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 fifth of six lectures, titled ‘America Allegro Molto Vivace’.

In this lecture, Prof. West argues that the two great philosophically-inclined artists in early twentieth-century America were T.S. Eliot and Eugene O’Neill. Eugene O’Neill’s 49 plays constitute the greatest literary exploration of the cultural and spiritual dynamics of the American empire. Eliot’s work, especially his poems and criticism from 1917-1942, explored the end of the age of Europe with its wars, loveless creatures, hollow men, mindless barbarity, and devastated wastelands. As Prof. West discusses in response to O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh and Eliot’s Four Quartets, both writers understood the profound human tragedy of their times, but, trapped within a waning civilisation, neither artist could find a way out.

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.