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Hello, The following event may be of interest to you: "Heidegger and the Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiesis" Tuesday, February 16, 2016 Elliott R. WolfsonDistinguished Professor of ReligionUniversity of California, Santa BarbaraMartin Heidegger (1889-1976) powerfully transformed the philosophical landscape in the twentieth century and exercised an inordinate influence on a wide variety of other disciplines. His personal shortcomings and ethical transgressions attested in his explicit complicity with National Socialism are well known and cannot be easily justified or dismissed as miscalculations based on inadequate knowledge or lack of savvy. In spite of Heidegger’s explicit anti-Judaism and his deplorable political judgment vis-à-vis Jews, there are themes in Heidegger’s oeuvre that bear a striking affinity to and can be utilized philosophically to elucidate the phenomenological aspects of kabbalistic esotericism and hermeneutics. My lecture will explore three Heideggerian themes that can be profitably compared and contrasted with some rudimentary tenets of the kabbalah: the depiction of truth as the unconcealedness of the concealment; the construal of language as the house of being within which all beings are disclosed in the nothingness of their being; and the understanding of the origin of timespace arising from an inceptual act that is, concomitantly, a contraction and an expansion, a withholding of the boundless ground that results in the self-extending delineation of boundary. The comparative analysis of Heidegger and kabbalah is justified hermeneutically by the principle that things belong together precisely because of the unbridgeable chasm that keeps them separate: what is the same is the same in virtue of being different. Time: 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Location: Olin Humanities, Room 203 Sponsor: Dean of the College; Interdisciplinary Study of Religions Program Contact: Bruce Chilton. E-mail: [email protected] Phone: 845-758-7335 If you would like to see more events please visit the following URL: http://inside.bard.edu/religion/events/