Past Events

October 26, 2018 at 1-4 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A 

Through a discussion of “Amor Mundi,” the final chapter of Harrison’s 2014 work Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age, this seminar will consider the mission of education in the humanities today—focusing on the relation of such education to Harrison’s central claim that “it takes a great deal of love—what Hannah Arendt, borrowing a phrase from Saint Augustine, called amor mundi—to take the well-being of the world to heart and commit oneself to assuring it continuity through the generations. It is that love, and that love alone, that takes custody of the world’s future.

Robert Pogue Harrison is Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (1992); The Dominion of the Dead (2005); Gardens: an Essay on the Human Condition (2008); and Juvenesecence: a Cultural History of Our Age (2014).

November 30, 2018 at 1 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A 

While Kierkegaard conceives of anxiety as the psychological presupposition of the dogma of original sin, and while Heidegger himself draws heavily on Kierkegaard in that he places anxiety at the center of his magnum opus Being and Time (1927), Heidegger nonetheless purposefully disregards the concept of sin (along with his indebtedness to Kierkegaard) throughout this work, restricting instead his analysis to guilt, that is, to the experience of sinfulness. This accords with the widely received line of interpretation according to which Heidegger appropriates Kierkegaard’s teachings by way of secularization. It has been largely overlooked, however, that Heidegger further secularizes his own concept of anxiety when in a crucial moment in the development of his thought, namely in his lecture course from the winter semester of 1929/30, entitled, “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,” he chooses to philosophize about boredom instead of anxiety, now disregarding no only sin but also guilt and fear, and thereby demonstrating, albeit without making this insight explicit, the guiltless and fearless nature of boredom, while at the same time revealing important aspects of boredom’s formal resemblance to anxiety.

Avraham Rot is a junior fellow at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies in Hamburg. He has a PhD in intellectual history from Johns Hopkins University, and has been a junior visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University and at the Freie Universität Berlin. He currently teaches philosophy and intellectual history at Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University.

November 29, 2018 at 4 p.m.

Robertson Gymnasium 1000A 

Recent decades have witnessed an upsurge of interest in emotional phenomena. But while the emotions themselves have been extensively studied, the very fact that there has been such a tremendous increase of interest in them remains underexplored and the explanations that have nonetheless been given to account for it are, as a rule, partial, circumstantial, circular or other unsatisfactory. Here I propose an alternative explanation to this second-order phenomenon based on Spinoza’s metaphysics, in the framework of which finitude is regarded not as a monolithic term, as is customary, but as a matter of degree, and the emotions are conceived as secondary affections of God, i.e., particularly finite beings. The growing fascination with the emotions is accordingly explicable in terms of a growing fascination with the finite, a process that accounts for the historical emergence of the sciences as it leads from theology, through physics and chemistry, as well as the life, human, and social sciences, to, most recently, the science of emotion, the science of the infinitely small.

Avraham Rot is a junior fellow at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies in Hamburg. He has a PhD in intellectual history from Johns Hopkins University, and has been a junior visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University and at the Freie Universität Berlin. He currently teaches philosophy and intellectual history at Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University.