French Spiritualism as Resource for Philosophy and Theology
Wednesday, January 17, 2024 - Friday, January 19, 2024 | Murray Room 4th Floor of Yawkey Center | Boston College | Please register to attend
Please note that this conference will only be available to attend in person and will not be streamed online.
This conference is an inter-disciplinary project that promotes reflection on modern and contemporary philosophy, theology, and ethical-spiritual practice, concentrating on the themes of corporeality, the person, and sacrifice as spiritual practice. It is born out of the observation, often made by philosophers and theologians, that with humanity’s rapid technological and material progress, there is a pressing need to recover our deepest spiritual values, which alone serve as a moral compass of meaning and human flourishing. In this light, the conference seeks to reimagine how we think about corporeality as a manifestation of a deeper spiritual reality; to deepen the investigation on the person as defined by the experience of a spiritual aspiration as native to it; and to reinvest philosophical and theological inquiry with an account of sacrifice and grace as the controlling metaphysical framework for being and practice.
Our point of departure will be the resources found in French Spiritualism, a current of 19th and 20th-century thought that arose in response to the reductionisms of materialism, of positivism and as a constructive response to the loss of the spiritual dimensions of reality. French Spiritualism has attracted considerable renewed attention as a modern renewal of a spiritual quest that is fundamental to human experience, to being itself, and as a response to deep challenges of meaning, identity and life. It is our aim to explore these resources in dialogue with those of other, perhaps better-known forms of reflection that have worked in some of the same fields.
The conference will be held over three days on the campus of Boston College.
Cosponsors: Institut Catholique the Toulouse, Institut Catholique de Paris, and University of Cambridge.
Schedule and RegistrationWednesday, January 17, 2024 | Murray Room, 4th Floor, Yawkey Center | Please register to attend | |
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| 4:30-5:00 PM | Registration and collection of conference material |
| 5:00-5:30 PM | Conference introduction
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| 5:30-6:30 PM | Session 1: Emmanuel Falque, Institut Catholique de Paris“Thus, the statue will smell like roses”: The debate between Condillac and Maine de Biran |
Thursday, January 18, 2024 | Murray Room, 4th Floor, Yawkey Center | Please register to attend | |
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| 9:00-10:00 AM | Session 1: John Milbank, University of Nottingham, UKMetaphysics beyond Phenomenology: The challenge of the Spiritualist revival
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| 10:00-11:00 AM | Session 2: Andrea Bellantone, Institut Catholique de Toulouse, FranceThe impossible symbolism: Spiritualism in search of its logic [Le symbolisme impossible: le spiritualisme à la recherche de sa logique]
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| 11:00-11:30 PM | Tea and Coffee Break |
| 11:30 AM-12:30 PM | Session 3: Sean J. McGrath, Memorial University of Newfoundland, CanadaThe Dissociative Self |
| 12:30-1:30 PM | LUNCH |
| 1:30-2:30 PM | Session 4: Giuseppe Bianco, Cà Foscari University, Venice, Italy
The social and epistemological condition of spiritualism as French academic philosophy |
| 2:30-3:30 PM | Session 5: Frédéric Worms, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
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| 3:30-4:45 PM | Session 6: Jeremy Smith, Otterbein University, OHNon-objective Self-Awareness in Michel Henry and Louis Lavelle
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Friday, Januray 19, 2024 | Murray Room, 4th Floor, Yawkey Center | Please register to attend | |
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| 9:30-10:30 AM | Session 1: Jacob Sherman, California Institute for Integral Studies, CA‘A Refraction of Spirit’: On the Legibility of Nature in Ravaisson’s Spiritualism |
| 10:30-11:30 AM | Session 2: Simone Kotva, University of Oslo, Norway
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| 11:30 AM-12:30 PM | Session 3: Jennifer Newsome Martin, University of Notre Dame, IN
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| 12:30 PM | Closing Remarks and Departure |
Speakers
Emmanuel Falque
Emmanuel Falque is Professor of Philosophy and Honorary Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Paris, France. He has published widely in phenomenology, philosophy of religion and medieval philosophy. His most recent publications include Hors Phénomène (2021), Nothing to It (2020), The Guide to Gethsemane (2019), The Loving Struggle (2018), and Crossing the Rubicon (2016). Falque is also the founder of the rapidly growing International Network of Philosophy of Religion.
John Milbank
John Milbank is Professor Emeritus of Religion, Politics and Ethics at the University of Nottingham. He previously taught at the universities of Lancaster, Cambridge and Virginia. He has published books on philosophy, theology and politics, besides books of poetry. His most recent books are Beyond Secular Order and The Politics of Virtue (with Adrian Pabst). He is currently working on a book about metaphysics.
Jennifer Newsome Martin
Jennifer Newsome Martin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and the Program of Liberal Studies (Great Books) at the University of Notre Dame. She is a systematic theologian with areas of interest in 19th and 20th century Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox thought, trinitarian theology, theological aesthetics, religion and literature, French feminism, ressourcement theology, and the nature of religious tradition. Her first book, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), was one of ten winners internationally of the 2017 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. She is co-editor of An Apocalypse of Love: Essays in Honor of Cyril O’ Regan (Herder & Herder, 2018) and the second edition of the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Catholicism. Over twenty articles and book chapters have appeared in such venues as Modern Theology, Communio: International Catholic Review, The Newman Studies Journal, International Journal of Systematic Theology, and in a number of edited volumes and collections of essays. She serves on the editorial board of Religion & Literature, Theological Studies, and the University of Notre Dame Press, as well as steering committees of the Hans Urs von Balthasar Consultation of the Catholic Theological Society of America and the Christian Systematic Theology Unit in the American Academy of Religion.
Jeremy H. Smith
Jeremy H. Smith is an Emeritus professor of English at Otterbein University in Westerville Ohio. He holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University in Comparative Literature focusing on philosophy of religion and literature. He has published and presented work on Husserl, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, Derrida, Michel Henry, and Louis Lavelle, focusing on religious experience, the phenomenology of perception, and aesthetics. He has published two books: Religious Feeling and Religious Commitment in Faulker, Dostoyevsky, Werfel, and Bernanos (Garland 1988; Routledge 2016) and The Staircase of a Patron: Sierra Leone and the United Brethren in Christ (Emeth, 2011). The latter is a study of the interaction of missionaries and traditional African culture in Sierra Leone from a phenomenological perspective.
Sean McGrath
Sean McGrath is Full Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at McGill. Recent books include The Philosophical Foundations of the Late Schelling (Edinburgh: 2020) and Political Eschatology (Wipf & Stock 2023).
Andrea Bellantone
Andrea Bellantone is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, Institut Catholique de Toulouse. His works is focused on French thought between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular spiritualism (from Ravaisson to Bergson) and the theological turn of phenomenology. He has also worked on the reception of German idealist thought in France (Kant and Hegel). He heads the Philosophy of Christianity teaching and research chair.
Frédéric Worms
Frédéric Worms is Director at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, where he has taught in the Department of Philosophy for many years. A leading specialist of Henri Bergson and a historian of philosophy, he is the author of several works on critical vitalism and the ethics of care in French, including La Philosophie du Soin and Soin et Politique.
Simone Kotva
Simone Kotva is ECODISTURB research fellow at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, and affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. She is the author of Effort and Grace: On the Spiritual Exercise of Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).
Giuseppe Bianco
Giuseppe Bianco is associate professor at Cà Foscari University, Venice. His area of interest is 19th and 20th century history of European philosophy and the history of the relation between philosophy, psychology, sociology and medicine. He is the author of Après Bergson (Puf, 2015). He is the recipient of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual grant for his research project INTERPHIL, “The international congresses and the transnational shaping of philosophy (1900-1948).”
Jacob Sherman
Jacob Sherman is Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies Chair of the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at CIIS. He received his PhD in philosophical theology from the University of Cambridge. He taught previously at King's College London and from 2014-17 held a visiting appointment as University Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Partakers of the Divine: Contemplation and the Practice of Philosophy, and editor, with Jorge Ferrer, of The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies. The author of over two dozen articles, essays, and reviews, his writings have appeared in publications such as The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Modern Theology, and the International Journal of Philosophy and Theology. He is currently working on a new manuscript entitled The Book of Nature: Philosophy, Theology, and the Ecological Imagination.
Campus Map and Parking
Campus Map and Parking:
Parking is available at the nearby Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue Garages.
Boston College is also accessible via public transportation (MBTA B Line - Boston College).
Boston College strongly encourages conference participants to receive the COVID-19 vaccination before attending events on campus.