from philosophical rationality.  Meanwhile, comparative methods in religious studies have largely fallen out of favor. Critics often charge such an approach to the academic study of religion as distortive at best, violent at worst.  How feasible are such critiques? Without jettisoning the very useful lessons they teach us, is it possible to retrieve a methodology of comparison? Is comparison part and parcel of any rational reflection?  If so, what do these critiques of comparative studies tell us about rationality generally?  Is there a future for religious studies (generally) and philosophy of religion (specifically) which works outside the bounds of comparative frameworks, or is comparativity inescapable, such that we should focus on learning better ways to compare, rather than attempting a cessation of comparison?  We hope to address these and other philosophical questions related to the comparison during the coming year.

Tyler Roberts on Religion and Critique

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“Reverence as Critical Responsiveness: Between Philosophy and Religion”

Tyler Roberts, Grinnell College

Tuesday May 12, 4:30

Swift Hall, Common Room

Abstract:

A major task of a future philosophy of religion will be to contribute to a post-critical ethos of participation. By “post-critical,” I mean that such a contribution requires philosophers of religion to reimagine the critical relationship between philosophy and religion. By “participation,” I gesture with some hesitation and much qualification to philosophical and religious visions centered on conforming mind and body to God, cosmos, reason or some other fundamental reality through active intellection and receptive contemplation. Today, the idea that we can identify such a reality is properly suspect and so subject to various critical procedures that expose the historical and social construction that produces this “reality.” But even if we agree that it is  imperative to submit all claims for what is ultimately real and authoritative to historicist and other forms of criticism, the question of how we hold together incisive critical thinking and affirmative attachment to or participation in existence remains. Philosophers of religion, because they work at a site of crossing between the philosophical and critical, on the one hand, and the religious and participatory, on the other, have a crucial role to play in working through this question. One starting point is William Desmond’s idea of a “two- way intermediation or communication between religion and philosophy, not just a singular direction from religion to reason.” From here, my paper considers religious dispositions or virtues such as gratitude and reverence as critical disciplines of attention and thoughtful vigilance. I thus seek to counter the modern, but by now well-worn idea that where philosophy and other forms of modern thought are critical, religious thought, grounded in such dispositions, is not.

Anil Mundra (Divinity PhD Student in Philosophy of Religions) on Classical Indian Philosophy of Religions

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Anil Mundra (Divinity PhD Student in Philosophy of Religions)

“Argument, Agreement, and Authority in Classical Indian Philosophy of Religions”

Tuesday, Jan 20, 4:30 PM, Swift 201

Abstract:

“Situations of religious diversity seem to raise special epistemological demands. How does one establish epistemic authority in the face of fundamental disagreement? In India, where religious diversity has been a fact of life for all of recorded history, interreligious debate and disagreement was formative of a number of interesting philosophical solutions to such problems. The Jains, best known for their ethics of non-violence, took the problem of disagreement so seriously as to ask: How can one be free of contradiction in the face of religious rivals, even as those rivals contradict each other? I will examine how a Jain locus classicus attempts to solve this problem through a dialectically synthetic epistemology that stands out in the Indian panorama, and remains provocative as well as potentially appealing to contemporary sensibilities.”