SYNOPSIS

Friday, April 6, 2018 7:15 pm -10:00 pm

Mark Cauchi Associate Professor, Department of Humanities York University, Toronto.

The Skepticism of Faith: Kierkegaard and Cavell in the Present Age.

Abstract

In my talk, I shall be undertaking a cross-reading of Soren Kierkegaard and the contemporary American philosopher, Stanley Cavell. In particular, my talk shall focus on the concepts of faith and modernity and on what the existence of the former in the latter can look like and mean, but it willthereby also be about the relationship of the secular and the religious more generally. Both Kierkegaard and Cavell see modernity as preoccupied with questions of knowledge. For Kierkegaard, this preoccupation threatens faith and ourtrue humanity, whereas for Cavell this preoccupation compensates for a more fundamental and ineradicable lack of certainty we have about ourselves, others, and the world (a condition Cavell calls "skepticism"). Kierkegaard expends much effort to help us see that knowledge does not produce faith and to articulating philosophical the nature of the latter; Cavell expends much effort showing that the standing threat of skepticism demonstrates that we do not have certain knowledge about ourselves, others and the world, but instead have relations of acknowledgement. In my essay, I thus intend to explore the relationship between Kierkegaard's understanding of faith in Christ and Cavell's idea of acknowledgement as a response to skepticism. Might faith be a response to skepticism? Might it be a form of acknowledgement? If skepticism is a modern condition, as Cavell alleges, would faith, at least as Kierkegaard conceives it, be modern? How, then, would we think about the modernity that Kierkegaard sees as threatening faith and this modern one? Must we posit a modernity against modernity? Is this captured in Kierkegaard's distinction between Christianity and Christendom?


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John Caruana
John Caruana is Associate Professor of Philosophy as well as the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University. While his past publications, in various journals and book collections, have focused on continental philosophers, including Levinas and Kristeva, his most recent work has explored the intersections of film, philosophy, and religion. He has published on the cinema of Bruno Dumont, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Abbas Kiarostami, Eric Rohmer, and the Dardenne brothers. He is - along with Mark Cauchi - the co-editor of Postsecular Cinema: Between Malick and von Trier (SUNY Press, forthcoming).
 


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