Speaker
Description
Title: Truth, Mystery, Ideology: from Plato to Marx and Back Again
Description: The idea is to make some suggestions about the relationship of three things: philosophy; religious questioning and belief; and both modern political ideology (taking Marxism as the central example) and the modern 'hermeneutic of suspicion' (Paul Ricoeur) with its pretense to unmask all truth claims as 'ideological'.
The idea for now is 1) to start with something that jolted me many years ago, Eric Voegelin's contrast of the 'faith' of the religious man with the 'faith' of the modern revolutionary or political 'true believer'; 2) to explore this distinction by considering the notion of 'mystery' as developed by Gabriel Marcel and Bernard Lonergan; 3) after this discussion, to revisit 'Socratic ignorance' and Plato's Cave allegory.
Speaker: Philosophy, History, and Ethics teacher, EEB4.
After attending a Jesuit high school in Philadelphia, I studied philosophy and German literature as an undergraduate at Columbia before completing a PhD at Princeton in modern European intellectual history, writing a dissertation on Nietzsche. After 14 years of university teaching in the US at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and the 'Great Books' school St John's College (Annapolis, Maryland), I moved to Brussels in 2007, where for the past 15 years I have enjoyed being a secondary school teacher. I've been at EEB4 since 2015.
