Wittgenstein, Language, and the Philosophy of Religion

Wittgenstein's philosophy continues to generate enormous interest, and his name is frequently cited in connection with radical developments in theology and the philosophy of religion. Via an exploration of the different accounts of language and meaning he presents in both his early and later work, this course will focus on his thought as it relates to religious belief and commitment.

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Biblical Foundations

This course will explore the Bible as the ongoing story of and for God and creation, paying special attention to the way in which God's story is intertwined with that of humanity and the world. In asking whether and in what way the Bible is also our story, we will attempt to identify which hermeneutical methods might help us discern its significance for present day life, including the academic enterprise.

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Deconstruction and Politics

This course will explore the issue of the uneasy relationship between decontruction and politics. We will begin by reading Derrida, after which we will explore the work of his contemporaries and critics. Readings could include Derrida's Of Hospitiality, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Politics of Friendship, Specters of Marx, Ernesto Laclau's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Gilles Deleuze's What is Philosophy?, Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception, Lyotard's The Differend, and Butler, Laclau, and Žižek's Contingency, Hegemony, Universality.

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Metaphysics after Auschwitz: Adorno's Negative Dialectics

No serious philosopher since Kant has been able to avoid his critique of metaphysical specualtions about God, the soul, and the meaning of existence. The horrors of recent history give added urgency to such questions. Theodor W. Adorno has posed these issues in dramatic and decisive ways. This seminar studies his reflections in Negative Dialectics on the status of metaphysics "after Auschwitz."

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Religion, Life and Society: Reformational Philosophy

An exploration of central issues in philosophy, as addressed by Herman Dooyeweerd, Dirk Vollenhoven, and the "Amsterdam School" of neoCalvinian thought. The course tests the relevance of this tradition for recent developments in Western philosophy. Special attention is given to critiques of foundationalism, metaphysics, and modernity within reformational philosophy and in other schools of thought.

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The Aesthetics of Compassion

In the history of Western thought, the innately imaginative character of compassion has been called upon to rationalize both its exclusion from and inclusion in a just society. For Plato, compassion was a disorderly and obfuscating emotion that did not belong in his utopian republic. For Aristotle, on the other hand, it was an emotion that had, when properly elicited through tragic drama, a potentially educative value. This course examines the place and role of compassion in the development of the Western aesthetics tradition, in particular among those writers who expanded upon the Aristotelian notion of poetic eleos.

Truth and Authenticity: Heidegger’s Being and Time

Martin Heidegger's Being and Time proposes a holistic conception of truth that can reconnect epistemology with cultural practices and social institutions. Yet his conception seems to make personal or communal “authenticity” the key to attaining truth. This seminar develops a constructive critique of Heidegger's conception of truth by examining its internal logic and its hermeneutical role.

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Faith and Judgment: Hannah Arendt and Religious Critique

This seminar will examine the role intersubjectivity plays in Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgment, in order to explore ways in which her insights might help us understand religious communities as communities of judgment.   How do faith communities become sites from which to make critical judgments of society?   How, in turn, can members of such communities learn from and respond to criticisms that come from outside their faith community?

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The Nature (and Grace) of Modern Theology

This course will explore the work of seminal Protestant theologians associated with the birth and early (re-)shaping of “modern” theology. The famous debate between Barth and Brunner on the nature-grace relationship, which we shall situate within our reading of Schleiermacher and Bultmann, will stimulate our own contemporary (post-secular?) reflections on the “covenantal” nature of existence.

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Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

This course will consist in a close reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. We will pay special attention to the basic theme of the logical and historical relationship between individual and social self-consciousness. We will also address Hegel's significance in relation to both his philosophical context and ours.

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Albert the Great, Meister Eckhart and Women's Spirituality

This seminar examines Meister Eckhart’s mystical discourse and its conceptual configuration as a ‘contradictory monism’ against the backdrop of the “Dionysian” tradition of Albert the Great (and Thomas Aquinas) and the current efflorenscence of women’s mysticism represented by Marguerite Porete.   In so doing it explores a properly historical understanding of a philosophical, theological or spiritual figure’s choice of discursive type.

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Course description (video)

IDS –Truth in Contemporary Thought

This seminar is designed to take up the philosophical conception of truth argued for in Zuidervaart's Artistic Truth and test its fruitfulness by using it to examine and analyse discussions of truth that arise in a variety of contemporary philosophical and theological contexts: Reformational Philosophy, Pragmatism, Educational Epistemology, Modern Theology, Postmodern Thought.

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Grace as an Aesthetic Concept

During the Renaissance, a notion of grace served as the central critical concept for understanding art, and the achievement of grace in art was taken to be the highest artistic ideal. The course will exam the concept of grace within its theological, philosophical, and art theoretical contexts in an effort to understand more completely how art was thought to function in the early modern period. It will also consider the place of grace in the development of the aesthetics tradition.