Continental Philosophy

Oxford Forum Public Conference — Ricoeur: On Memory, Politics and Forgiveness

20-21 March 2009, Faculty of Philosophy and Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford

Friday, 20 March, Faculty of Philosophy

14.00-15.15 Dialogue with Pamela Sue Anderson (Oxford)
On Confidence, Power and Affirmation

15.15-15.30 Break

15.30-16.45 Dialogue with Luc Bovens (LSE)
On Apologies and Forgiveness

16.45-17.15 Coffee/Tea

17.15-18.30 Dialogue with Morny Joy (Calgary)
On Solicitude and Gift

Saturday, 21 March, Regent’s Park College

11.30-12.45 Dialogue with David Klemm (Iowa-Glasgow)
On Reading Ricoeur (tbc)

13.00-14.15 Lunch (own arrangements)

14.15-15.30 Dialogue with William Schweiker (Chicago)
On Ricoeur and Theological Humanism (tbc)

15.30-16.00 Coffee/Tea

16.00-17.00 Round table
Chair: David Jasper (Glasgow)

The event is open to all and there are no registration fees. For further information and to book a place contact Roxana Baiasu, Roxana.Baiasu@philosophy.ox.acor Juliana Cardinale: 020 7955 7539, J.Cardinale@lse.ac.uk
Forum for European Philosophy European Institute, London School of Economics, WC2A 2AE www.philosophy-forum.org

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) ranks as one of the most original Jewish thinkers of the modern period. As a historian of philosophy, Rosenzweig played a brief but noteworthy role in the neo-Hegelian revival on the German intellectual scene of the 1910s. In the years immediately following the First World War, he sought to bring about the “total renewal of thinking” through a novel synthesis of philosophy and theology he named the “new thinking.” Rosenzweig’s account of revelation as a call from the Absolute other helped shape the course of early 20th-century Jewish and Christian theology. His reflections on human finitude and on the temporal contours of human experience made a lasting impact on 20th-century existentialism; and his account of dialogue presented the interpersonal relation between “I” and “You” as both constitutive of selfhood and as yielding redemptive communal consequences. Rosenzweig engaged in two major works of translation, most notably the German translation of the Bible in which he collaborated with Martin Buber. He founded a center for Jewish adult education in Frankfurt—the Lehrhaus—which attracted the most important young German-Jewish intellectuals of its time, and which is still held up today as a model for educational programs of its type.

Link

Phenomenology did not begin as a religious philosophy, but recently several prominent European phenomenologists have asked whether a coherent phenomenology of human experience must find its fulfillment in religion.

Christian phenomenologists such as Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, and Jean-Louis Chrétien have all pressed an incisive and provocative question to modern secular philosophy: do our lived human experiences of self, other and world finally make sense only when we see them as founded on God’s creative act? By answering this question affirmatively, these thinkers have asserted that a rigorous philosophical account of human experience must also involve a philosophy of God. Human experience, precisely in order to be true to itself, must include practices of religious gratitude and praise. As a corollary, philosophy must include theological analysis.

The Silverman Center’s 2009 Symposium on phenomenology and the theological turn will therefore investigate sympathetically and critically this radical turn to religion in phenomenology. We hope you will join us for what is sure to be a spirited conversation about a matter that is of far more than just theoretical interest.
Speakers

Jean-Luc Marion, University of Chicago and University of Paris-Sorbonne
“On the Foundation of the Distinction Between Theology and Philosophy”

Richard Kearney, Boston College
“Returning to God After God: Levinas, Derrida, Ricoeur”

Edith Wyschogrod, Rice University
“Confessional Memoirs: The Phenomenology of Telling It All”

Jay Lampert, University of Guelph
“Do the Arguments for Saturated Phenomena Prove That They Are Necessary or That They Are Possible? Time to Decide”

Link

SEP’s new entry on “Religion and Political Theory”

And Balibar’s Spinoza and Politics

Recent articles in Reset:

The Primacy of Perception in the era of communication

A “post-secular” society – What does that mean?, by Habermas

On the Public Spehere, Deliberation, Journalism and Dignity, an interview with Benhabib

A review of Dante and Derrida: Face to Face (S U N Y Series in Theology and Continental Thought)

A challenge all interpreters face is finding a language in which to mediate understanding between the author they are interpreting and a contemporary audience. Erich Auerbach accomplished this by recovering and expounding the idea and practice of figura, which became the basis for path-breaking interpretations of Dante. Similarly, many scholars have brought forward passages in Thomas Aquinas that Dante echoes or likely had in mind and used them to explain the poem’s theological and philosophical grounding. Another example is the careful reconstruction of the cosmology of the Commedia, used to organize the entire structure of the Pardiso as well as for smaller functions like marking the passage of time or to convey a variety of other meanings. The advantage of such scholarly recoveries is that these are languages Dante himself spoke fluently. The disadvantage is that they may be so remote that they actually widen the distance of the contemporary reader from Dante. The more we understand Dante, the more we realize his thought presupposes ideas we may no longer believe and cannot share. One can try to relegate such erudition to footnotes where the ordinary reader can ignore it, but it is disconcerting to think that the more precisely one understands Dante, the more he seems so much of his time, the less he has to say to us.

Link

A review of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age(link to the review)

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

And a Zizek interview, which is quite funny. Just an excerp:

If you could go back in time, where would you go?

To Germany in the early 19th century, to follow a university course by Hegel.

How do you relax?

Listening again and again to Wagner.

How often do you have sex?

It depends what one means by sex. If it’s the usual masturbation with a living partner, I try not to have it at all.

A correspondence between Hannah Arendt and the theologian Hans-Jürgen Benedict (in German)

Foucault Live

What Schopenhauer taught Beckett

We are pleased to release the June 2008 Issue of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy

The journal website: http://www.kritike.org
Current issue: http://www.kritike.org/Current_Issue.html
Call for papers: http://www.kritike.org/Call_for_Papers.html

KRITIKE VOLUME TWO NUMBER ONE (JUNE 2008)

1. Editorial: Marking the First Year of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy – The Editor

Articles:

2. Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality – Mark W. Westmoreland

3. Iris Murdoch’s The Bell: Tragedy, Love, and Religion – Kenneth Masong

4. ‘To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die?’ – Saitya Brata Das

5. A Comparative Study on the Theme of Human Existence in the Novels of Albert Camus and F. Sionil Jose – F. P. A. Demeterio

6. The War on Concepts: The Thought of Jan Patocka and the War on Terror – Katy Scrogin

7. Mass Mentality, Culture Industry, Fascism – Saladdin Said Ahmed

8. The Causal Relevance and Heterogeneity of Program Explanations in the Face of Explanatory Exclusion – Wilson Cooper

9. A Freewheeling Defense of Kant’s Resolution of the Third Antinomy – Todd D. Janke

10. The Structures of Perception: An Ecological Perspective – Michael James Braund

Book Reviews :

11. Powell, Jason, Jacques Derrida: A Biography – Marko Zlomislic

12. Evans, C. Stephen, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays – Robert C. Cheeks

13. Drake, David, Sartre and Bernasconi, Robert, How to Read Sartre – Marella Ada Mancenido

TOC

Literary Theory in an Age of Globalization — Ihab Hassan

The Dramatic Sources of Philosophy — Amelie Oksenberg Rorty

Art and Evolution: Spiegelman’s The Narrative Corpse — Brian Boyd

Did God Deprive Pharaoh of Free Will? — Don Levi

The Worst Case of Knowing the Other?: Stanley Cavell and Troilus and Cressida — David Hillman

Literature, Politics, and Character — Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar

Plot Taxonomies and Intentionality — Jon Adams

How Few Words Can the Shortest Story Have? — Amihud Gilead

“A little throat cutting in the meantime”: Seneca’s Violent Imagery — Amy Olberding

Of Literary Universals: Ninety-Five Theses — Patrick Colm Hogan

And more

This blog has a number of texts on religion (including philosophy of religion). Its motto: "freely you have received; freely give"

Joel Buxton pointed out that there are two Derrida lectures on Religion (Link)

Some  other interesting links, including the ones provided by Alex by Badiou, one on Hobbes, etc. (Link)

TOC

Critical theory and the traps of conspiracy thinking — Volker Heins

What’s wrong with hypergoods — Charles Blattberg

Marx and the gendered structure of capitalism — Claudia Leeb

Tragedy and politics — Neal Curtis

Rawls and Habermas on religion in the public sphere — Melissa Yates

Open Court, publisher of the philosophy and contemporary culture series, has a number of podcasts that could be of interest to some. Here is the link.

Avax forum has posts on Rorty and Vatimo’s The Future of Religion and Gadamer’s Reason in the Age of Science

Emergent Village Podcast

* Jack Caputo
* Richard Kearney
* 50 minutes

Here’s the mp3 file for download

(H/t: Michael O’Rourk)

Philosophy at the End of the World
The gospel according to Slavoj Zizek.
by Ashley Woodiwiss (via PTDR)

And so it has come to this. Philosophy is now in the hands of a Slovenian madman. Slavoj Zizek has been thought of as one part Groucho, one part Karl Marx, an idiot savant, a Shakespearean fool, or maybe Dylan's Jokerman.1 A self-declared "fighting atheist" who claims the Christian legacy is worth fighting for. A Leninist who seeks wisdom in Chesterton's Orthodoxy. A leftist accused of being authoritarian, anti-feminist, and anti-Semitic. A critic of the worst excesses of capitalism who himself so over-produces books and articles that critics despair of ever being able to pin him down before he's off on his next tangent. So full of apparent contradictions is Zizek that to some critics it appears that while it is true Zizek exists, nevertheless we may well have created him.2

When writing about Zizek, one must decide (finally) to plant the flag somewhere. For the purposes of this article, I limit the discussion to Zizek's political-religious thought.3 And in order to provide anything like a coherent account even of this more narrowed focus, I will do so by discussing Zizek's concept of "the act." Although Zizek gives his most sustained philosophic analysis of the act in two earlier works, The Indivisible Remainder (1996) and The Ticklish Subject (1999), in the five books under discussion here, Zizek's invoking of the act serves as one link between his three works on Christianity and his accounts of the two defining moments of our contemporary political world, 9/11 and the war in Iraq. While there are some signs that his red-hot status may be cooling a bit, there is still enough going on in his rants against the Bush Administration and his riffs on St. Paul to give readers pause before judging him to be a signifier of nothing. There is method to his madness, wisdom in his foolishness.

The rest

"Derrida offered extended audio comments regarding his unique, somewhat Kierkegaardian notion of prayer (as recounted in his 1991 work 'Circumfession') at the 2002 Toronto conference, 'Other Testaments'… Prayer, Derrida contends, is an 'absolutely secret' act though it also involves 'common ritual (and) coded gestures' … it is fundamentally 'childish' and God is regarded as both a 'harsh, just' father and a 'forgiving' mother… prayer must also embody a sceptical 'suspension of belief and certainty' as epitomized by Kierkegaard and, in another way, by Nietzsche; the realization that the object of prayer is indeterminable is another key notion in this unusual position…"

Part One:

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Part Two:

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Part Three:

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You can fine one of Ron Aronson's essay — "Thank Who Very Much?" — in The Philosopher's Magazine. From the introduction:

Living without God today means facing life and death as no generation before us has done. It entails giving meaning to our lives not only in the absence of a supreme being, but now without the forces and trends that gave hope to the past several generations of secularists. We who live after progress, after Marxism, and after the Holocaust have stopped believing that the world is being transformed by reason and democracy. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the modern faith that human life is heading in a positive direction has been undone, giving way to the earlier religious faith it replaced, or to no faith at all. Alone as never before, in a universe scientifically better understood than ever, we find little in its almost-infinite vastness to guide us towards what our lives mean and how we should live them. 

You can also read Aronson's review of recent scholarship on "disbelief" in the Oct/Nov issue of Bookforum. 

Finally, click here for the complete text of his book Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World (1980).  

The European Journal of Philosophy has made its April 2006 issue temporarily available for free. The lead essay of the issue is by Habermas, entitled "Religion in the Public Sphere". Though the subject is rightly treated from a conceptual and philosophical perspective, the essay clearly engages contemporary issues as well. Just a passage:  

Two days after the last Presidential elections, an essay appeared, written by a historian, and entitled ‘The Day the Enlightenment Went Out’. He asked the alarmist question: ‘Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation? America, the first real democracy in history, was a product of the Enlightenment values . . . Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what then was modernity . . . Respect for evidence seems not to pertain any more, when a poll taken just before the election showed that 75% of Mr. Bush’s supporters believe Iraq either worked closely with Al Qaeda or was directly involved in the attacks of 9/11’. 

 

Irrespective of how one evaluates the facts, the election analyses confirm that the cultural division of the West runs right through the American nation itself: conflicting value orientations—God, gays and guns—have manifestly covered over more tangibly contrasting interests. Be that as it may, President Bush has a coalition of primarily religiously motivated voters to thank for his victory. This shift in power indicates a mental shift in civil society that also forms the background to the academic debates on the political role of religion in the state and the public sphere.

(I am not sure how long the issue will remain available to the general public.)