Organized by Prof. Tuhin Bhattacharjee and Dr. Alessandra Filannino Indelicato
Weekly meetings will take place on Fridays 10 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. (US Central Time) beginning on April 04, 2025. There will be 8 seminar sessions.
Content
At the beginnings of Western philosophy, the dividing lines to ‘Eastern’ thought were blurry. Before the Logos became the dominant concept for organizing knowledge toward wisdom (as in ‘philo-sophia’), the question of what the sources of that wisdom were, was highly contested. There were rich ancient traditions, ranging from religious practices and cults to rituals, that emphasized the manifold sources of insight, healing, and self-knowledge, based upon experiences of the divine, the spiritual, the body, sexuality, and performativity. The theater, in particular, rooted in Dionysian worship, was as a transformational space that merged various traditions and whose history illustrates the evolving shift from ‘chaos’ via ‘mythos’ to ‘logos.’ If, in modernity, philosophy became ever-more scientific, then revisiting its excluded ancestors offers a chance to investigate the diverse understandings of “sophia” and shed new light on the horizons of philosophical orientation today.
In this seminar, we will trace, via the terms of the philosophy of orientation, how what we call ‘Western philosophy’ was step by step created by distinguishing itself from perceived ‘Eastern traditions’ and their myths and rituals. To do so, we will focus on the depictions of the gods Śiva and Dionysus, their receptions in ancient Greek theater from Aristophanes to Euripides, as well as Plato’s engagement with mythos and logos. This seminar is discussion-based; this means that participants are expected to read the assigned passages before the sessions. The seminar is free, but seats may be limited. Please apply by March 28, 2024, via the application form below by briefly explaining 1.) your professional and/or academic background, 2.) your philosophical interests, and 3.) your motivation for joining the seminar (max. 50 words per field).