What Can Philosophy Learn from Religious Traditions? New Dialogues between Talmud, the Bible and Philosophy
October 15 @ 2:00 pm - October 17 @ 3:00 pm
This conference will bring into dialogue leading experts from Jewish and Christian traditions to explore what contemporary philosophy can learn from concepts and methods whereby religious traditions define themselves, transmit and develop knowledge, and invite critical self-reflection on their boundaries.
It is widely recognized that philosophy can be used to elucidate and explain religious beliefs. However, in recent years, scholars in the Jewish and Christian traditions have shown that it also works the other way around: philosophy can benefit from resources provided by religious traditions. The volumes Talmud /and/ Philosophy: Conjunctions, Disjunctions, Continuities (Indiana University Press, 2024), edited by James Adam Redfield and Sergey Dolgopolski, and Biblical Narratives and Human Flourishing: Knowledge Through Narrative (Routledge, 2024), edited by Eleonore Stump and Judith Wolfe, provide a good overview of this exciting new field of study. For instance, contributions to the latter volume show that Biblical narratives transmit and convey second-personal knowledge of persons that cannot be reduced to propositional knowledge. Upon close examination of biblical narratives, it become clear that they contain knowledge which is not accessible by the methods of analytic philosophy which predominate in the Anglo-American philosophy of religion/philosophical theology. In a similar manner, the volume Talmud /and/ Philosophy has challenged the hegemony of philosophy over the intellectual tradition of Talmud and called for a new paradigm in which both Talmud and philosophy’s methods of approaching shared problems can inform one another.
Building upon this new conversation, our conference will bring into dialogue leading experts from Jewish and Christian traditions to explore what contemporary philosophy can learn from concepts and methods whereby religious traditions define themselves, transmit and develop knowledge, and invite critical self-reflection on their boundaries.
More information can be found here.
Attendance is free, but registration is required by 1 October 25 at: redfieldzoll25@gmail.com