THE GIFFORD LECTURES – WINTER 2023
4 & 5 DECEMBER 2023
REVELATION AND CONTEMPLATION: JEAN-LUC MARION AND KEVIN HART IN CONVERSATION
Professors Marion and Hart will present the published versions of their Gifford lectures and engage in a dialogue on the notions of revelation and contemplation in phenomenology and literature.
This event is open to the UofG staff and students and to the general public. Entry is free but places are limited so early registration on Eventbrite is highly recommended:
4 December Yudowitz Lecture Theatre (Wolfson Building, University of Glasgow, University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ), 5:30pm-7:30pm:
PRESENTATION OF JEAN-LUC MARION’S Revelation Comes from Elsewhere (Stanford University Press, 2024) AND DISCUSSION WITH KEVIN HART
Although today considered the central theme of theology, the concept of Revelation was almost entirely unknown to the first millennium of Christian thought. In Revelation Comes from Elsewhere, a penetrating historical deconstruction Marion traces the development of this term to the rise of metaphysics from Aquinas through Descartes, Suárez, and Kant. Formalized into an epistemological framework, this understanding of Revelation has restricted philosophical and theological thinking ever since. To break free from these limits, Marion takes hints from theologians including Balthasar and Barth while mobilizing the phenomenology of givenness to provide a rigorous new understanding of revelation as a mode of uncovering. His extensive study of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures unfolds a logic of Trinitarian phenomenality, worked out in conversation with Augustine, Basil, Hegel, Schelling, and others, that ultimately transforms our very notions of being and time. The result is precisely what we have come to expect from this acclaimed philosopher: masterful historical scholarship working in tandem with daring originality. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35771
Jean-Luc Marion is an elected Fellow of the Académie française and of the Accademia dei Lincei (Rome), an Honorary Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Professor of Catholic Studies and Professor of the Philosophy of Religions and Theology at the University of Chicago and a Professor of Theology at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. Jean-Luc Marion works at the intersection of contemporary phenomenology, the history of philosophy, and Christian theology. Many of his books are into 2nd, 3rd, and even 10th editions, and have been translated into several languages. In Reduction and Givenness, Being Given, In Excess, Givenness and Hermeneutics, and most recently Reprise du donné among other works, he has presented and developed a phenomenology of givenness. Elsewhere he has applied those results to a variety of special subjects such as painting (Courbet ou la peinture à l’oeil), love (Prolegomena to Charity and The Erotic Phenomenon), and certitude (Negative Certainties). In more directly historical work Marion has published several studies reading philosophy through a phenomenological lens, particularly Descartes. His recent published works include: D'ailleurs la Révélation. Contribution à une histoire critique et à un concept phénoménal de révélation, 2020, tr. by S. Lewis & S. Rumpza, in press, Stanford U.P., 2024; Givenness and Revelation (Gifford Lectures 2014, trad. Stephen E. Lewis, preface by R. Fotiade & D. Jasper), 2016, 2018; Negative Certainties, tr. S. Lewis, 2023; Believing in order to See. On the Rationality of Revelation and the Irrationality of some Believers, tr. C. Gschwandtner, Fordham U.P., New-York, 2017.
5 December, Room 237c, Advanced Research Centre (11 Chapel Lane University of Glasgow, G11 6EW), 5:30-7:30pm:
PRESENTATION OF KEVIN HART’S Lands of Likeness (Chicago University Press, 2024) AND DISCUSSION WITH JEAN-LUC MARION
In Lands of Likeness, Kevin Hart develops a new hermeneutics of contemplation through a meditation on Christian thought and secular philosophy. Drawing on Kant, Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl, Hart first charts the emergence of contemplation in and beyond the Romantic era. Next, Hart shows this hermeneutic at work in poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Geoffrey Hill, and others. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo202441956.html
Kevin Hart is Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Theology at the University of Virginia where he also holds professorships in the Department of English and the Department of French. He is the author of numerous scholarly books, including Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry (Bloomsbury), The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago UP), Maurice Blanchot on Poetry and Narrative: Ethics of the Image (Bloomsbury), and L'image vulnérable: Sur l'imaage de Dieu chez S. Augustin (PUF). His volumes of poetry include Wild Track: New and Selected Poems (Notre Dame UP) and Barefoot (Notre Dame UP). Next year there will appear Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul (Columbia UP) and Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood (Paul Dry Books).
Recent lectures and events
Mark Williams, 'The Japanese Religious Melting Pot and the Significance of Christianity' and 'Voices in the Wilderness: Writing Christianity in 20th century Japan' (10-11 May 2023). Click here for recordings.
Jack Halberstam, 'Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse' (15 September 2022)
Manthia Diawara & Terri Geis, ‘Towards a New Sacred’ (5 May 2022)
T. J. Clark, ‘Bruegel in Paradise’ (6 March 2020)
Mark Pagel, 'Wired for culture: the origins of the human social mind, or why humans occupied the world and no other species did' (23-29 October 2019)
