Prof. Cornel West delivers the 2024 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled ‘A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane’. This is the second of six lectures, titled ‘Metaphilosophic Andante’.

Prof. West’s second Gifford Lecture opens with the inauguration of philosophy in the West. In his responses to Greek catastrophes, including the Peloponnesian wars, Plato provided profound resources for our own catastrophic moment. To be sure, Plato’s fear of disorder and unruly passions, and his denigration of history, blurred his lens, and could blind him to the catastrophic and tragicomic. And yet Plato also understood that ‘when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining’, philosophy could become redemptive and (in Professor West’s conception) jazz-soaked and free-style.

Prof. West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy & Christian Practice, Union Theological Seminary, New York. His teaching and publications focus on roles of race, gender, and class struggle in American society, synthesizing influences from Christianity, the Black Church, democratic socialism, left-wing populism, neopragmatism and transcendentalism. A musician and spoken word artist, Prof. West has collaborated with acts across the rap, hip-hop and funk genres, as well as appearing in the Matrix series and many documentary films.

The prestigious Gifford Lectureships, held at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St Andrews, have been delivered annually since 1888 by a succession of distinguished international scholars. The Lectureships were established by Adam Lord Gifford (1820-1887) to ‘promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term – in other words, the knowledge of God’, and have enabled a most notable field of scholars to contribute to the advancement of theological thought.

Watch the rest of the lectures here.

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