THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
John U. Nef Lecture Series
4:30 – 6:00 p.m. CST
Foster 505
By Joshua Billings
Professor, Classics and Comparative Literature, Princeton University
Scholarship on atheism in classical Athens has reached an impasse, with irreconcilable views on its definition and extent. The talk shifts perspective by adopting a phenomenological approach, viewing atheism through the modern lens of a “moral panic,” and reassessing the surviving evidence. At stake, it is argued, is less the existence of the gods than what humans expect from divinity, and how these expectations are or are not fulfilled, particularly when it comes to justice. Understanding the importance of questions of theodicy to fifth-century thought allows for a new theological dialectic to emerge, in which atheism is one part of a much wider inquiry into divinity and traditional belief.
4:30 – 6:00 p.m. CST
Foster 505
By Tae-Yeoun Keum
Assistant Professor, Political Science, UC-Santa Barbara
What role do canonical figureheads play in the process by which philosophical ideas gain political substance? This talk explores an interpretive shift in the reception of Plato in eighteenth-century Europe, focusing on Voltaire’s Socrate (1759), a three-act play dramatizing the trial and death of Socrates. Voltaire’s play, on my reading, represents an effort to offer a new political extension of a recent epistemological realignment in interpretations of Plato’s philosophy. Plato’s eighteenth-century readers developed an understanding of his epistemology that negotiated a compromise between Neoplatonism and Academic Skepticism. Working out the political ramifications of this compromise, I believe, was central to Voltaire’s reimagination of Socrates’s trial.
Socrate calls attention to a neglected dimension in which the contingencies of historically situated, idiosyncratic interpretations can bear out in the dynamics of disciplinary canons: how authors’ philosophical receptions interact with their receptions in political thought. At the same time, the play also offers a case study of an intervention in the symbolic meanings of Plato, one in which the deep-rooted associations he accrued in two ancient traditions that claimed him as a figurehead were reshuffled in a distinctly modern, political key.
By Sonam Kachru
Assistant Professor, Religious Studies, Yale University
“It is,” a story in the ocean-vast Buddhist collection The Divine Stories tells us, “a law of nature that lord Buddhas make decisions in conversation with phantom counterparts of themselves that they have created.” The Buddha of our historical epoch, Siddhārtha Gautama is not exempt. And so, he goes on to converse with a being he has made, the spitting image of himself, down to the shaven head and the color of the robes. At times like these, it can feel as if Buddhist literature provides us with answers to questions that have not yet explicitly been formulated. And the questions of Buddhist philosophers, inspired by such events in Buddhist stories—questions such as “How do phantom beings think?” or “How are phantom beings unlike us?”—are all too easy to overlook. Unlike the Greek dramatist’s breathing phantom (εἴδωλον ἔμπνουν), Helen of Troy, phantom beings in Buddhist literature and thought do not exhale, but they do speak, think, and act—with world historical consequences, at times. (It being maintained by some, after all, that Siddhārtha Gautama was himself just such a phantom being.) In this talk, following Āryadeva’s suggestion that phantom beings and automata are alike in being good to think with, I offer a preliminary exploration of these artificial intelligences: to ask why Buddhas have to make artificial beings to help them think, and to explore what Buddhist philosophers might be thinking about when they think with and about such beings.
By Hans Joas
Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at the Humboldt University of Berlin
Monday, October 21, 2024
4:30 – 6:00 p.m. CST
Foster 505
Taking the well-being of all human beings into account when making moral and political decisions - for many people today, this is at least justified as an ideal. But such a "universalist" orientation is by no means innate or universal. It is therefore important to ask about its historical origins, its further development and the conditions for its stabilization - against nationalism and racism, for example. However, the history of the interactions between universalism and imperialism also shows what dangers are built into universalism as soon as it serves to justify empires. Can there be a universalism without imperialism? From which thinkers - from Augustine to Dante to Gandhi - can we learn something in this respect?
Master class session 1: Wednesday, October 23, 2024; 4:30 – 6:30 pm, Social Science Tea Room
This first session will be devoted to a clarification of the main purpose of Under the Spell of Freedom: Theory of Religion after Hegel and Nietzsche (OUP, 2024). It is the second volume of a trilogy. Vol. 1 (The Power of the Sacred) was the subject matter of last year’s class. It deals with the Weberian narrative of disenchantment and the assumption that it was the preparation for modern European secularization. Vol. 2 does the same with regard to the Hegelian narrative according to which the history of religion leads to a highest form, namely Christianity, the history of Christianity to a highest form, namely Protestantism, and Protestantism to the institutionalization of political freedom whereas all the other religions are a danger for freedom. For preparation I recommend reading the introduction (pp.1-18) which argues that we have to go beyond Hegel in four respects: his understanding of religion, of history, of freedom and his eurocentrism. These four points also constitute the basic structure of the book. The long "introductory remarks“ in each of the four parts allow the reader to follow my argument in more detail. Each of the parts then contains portraits of crucial 20th century thinkers, whose understanding of religion is neither Hegelian (or Marxist) nor Nietzschean.
Master class session 2: Monday, October 28, 2024; 4:30 – 6:30 pm, Foster 505
The focus of this session will be the fourth part of the book and the conclusion. In preparation, pp. 241-255 and pp. 344-361 should be read. This means that crucial sociological approaches to an adequate understanding of the history of religion from H. Richard Niebuhr to David Martin, Robert Bellah and José Casanova are being dealt with. The main thesis of the conclusion is that we need a global history of moral universalism as a counternarrative to the Weberian and Hegelian narratives. Vol. 3 (Universalism: World Domination and Ethos of Humanity) is finished in German and coming out in the spring of 2025; it offers this counternarrative in twelve analytical chapters. The guiding thread is the interplay between moral universalism and the history of empires from the Axial Age to the present. It will be the topic of the master class next year.
Professor Joas is the Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion in the Faculty of Theology at the Humboldt University of Berlin and, for over twenty years, has also been Visiting Professor of Sociology and in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.