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.

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)

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?

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)

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.

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)

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.

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)

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.

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)

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.

View course syllabus
Download course syllabus (PDF)

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.