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Call for Applications
Theme: Religion
Subtitle: Key to Understanding Violence and Promoting Peace in Global
Times
Type: Fall Seminar
Institution: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy (RVP)
Location: Washington, DC (USA)
Date: 18.8.–19.9.2014
Deadline: 1.3.2014
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It is both the glory and the conundrum of persons that they can
achieve their proper fullness only by transcending or going beyond
their humanity. They are destined to a life they can neither fully
comprehend or precisely control. The result is a need for philosophy,
notably metaphysics, in order to help guide one's steps.
On the one hand, it is necessary to avoid the idolatry of an egoism
that absolutizes oneself and instrumentalizes the other to the
destruction of both. On the other hand, one is drawn ever forward and
upward to realize the human potential of a spirit incarnate in
matter, yet which knows no bounds.
The key to both is the transcendence unique to humans which both
constitutes and challenges their glory. Poorly conceived this can
base attacks on others and religious wars. Yet correctly applied it
constitutes the call for self-sacrifice for others and the appeal of
peace.
Two currents are especially relevant here. One relates to the Nazi
experience and the holocaust. After World War II this generated a
focused attack, especially among French philosophers, against any
sense of 'absolute' and hence of 'transcendence'. This reduced all to
the relative, the reductively human and the secular. This is an
essential ingredient of the post moderns and of contemporary
philosophy.
The other current is the spectacle of the contemporary turmoil across
the various regions of the globe. This tends to reinforce the first
current leading to the sense that any sense of transcendence is
destructive of life in these times. Here one is led to the central
issue of culture and its phases: a sense of transcendence was needed
in an earliest rural phase of life; it was supplanted by the rule of
law immanent to human society in its modern urban configuration. What
then of the present situation where the media so individualizes the
context of meaning that it supplants the social forces of religious
institutions on the religious/transcendent level, as well as of
social structures such as labor unions and political parties on the
properly human level.
An implication of this for the seminar theme is that the Middle East
chaos where a vivid sense of transcendence meets the influences of
modern times is not essentially different from the problems
experienced in the West, e.g.,
(1) the seekers who are leaving old institutions in search of new
ways of living more meaningful and fulfilling lives;
(2) the institutional sources such as universities, academies and
religious communities generally called upon to guide and inspire
this effort;
(3) the ethics for responding to the challenges of life; and
(4) the inter-relation of the plural form of spirituality which have
become newly possible across the world in these global times.
Each of these issues can be treated in their specifics by the
separate sciences appropriate to their particular order. Yet the way
they all share parallel disfunction at relatively the same time
suggests the need for developing new philosophical insight in order
to protect and promote the underlying reality of transcendence and of
the absolute without which none of these particular issues and fields
can be adequately understood and lived.
This is the basic insight of Piaget in psychology, of Heidegger in
metaphysics and of Gadamer in hermeneutics, namely, that the earliest
insights are the most basic and most rich and that they are not
substituted by later insights but remain as the essential substrata
of all that follows. Thereby they serve as the continual corrective
of the human tendencies to simplify and universalize which leads to
the extremism of ideologies.
Hence, the issue of transcendence for global times and as related to
the varying phenomena and degrees of violence. There include the
killing in the tribal and post tribal societies of the Middle East,
the marginalization and prejudice with regard to the underclass in
modern urban societies, and the extremism and resulting paralysis and
disorganization of the public institutions of today's media society.
Whether religion is essentially the cause of peace and/or of violence
is the main burden of this seminar. Through human history religion
has been the essential key to the salvation of humanity, yet if
poorly done or not attended to in a secular age leads to human
stagnation and indeed to violence.
Application for Participation
Applications for participation in this seminar should be sent by
email by March 1, 2014, to cua-...@cua.edu. Participants cover their
own travel costs; the RVP provides simple room and board during the
seminar. The seminar will be held at the RVP Seminar Room: Gibbons
Hall B-12, 620 Michigan Avenue, North East, Washington, D.C., 20064.
Please enclose:
(1) a vita describing one's education, professional positions and
activities;
(2) a list of the applicants' publications;
(3) a letter stating your interest and involvement in this theme and
its relation to your past and future work in philosophy and
related studies; and
(4) an abstract of a study(s) you might present as an integral part
of the seminar.
Website of the Seminar:
http://www.crvp.org/seminar/seminar_14-fall.htm
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http://interphil.polylog.org
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