Tag Archives: philosophy of religion

Niki Clements (Rice University): Foucault’s Christianities

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Niki Clements

Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Assistant Professor of Religion, Rice University

Foucault’s Christianities

Wednesday, February 28, 4:30pm, Swift 208

Niki Clements works at the disciplinary intersection between the history of Christian practice, philosophy of religion, and religious ethics. She specializes in Christian asceticism and mysticism in late antiquity, highlighting its resources for thinking through contemporary ethical formation and conceptions of the self. She is currently completing the first comprehensive treatment of the ethical thought of John Cassian (c.360-c.435), a late antique Catholic architect of Latin monasticism doctrinally marginalized for his optimistic views on human agency. Engaging Michel Foucault’s late work on ethics-which sees Cassian as a crucial inaugurator of modern disciplinary subjectivity-she critiques the conceptual limitations that Foucault’s philosophical categories impose on his reading of Cassian, late antique Christianity, and the study of religion. She also pursues a transdisciplinary approach with cognitive neuroscience to argue that ethical formation integrates consciousness, embodiment, and affectivity. She is the volume editor for Mental Religion: The Brain, Cognition, and Culture, as part of the forthcoming Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks.

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.

Scott Ferguson: “Descartes, Boyle, and (Early) Kant on Physico-Theology and the Existence of God”

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Scott Ferguson

PhD Candidate, Philosophy of Religions

Descartes, Boyle, and (Early) Kant on Physico-Theology and the Existence of God

Wednesday, October 4, 4:30pm, Swift 208

Physico-theology – the attempt to infer God’s existence and concept from nature – has an equivocal position in both Kant and Descartes. Kant consistently praises the beauty of the physico-theological (nee “cosmological”) proof for God’s existence, except that he never grants it any independent validity. Descartes explicitly rejects final causality, seemingly ruling out any theistic proof from nature’s purposiveness, except that Robert Boyle can fairly convincingly show room for just such a proof within Descartes’ thinking. Beyond just laying out the texts, I want to suggest that the reason for these obscurities may be that the basic concepts of physico-theology have just never been clarified – that this sense of “nature,” as an ontological field(a way for entities to be), has never been adequately characterized, nor explored in terms of its link (which I will try to show) to sensation and the union of mind and body.

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.

Matthew Peterson: “Historicity and Absence: On the Return of Excess in the Study of Religion”

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Matthew Peterson

PhD Student, Philosophy of Religions

Historicity and Absence: On the Return of Excess in the Study of Religion

Wednesday, April 26, 4:30pm, Swift 403

The concept of experiential excess, once a defining feature of the study of religion, has seen a revitalization in recent years. This retrieval has been championed by Robert Orsi, a scholar of lived religion who, situating himself within what he calls “the tradition of the more,” wants to turn away from what is socially, linguistically, and historically given in experience to instead leave room for the unpredictability of the intersubjective realm, which he ascribes to the “really real” presence of the gods or the holy. Against this view that the intersubjective and social-historical realms can be so easily distinguished, I draw on the continental philosophical tradition, especially Michel de Certeau, to argue for a sense of the excessive or holy as absent, understood as products of historicity. I then explore whether such a perspectival shift is enough to allow scholars to interrogate excessive experiences alongside or even in light of their theological, atheological, or agnostic commitments, without allowing those commitments to set the terms of the conversation.

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.

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.

Bettina Bergo (University of Montreal): “And God Created Woman”

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Bettina Bergo

Professor of Philosophy, University of Montreal

And God Created Woman

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

Emmanuel Levinas wrote his « And God Created Woman » (Tractate Berakhot, 61a) between 1972 and 1973 in the shadow of “mai soixante-huit”. It follows, even stands in the shadow of his “Judaism and Revolution” (a reading of Baba Metsia 83), which appeared in 1969. The two Talmudic readings arguably share a guiding thread, although their discussions are quite different: in 1969 it is social and metaphysical alienation; in 1972, it concerns an enigmatic domain of justice situated between the universal and the particular. Thus Levinas’ clin d’oeil to Godard’s film with Bardot focuses on “a difference that does not compromise equity,” before it so much as touches on sexual difference. Perhaps predictably, we find running through the debate about God’s ‘second’ creature (viz., is the rib from which Eve is created a face, or rather a tail?), the question of alterity itself. But is this not one of those abstractions—flowing out of phenomenological formalism—that belies its lived origin in our experiences of or with actual people? Alterity and its “modalizations” would be the question that opens to that of justice in this reading, as in Levinas’ Otherwise than Being. To understand this approach I compare his Talmudic reading with Daniel Sibony’s discussion of the discovery, après coup, of Eve, Isha, by Adam, Ish.

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.