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 third of six lectures, titled ‘Folly Presto’.

This third lecture presents Prof. West’s consideration of early modern philosophy, focusing on Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly (1511), as a response to an era that saw devastating religious warfare, plagues, and famines, and the onset of European imperial conquests. The great public intellectual, Erasmus of Rotterdam, directed his classic work to the sheer absurdity, indeterminacy and frailty of human societies. Also discussed is Montaigne, whose self-explorations, including his essays “Of Cannibals” (1580) and “Of Coaches” (1588), were among the first philosophic reflections on the barbaric European colonization of the New World. As Prof. West argues, Erasmus and Montaigne were both path-blazing exemplars of blues, swing and improvisation in philosophy, facing dark folly with a free-style soul-craft.

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.