About the seminar
The idea of life is at the heart of philosophical speculation and religious imagination. In this seminar we gather scholars from different fields in order to discuss the problem of life, be it as the religious idea of the soul, a biological phenomenon, or even as the basis for the modern economy, from the perspective of religion and philosophy.
This seminar is open to Campion Hall members.
Seminar Programme
09.30 Introduction
09.40 - 10.20 Gavin Flood: “Bare Life and the Resurrection of the Body”.
This talk, partly based on the last chapter of Gavin Flood’s book “Religion and the Philosophy of Life”, will discuss the relation between life, philosophy, and religion and examine how human evolution is a necessary condition for the development of higher order institutions and a moral ontology. Life itself seeks articulation and preservation through civilizational structures. This implies a vitalmaterialism which imbues life with positive value and interfaces with environmentalism. But there is another kind of vitalism in which the political colonizes life in a way that brings into question the value of life itself and brings life into proximity with nihilism. We might call this a dark vitalism, which we see emerging in the European body politic in the twentieth century.
10.20-11.00 Audrey Borowski: “Life and Purpose in Leibniz, Hegel and Schrödinger.”
This talk will explore Leibniz, Hegel and Schrödinger's philosophies of biology and how they prefigured the current state of the art in important ways from the role of organisms and organization, teleology and the relation between life and cognition.
11.00-11.20 Coffee and Break
11.20-12.00 Mårten Björk: “Hierarchy and Irreducibility – Andreas Wagner and Michael Polanyi on the Hard Problem of Life”
The celebrated Austrian American evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner has recently argued, “that life’s creativity draws from a source that is older than life, and perhaps older than time.” The evolution of life, he insists, is underpinned by “a library of Platonic forms.” This paper will explore some philosophical and theological implications of this form of biological Platonism by interpreting it from the vantage point of Michael Polanyi’s theory of the irreducibility of life. Life, for both Wagner and Polanyi, necessitates an ontology of hierarchies that pushes against the one-dimensional understanding of life as
mere biological matter. The paper argues that there might not only be a hard problem of consciousness, but also a hard problem of life, that indicates the need for a metaphysical and even theological understanding of biological existence.
12.00–12.40 Ruth Gornandt: “Implanted in Us by Nature – The Doctrine of the Natural Knowledge of God and the Cognitive Science of Religion.”
The Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) is the study of religion and religious ideas with methods and concepts from cognitive science. The talk will outline CSR’s models and research. This will lead to the question of the relation between CSR’s religion and Christian doctrine and theology. My suggestion will be to regard CSR’s reconstruction of religion as what we would call in theology ’natural religion’ or what the old Lutheran dogmatics discussed as the notitia Dei naturalis insita. This enables theology to develop a differentiated relation between them (affirmation, modification, rejection) and thus integrate CSR’s research.
12.40–13.30 Lunch
13.30-14.10 Agata Bielik-Robson: “Messianic Vitalism or Another Finitude – Torat Hayim from the Rabbis to Derrida.” (Zoom)
My stake in this talk will be to outline a new thinking about finite life, which opposes the dominant tendency to perceive finitude under the auspices of death: the end, the final destiny, the ultimate verdict, and the only reality of the ‘lower beings.’ I will try to think finitudepositively, that is, in the manner faithful to what the Jewish messianic tradition calls amaximalisation of existence, and, despite the finite condition, attempt to wrench ‘more life’ from life seemingly reduced only to its lethal destiny. It will be my aim to prove that the best alternative to the post-Heideggerian death-bound concept ofEndlichkeitlies precisely in what Jacques Derrida, a propos Benjamin, heralded as the ‘awakening of the Judaic tradition.’ The thinkers who emerge under the heading ofmessianic vitalistssuscribe to thetorat hayimor the ‘Jewish principle of life,’ deeply mistrustful toward the purely philosophical –death-bound– concept of the finite life.
14.10–14.50 Daniel M. Herskowitz: “Revelation as Justification and Eternal Bliss – Rosenzweig's account of Simul Justus et PeccatorinThe Star'”
In the section ‘Language of Eros’ in Book II of Part II of THE STAR OF REDEMPTION, Franz Rosenzweig offers a beautiful account of revelation between God and the soul as love and dialogue. For some reason, Rosenzweig includes a stage in revelation in which the soul acknowledges and confesses for both its past and still present sinfulness – ‘I have sinned’ and ‘I am sinner’ - and talks of the soul's 'Selikgeit' once the sin is absolved. In this paper I suggest that Rosenzweig’s account of revelation should be read in light of developments in nineteenth century and twentieth century German Protestant theology.
14.50-15.30 Dritëro Demjaha: “The Meta-Life of Capital.”
This paper explores Hegel’s extra-biological concept of life in the Wissenschaft der Logik and its relationship to Marx’s theorisation of the ‘organic development’ of capital as a ‘living organism’ in the Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie.As Mark E. Meany has shown, the Grundrisse systematically draws on Hegel’s exposition of the logical ‘concept’ as ‘life’, through its objectification in the moments of the ‘living individual organism’, the ‘life-process’ and the ‘genus-process’. This paper aims to elucidate twentieth century Marxian theorisations of capital as a ‘biological’ form of domination over the human species in relation to Hegel’s understanding of life and his understanding of the distinction between the ‘human’ and ‘animal’ genus processes.
Speakers:
Agata Bielik-Robson, Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham and at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw
Mårten Björk, Junior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, Oxford University and Research Fellow at Lund University.
Audrey Borowski, Doctor in the History of Ideas at Queen’s College, Oxford University.
Dritëro Demjaha, Doctor in Theology and researcher.
Gavin Flood, Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion in the Theology and Religion Faculty and academic director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.
Ruth Gornandt, Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford.
Daniel M. Herskowitz, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford.
