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 fourth of
six lectures, titled ‘History Adagio’.
In this lecture,
Prof. West argues that the greatest breakthrough in modern philosophy is
found in the works of the Italian Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), whose
perceptions wedded wisdom, eloquence, prudence, and providence. His 1725
work, The New Science, was the first great philosophic European
response to the New World. In it, Vico saw Europe as locked into a
dominant ‘barbarism of reflection’, yielding a rapacious individualism,
and reducing philosophy to a paralyzing scepticism. As Prof. West
discusses in this talk, Vico responded to this scepticism with his
conception of ‘ingenium’, a kind of ingenuity or improvisation that
accentuates our creative power to transcend savagery.
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.
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