Thursday 27 January 2011

John Milbank's Stanton Lectures

Last week, John Milbank gave the first of the 2011 Stanton Lectures at Cambridge. His lectures are titled "Philosophy: A Theological Critique". There are eight lectures in total, and the text of each one will also be posted on the ABC site – here's the first one. The full series is as follows:

  • 19 January: The Return of Metaphysics in the 21st century
  • 26 January: Immanence and Life
  • 2 February: Immanence and Number
  • 9 February: Transcendence without Participation
  • 16 February: Participated Transcendence Reconceived
  • 23 February: The Habit of Reason
  • 2 March: The Realism of Feeling
  • 9 March: The Surprise of the Imagined
As he says at the close of the first lecture, one of his aims is to "construe language as actual words, phenomena as actual things, mathematics as actual numbers and life as actual transcendence, not virtual immanence."

7 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Milbank, the self-appointed expert big-time false talker of big-time false archaic religion. One of the principlal architects of the "grandeur of reason", or more accurately tower of babble/babel.

I wonder what would happen to both Milbank and all of the dreadfully sane "divinity" faculty and students, if Jesus happened to re-appear in the room while he was giving his "learned" talk.

Simon & Lucy said...

I was in the room for this lecture and and at one point I also did wonder what Jesus would think of it all!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for posting this, Ben. Will you link to the others as they are posted?

James

Unknown said...

Thanks for posting these.

And while we're at it, I wonder what Jesus thinks about anti-Milbank vitriol.

Tony Hunt said...

I wonder what Jesus thinks of people who always seem to know what he thinks.

Simon & Lucy said...

there seems to be a lot of wonder going around:

"So what we are now left with seems to be once more unbounded speculation."

Gorazd Andrejc said...

Perhaps this was just the first lecture and it will get better, but in this one Milbank was only casting some big pictures and ways of viewing "the history of ideas" in Christian theology's relation to philosophy, without any serious academic engagement with any of the thoughts or positions mentioned.

But it's interesting where Milbank locates "paganism" in Christianity. It is in positing the "natural" reason, dissected from faith and independent source of knowledge. Not surprisingly, since his greatest enemy is any kind of "neutrality".

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