Monthly Archives: November 2012

The Place of Renaissance Humanism in the History of Philosophy – Call For Papers

The Place of Renaissance Humanism in the History of Philosophy 
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, The Netherlands 
13, 14 and 15 June, 2013

Keynote Speakers: Michael Allen, Luca Bianchi, Christopher Celenza, Brian P. Copenhaver, James Hankins, Jill Kraye, David Lines, Peter Mack, John Monfasani, Lodi Nauta, Jan Papy, Andrea A. Robiglio

The organizing committee welcomes papers on themes such as the following:

  • philosophical ideas in humanist texts
  • the interplay between scholastic and humanist modes of thought and writing
  • philosophical assumptions of humanist techniques in reading, writing and commenting
  • the humanists’ contribution to the development of thought from the late middle ages to the late Renaissance
  • the historiography of Renaissance humanism in modern scholarship 

We would in particular like to invite speakers to reflect on what they see as the philosophical dimension of humanism or what they see as important contributions of the humanists to the development of Western philosophy (which we take in a broader sense than the academic discipline of today). Speakers may also choose to discuss one of more case studies or a discipline (grammar, rhetoric, ethics, natural philosophy, methodology of reading and writing, humanist scholarship, and so on) on the basis of which something can be said about the place of Renaissance humanism in the broader narrative of Western thought.

Please send an abstract of max. 300 words and a brief CV (max. 1 page) plus list of publications or lectures (if any) to renaissance-humanism@rug.nl no later than Dec. 1st, 2012. You will hear from the organizers in Jan. 2013 whether your paper has been accepted.

Announcements will also be made at our website: www.renaissance-humanism.nl.

Please send your enquiries to renaissance-humanism@rug.nl.

View this CFP online here.

Eileen A. Joy: ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Lecture – University of Sydney

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions lecture
“Women Who Take the Ideal All the Way: The Hagiography of Lars von Trier”, Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Date: Friday 16 November 2012
Time: 1-2pm
Where: Woolley Common Room, John Woolley Building, University of Sydney
Cost: Free – All welcome

This seminar will explore the medievalism of Lars von Trier’s trilogy of films — Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), and Dancer in the Dark (2000) — in which he sought to pay homage to the role of the female martyr “in its most extreme form” and to women “who take the ideal all the way.” The three films are often referred to as the ‘Gold-Heart’ trilogy because they are partly based on a ‘lost’ Danish fairy-tale book (Guld Hjerte) from von Trier’s childhood about a little girl of the same name who embarks on a journey through the woods with pieces of bread and other things in her pockets. Along the way, she gives away everything she has, including her clothing, and whenever the animals of the forest question her risky behavior and impending destitution, at every bleak turn of the narrative, including one moment when she stands naked at the edge of the woods, she proclaims, ‘I’ll be fine, anyway,’ or, in another translation, ‘But at least I’m okay.’

Although decidedly not a person or artist who supports organized religion, von Trier has often remarked in interviews that, having been raised by parents who were atheists, he often feels as if he lacked a proper spiritual education, and these three films are partly his exploration of what that spiritual education might have given him in the way of philosophies of faith, devotion, goodness, love, selflessness, poverty, and sacrifice. These three films have been highly controversial and have also been extremely difficult to recuperate especially from feminist perspectives, partly because of the radical forms of feminine sublimity or the Real or Levinasian holiness or love’s extreme unconditionality (or pathology?) as exemplified in these films’ “martyr-heroines,” and in ways that should productively trouble our commonly held assumptions about (or stakes in) the feminine, religion, sacrifice, faith, love, goodness, violence, the law, and the symbolic order (and any combination thereof). This seminar will explore these ethical and other problematics in von Trier’s ‘Gold-Heart’ trilogy in relation to queer work on late antique and medieval hagiography and also Michel Foucault’s late writings on ascesis [self-discipline] and “improbable manners of being.”

Eileen Joy’s webpage is: http://www.siue.edu/~ejoy/
She is co-editor of the journal postmedieval