A seminar series at Durham

Secularism and Secularisms

Andrew Brower Latz

Mondays 3^rd, 10^th and 17^th  June, 4-5pm, Seminar Room, Dun Cow Cottage.

Contact: andrew.brower-latz@durham.ac.uk

 This course is primarily for first year Durham undergrads but is open to others if there is room.

This course is a seminar on Jean-Claude Monod’s short book, Secularisation et laïcité. Students will be given selections of my draft translation and be expected to read about 15 pages before each session (roughly the length of a journal article). The topics to be covered will depend slightly on students’ interests but will be selected from theories and theorists of modernity and secularisation (Hegel, Weber, Schmitt, Blumenberg); the diverse forms of secularisation (including the distinctive French version, called laïcité), confessionalism and civil religion, in France, Germany, the UK and the US; Islam; forms of neo-fundamentalism. Monod’s book is a very accessible introduction to the theories and history of modernity and secularisation, and its wide, comparative scope is particularly useful. These topics are important background for all contemporary politics, philosophy, sociology and theology.

Some good news

From the Scottish Presbyterians. 

Let’s get it straight: the German Idealists were realists

And to prove it, go to this awesome looking conference in an awesome city.

The Absolute and the World in Late German Idealism

Thomson House, McGill University, Montreal
26-27 August, 2013

http://theabsoluteandtheworld.wordpress.com

Keynote addresses:
*“The Late Schelling’s Critique of Hegel and Why it Still Matters,” Sean McGrath, Memorial University,
author of The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious (Routledge, 2011)

*“The Non-Existence of the Absolute,” Cem Kömürcü, author (in German) of Yearning and Darkness:
Schellings Theory of the Linguistic Subject (Passagen Verlag, 2010)

We open our discussion with a provocation: To what extent, if at all, are we even permitted to call
German Idealism an idealism? In contemporary parlance, “idealism” is often associated with the
insurmountable necessity of investigating the very possibility of thinking’s access conditions to
being, a task that not only leads to their irremovable correlation but also in the process renders
meaning dependent upon language or a subject’s constituting or inferential powers, in stark contrast
to traditional metaphysics. However, throughout what has come to be known, perhaps somewhat
unfortunately, as German Idealism we encounter a series of meditations on the relationship between
being and thinking that does not merely problematize such a one-sided conception—but, more
profoundly, requires us to reconsider whether we are justified in any useful manner to denote this
tradition as idealistic rather than realistic.

Responding to Kant’s Copernican revolution, both Schelling and Hegel, in theirown way, attempt to
overcome the transcendental turn from within. Never rejecting the primacy and role of thinking, they
nevertheless refuse to claim that we only have knowledge of phenomenal appearances or that being
is dependent upon a subject. Not only must thinking be able to grasp the real in itself, but thinking
must simultaneously be able to give an account of its own pre-history out of nature, thereby
reconciling itself to the latter, and even mythology. But neither are they solitary thinkers that emerge
ex nihilo in the philosophical throes of the Kantian legacy: their own projects are anticipated,
foreshadowed, and even in hindsight challenged by Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schlegel, whose
theoretical contributions sadly have a tendency to be neglected. Our wager is that these thinkers’
meditations upon the relationship between being and thinking, and their place in an overarching
metaphysical system that articulates itself through both moments, represent some of the most
original, and daring, attempts to come to terms with the nature of human knowledge, our place in
the world, and the status of the absolute, in Western thinking, with wide-reaching implications that
have yet to be truly exhausted.

Taking these interrelated concerns as its point of departure, this workshop asks for original and
provocative contributions focusing on this topic and other related themes as they occur and are
developed in late German Idealism. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
* Höderlin’s fragment Urtheil und Seyn
* Novalis’ “syncritic” synthesis of idealism and realism
* Schlegel’s invention of absolute idealism
* Schelling’s early Naturphilosophie
* God, mythology or revelation in Schelling’s late philosophy
* Hegel’s dialectic of the emergence of ideality
* Hegel’s naturalization and de-naturalization of spirit
* The ontology of language in Schelling and Hegel
* Spinozist and anti-Spinozist themes in late German Idealism

Abstracts of 500 to 750 words (or full papers) should be sent to Joseph Carew
(jstephencarew[at]gmail.com) and Wesley Furlotte (wesleejoseph[at]gmail.com) by June 15 May,
2013. Decisions will be made in the days that follow. Accepted submissions will be taken into
consideration for a possible edited volume to be published by a major academic press.

Another unnecessary asylum death

G4S give people four weeks training and it seems not to work. The government’s most authoritarian policy? I won’t say arbitrary because there’s good evidence that the government deliberately harasses refugees, so why not create the sort of pressure that leads to these sort of deaths whilst keeping their distance by contracting to private firms? Shameful beyond words.

On the state of current philosophy

John McCumber’s new book warns against the narrow way of going on of many philosophers. He thinks philosophers face a crisis in their discipline but don’t even realise it. They concern themselves with technical problems, talking mainly to other like-minded specialists, without raising their heads to the wider problems of the day. They have forsaken the links between what Socrates called the soul, the city and the sacred. Meanwhile, Richard White argues, in his new book, that philosophers have forgotten that for most of its history their discipline was a spiritual practice – in Greece, India, medieval Christian Europe. McCumber and White have analytic philosophy in their sights, but Nicholas Joll reminds us that continental philosophy has largely forsaken what he calls ‘default clarity’. ‘Default clarity as I construe it has four parts: (a) explication of terms; (b )rigor; (c) precision; (d) accessibility.’ Much continental philosophy, Joll argues, makes itself needlessly obscure and inaccessible, creating not just ‘gratuitous difficulty’ but the ‘dangers of confusion, obscurantism, and discipleship’, thus standing in the way of its alleged aims of emancipation. 

If all this seems harsh – though I suspect there is truth in these diagnoses – the situation is not monolithic. Thom Brooks argues in an article just out that political philosophy at least has many different forms of connection to real life. Martha Nussbaum [pdf] pointed out the trickle down effect of moral philosophy several years ago. Just recently, I attended a workshop at Liverpool as part of a project examining the relationship (what it is, what it could and should be) between philosophy of religion and lived or material religion. A sociologist there called for more interdisciplinary teamwork between law, sociology and philosophy in relation to law and policy. I think this sort of development is exciting and I hope interdisciplinary work will become more embedded in university funding and institutional life, but it may well require change in the way we pursue our disciplines. 

A talk I’ll be giving

On June 1st I’ll be giving a short (20 min) paper at the 10th anniversary Ustinov Seminar at Durham’s Ustinov College. It’s called ‘The consolation of contraries: Gillian Rose and the broken middle’. The event starts at 10.30 and runs till lunch (which is provided!). Let me know if you’re going! Here’s the abstract:

Gillian Rose (1947-1995) was a social philosopher in the critical theory tradition who developed a Hegelian philosophical-sociological analysis of modern society expressed in her doctrine of the ‘broken middle’. The broken middle regards contemporary life as riven by fundamental fissures: between law and ethics; rights language and actual practices of state power; formal, legal equality and the inequalities of class, race and gender. Rose tried to show this situation evaded in two different ways by despairing apolitical philosophy (postmodernism) or romanticising and idealising solutions (political theology). Instead of the melancholy of ‘despairing rationalism without reason’, or the utopianism of ‘middles mended as holiness’, she proposed ‘mourning becomes the law’. The irreparable splits in society are not irremediable; but in order best to respond to them we cannot hide from them or imagine we can think ourselves out of them. Instead we must risk action in the universal interest, mourn and learn from our mistakes, and then act again. Rose counsels courage in facing the modern condition and draws resources to respond to our mixture of freedom and unfreedom from a diverse range of sources: Judaism, Christianity, sociology, philosophy and jurisprudence.

A new field

Today I invented the field of super-altern studies. This new discipline investigates the occlusion of alterity in the super-hero genre. For instance, it analyses constructions of gender (questioning the pervasive use of lycra), material practices of world domination (questioning the typology of ‘evil’ scientist), psychoanalyses alliterative character appellations (Peter Parker, etc.).

In real life, Peter Thompson has lots of articles about critical theory in the Guardian.