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.