Academic Conferences

Intelligibility of the Transcendent:
Thinking with Levinas about God, Philosophy and Education

Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Institute for Christian Studies, 229 College Street, 2nd Floor, Toronto

10:00 a.m. “'Transcendence' in Plato, Levinas, and Reformational Christian Philosophy”
Lecture by Aron Reppmann, Trinity Christian College, Palos Heights, IL
In his lecture, Reppmann traces a particular version of the movement of transcendence in Plato and confronts it with a strongly anti-Platonic bias in the reformational Christian tradition. The work of Levinas, who has purposely retrieved the Platonic version of transcendence within his own, specifically religiously oriented philosophy of human responsibility, provides a provocative standpoint for critique of the reformational tradition's anti-Platonism.

1:30 p.m. “Transcending God with Levinas: Reading Westphal's Transcendence and Self-Transcendence Back-words”
Lecture by Jeffrey Dudiak, The King's University College, Edmonton, AB
In his lecture Dudiak offers a re/reading of Westphal's text in which he argues, against Westphal, that it is Levinas rather than Kierkegaard who offers us the most radical way in which to preserve the transcendence of God and human self-transcendence. Some of the implications of this for theism, and for Christian theism in particular, are examined.

7:30 p.m. “Beyond (rational) autonomy: Levinas and the incomparable worth of the student as singular other”
Association of Reformed Institutions of Higher Education Lecture by Clarence Joldermsa, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI
Joldersma's lecture offers an alternative account for why teachers ought to value students. Arguing against a Kantian account of worth in terms of rational autonomy, he builds on Levinas's notion of the other to offer a different account. He does so drawing on Levinas's ideas of proximity, singularity and ipseity.