JPI 955
Nature and History
The purpose of this course is to ponder the ontological (philosophical, theological) issues surrounding the problem of nature and history: the problem of what is often called historicism, or historical relativism.
What is nature and what is history, and in what sense does being participate at once in both? In what sense are nature and history mutually inclusive? Is intelligible order compatible with historical novelty?
The problem of nature and history thus concerns the meaning of being in its most basic "givenness." In what sense is our own being and the being of everything (human and subhuman), in its primitive constitution as given, a matter of truth and goodness? What most basically establishes being as true and as good, and what is the relation between the two? In what sense is this truth and goodness to be ascribed to things qua natural and qua (ongoingly) historically differentiated? Such questions carry in their train several further cognate questions, regarding the meaning of being qua universal and singular; qua bearer of the past and open to the future; qua eternal and open to time; qua necessary and spontaneous (free); qua same and other; and so on.
The intended outcome of the course is that the student will understand the sense in which nature transcends history and at the same time remains in principle open to and inclusive of history: such that it is possible—indeed, in principle necessary—for a thinker to take seriously the being and meaning of the present even as he avoids historicism.
These questions with which the course is occupied are framed most basically within the horizon of the relation between the "ancients" ("classical" culture) and the "moderns" ("modern" culture), and between "Jerusalem" (or Christian revelation) and "Athens" (reason: philosophy and science). Readings will be drawn from L. Strauss, Plato, Aristotle, R. Spaemann, H. U. Von Balthasar, J. Ratzinger, J. Monod, G. Hegel, among others.
