In much of the best recent thought, philosophers working in philosophy of religion have been seeking to understand the role of the emotions in the religious life. Leaving aside for the moment some of the more ‘traditional’ arguments for the existence of God, they have been trying to explore the ways in which religious belief rests, not simply on intellectual assent to claims about God, but also on whole networks of affective responses – responses to other human beings, to the natural world, to places of worship and the like. The nature of language is important here – the language of poetry, for example – as is thought about the sacred and the profane, and our corporeal, embodied existence which is so deeply revelatory of emotional life. This conference explores these and related concepts in contemporary philosophy of religion in both the analytic and continental traditions.
Programme
10.30 Coffee and welcome
- Session 1
11.00-11.30: Zohar Atkins (Oxford): ‘Love as Opening: Parallels between Being and Time and the later Heidegger.’
Respondent: Eric Lee (Nottingham)
- Session 2
11.30-12.00: Michael DiFuccia (Nottingham) ‘Owen Barfield and Martin Heidegger: Language and Poetry’.
Respondent: Tara Isabella Burton (Oxford)
- Session 3
12.00-12.30: Jacob Phillips (King's College London): 'The Non-Inferentiality of Emotion and Wilhelm Dilthey's This-Worldly Religious Erlebnis’.
Respondent: Simone Kotva (Cambridge)
- Session 4
12.30-1.00: Orion Edgar (Nottingham) ‘‘The Hungry Animal’: Bodies, Desire and Human Nature’.
Respondent: Joseph Vnuk (Nottingham)
- Session 5
1.00-1.30: Joshua Hordern (Cambridge): ‘Christian affections in public moral reasoning’.
Respondent: Trey Medley (King's).
1.30-2.30 Lunch
- Session 6
2.30-3.00: Raphael Cadenhead (Cambridge): ‘Reason, Passion and Asceticism: Philosophical Reflections on Gregory of Nyssa's De anima and Vita Macrinae.’
Respondent: Chris Wojtulewicz (King's).
- Session 7
3.00-3.30: Daniel Plant (KCL) : ‘Kierkegaardian Faith as the Paradox of Imaginative Order’.
Respondent: Victoria Davies (Oxford)
- Session 8
3.30-4.30: Katherine Kirkpatrick (Oxford): ‘Is Shame an Emotion? Reading Sartre through Sartre’.
Respondent: Samuel Kimbriel (Cambridge)
4.30-5.30: Academics’ panel plus discussion and questions
5.30 Thanks and close
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Attendees are free to drop in for part of the day, and attend as many papers as they wish.