THEORY TO NO END

John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Roehampton, London, Visiting Professor at King's College, London, and Honorary Fellow at St John's College, Oxford University. He has published over thirty books – fifteen as sole author, a further nine editions and translations, plus (either as single or joint editor) eight edited collections – together with over 140 articles in learned journals or books. From 1993-2012 he was Editor of Ratio, the international journal of analytic philosophy.

A complete list of John Cottingham's publications and research interests can be found on his webpage: https://www.johncottingham.co.uk/

We discuss his recent book titled, In Search of the Soul, Princeton UP, 2020.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174426/in-search-of-the-soul

John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading, Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Roehampton, London, Visiting Professor at King's College, London, and Honorary Fellow at St John's College, Oxford University. He has published over thirty books – fifteen as sole author, a further nine editions and translations, plus (either as single or joint editor) eight edited collections – together with over 140 articles in learned journals or books. From 1993-2012 he was Editor of Ratio, the international journal of analytic philosophy.

A complete list of John Cottingham's publications and research interests can be found on his webpage: https://www.johncottingham.co.uk/

We discuss his article, "From desire to encounter: the human quest for the infinite," published in Religious Studies, 2019.

Philip Pettit is L.S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University and Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra.

Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit appeared from OUP in 2007, edited by Geoffrey Brennan, R.E.Goodin, Frank Jackson and Michael Smith.

He works in moral and political theory and on background issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. His recent single-authored books include The Common Mind (OUP 1996), Republicanism (OUP 1997), A Theory of Freedom (OUP 2001), Rules, Reasons and Norms (OUP 2002), Penser en Societe (PUF, Paris 2004), Examen a Zapatero (Temas de Hoy, Madrid 2008), Made with Words: Hobbes on Mind, Society and Politics (PUP 2008); On the People's Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (CUP 2012); Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World (W.W.Norton 2014) and The Robust Demands of the Good: Ethics with Attachment, Virtue and Respect (OUP 2015). His recent co-authored books include The Economy of Esteem (OUP 2004), with Geoffrey Brennan; Mind, Morality and Explanation (OUP 2004), a selection of papers with Frank Jackson and Michael Smith; A Political Philosophy in Public Life: Civic Republicanism in Zapatero's Spain (PUP 2010), with Jose Marti; and Group Agency: The Possibility, Design and Status of Corporate Agents (OUP 2011), with Christian List. He gave the Tanner lectures on Human Values at Berkeley in April 2015, which appeared in late 2018 with OUP, New York (with commentary by Michael Tomasello) as The Birth of Ethics: A Reconstruction of the Nature and Role of Morality. He is presenting the Locke lectures in Philosophy at Oxford University in Spring 2019.

We discuss his chapter titled, "Ethics without Transcendence" published in Ciphers of Transcendence. Essays in Philosophy of Religion in Honor of Patrick Masterson (2019).

David T. Pan is Professor of German in the Department of European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, Penn State University, and McKinsey and Company. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (2001) and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth (2012). He has also published on J. G. Herder, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Schmitt, and Theodor Adorno. He currently serves on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, on the Commission on Unalienable Rights at the U.S. State Department, and as the Editor of Telos (http://www.telospress.com/).

We discuss his article titled, "Economy and Ecology: Federal Populism and the Devil in the Details of Universal Basic Income," published in Telos, issue 191, summer 2020.

http://www.telospress.com/telos-191-summer-2020-going-viral/

John D. Caputo is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University.

He is a hybrid philosopher/theologian who treats "sacred" texts as a poetics of the human condition, or as a "theo-poetics," a poetics of the event harbored in the name of God. His past books have attempted to persuade us that hermeneutics goes all the way down (Radical Hermeneutics), that Derrida is a thinker to be reckoned with by theology (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida), and that theology is best served by getting over its love affair with power and authority and embracing what Caputo calls, following St. Paul, The Weakness of God. He has also addressed wider-than-academic audiences in On Religion and What Would Jesus Deconstruct? and has an interest in interacting with the working church groups like ikon and the "Emergent" Church. He is currently working in a book on our frail and mortal flesh, probably to be entitled The Fate of All Flesh: A Theology of the Event, II.

Professor Caputo specializes in continental philosophy of religion, working on approaches to religion and theology in the light of contemporary phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction, and also the presence in continental philosophy of radical religious and theological motifs. He has special interests in the "religion without religion" of Jacques Derrida; the "theological turn" taken in recent French phenomenology (Jean-Luc Marion and others); the critique of onto-theology; the question of post-modernism as "post-secularism;" the dialogue of contemporary philosophy with St. Augustine; the recent interest shown by philosophers in St. Paul; the link between Kierkegaard and deconstruction; Heidegger's early theological writings on Paul and Augustine; "secular" and "death of God" theology (Altizer, Vattimo, Zizek); medieval metaphysics and mysticism.

For a complete list of his publications please follow the link to his academic website: https://thecollege.syr.edu/people/faculty/caputo-john-d/

In this interview we discuss his article titled, "The Theopoetic Reduction: Suspending the Supernatural Signified," published in Literature and Theology, Volume 33, Issue 3, September 2019, pages 248–254.

Benjamin Straumann is Research Professor of Classics at New York University and Alberico Gentili Senior Fellow at New York University School of Law. A historian of ideas, he is chiefly interested in classical political and legal thought, the history of natural and international law, constitutionalism, and the reception of classical political thought and Roman law in early-modern Europe. Benjamin is the author of Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2016); Roman Law in the State of Nature: The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius' Natural Law (Cambridge University Press, 2015); and editor, with Benedict Kingsbury, of Alberico Gentili, The Wars of the Romans: A Critical Edition and Translation of De armis Romanis, (translated by David Lupher, Oxford University Press, 2011). He co-edits the book series History and Theory of International Law for Oxford University Press. He also co-edits the first volume on the classical world of the five-volume Cambridge History of Rights.

Paul Fiddes is professor of systematic theology at the University of Oxford and Principal Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow at Regent's Park College at Oxford. He is the author of numerous published works, including The Creative Suffering of God, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity, as well as Seeing the World and Knowing God. He also published his first novel--a mystery exploring the mythology and symbolism of the unicorn, titled A Unicorn Dies:A Novel of Mystery and Ideas. We discuss his article titled, "Forgiveness, Empathy, and Vulnerability: an unfinished conversation with pamela sue anderson" published in Angelaki issue 25 in February 2020.

Nehal Bhuta holds the Chair of Public International Law at University of Edinburgh and is Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law. He previously held the Chair of Public International Law at the European University Institute in Florence, where was also Co-Director of the Institute's Academy of European Law. He is a member of the editorial boards of the European Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Constellations and a founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Humanity. He is also a series editor of the Oxford University Press (OUP) series in The History and Theory of International Law. Prior to the EUI he was on the faculty at the New School for Social Research, and at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Before entering academia, he worked with Human Rights Watch and the International Center for Transitional Justice. Nehal's two most recent edited volumes are Freedom of Religion, Secularism and Human Rights (OUP) and Autonomous Weapons Systems - Law, Ethics, Policy (Cambridge University Press with Beck, Geiss, Liu and Kress). Nehal works on a wide range of doctrinal, historical and theoretical issues in international law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law and human rights law.

We discuss Nehal's chapter titled, "What Should Freedom of Religion Become?" published in Freedom of Religion, Secularism and Human Rights (OUP), 2019.

Phillip E. Wegner is the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar and Professor of English at the University of Florida and the director of the Working Group for the Study of Critical Theory. He is the author of numerous essays and five books, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (California, 2002); Life Between Two Deaths: U.S. Culture, 1989-2001 (Duke, 2009); Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative (Northwestern, 2014); and Shockwaves of Possibility: Essays on Science Fiction, Globalization, and Utopia (Peter Lang, 2014); and Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times (Minnesota, 2020); as well as the editor of a new edition of Robert C. Elliott's The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre (Peter Lang, 2013). In 2017, he was honored as the recipient of the Society for Utopian Studies Lyman Tower Sargent Award for Distinguished Scholarship. We discuss his latest book, Invoking Hope (Minnesota, 2020), with a focus on the sixth chapter, "Repetition, Love, and Concrete Utopia in 50 First Dates."

Full bio at: https://phillipewegner.org

From University of Minnesota Press:

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/invoking-hope

With Invoking Hope, Wegner provides an innovative lens for considering the rise of right-wing populism and the current crisis in democracy. He discusses challenges in the humanities and higher education and develops strategies of creative critical reading and hope against the grain of current trends in scholarship.

This is a book that banishes intellectual lethargy forever, so dazzling are the close readings that flesh out its world-scale philosophy and so forceful is its polemic—a polemic on behalf of knowledge itself as much as theory, commitment, and a responsibly grounded, even necessary, account of hope.

— Bruce Robbins, author of The Beneficiary

With originality and humor, Phillip E. Wegner extends Fredric Jameson's tradition of dialectically reappropriating formalisms, showing how even the most seemingly static structures can be deployed to think diachronically and reinvigorate our abilities to historicize. This fearless book is exactly what we need now.

— Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago

Invoking Hope is a major intervention by our leading theorist of utopia—a manifesto for the crisis of the present and the possibility of a better future. Drawing on a mix of Western Marxism and Badiou, Phillip E. Wegner argues for the necessity of a positive hermeneutics and the imagination of possible futures. In the Pandora's box of the present, Wegner finds the hope that emerges last but promises everything.

— Christopher Breu, Illinois State University

Amanda Minervini teaches and researches in the department of Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese and Russian Studies, and is the director of the Italian program, at Colorado College. Her research interests are in religion and politics, documentary, Holocaust representations, and political theory. She is the translator of Carlo Galli's Janus's Gaze: Essays on Carl Schmitt. Today we discuss her article titled, "Face to Face: Iconic Representations and Juxtapositions of St. Francis of Assisi and Mussolini during Italian Fascism," forthcoming in M. Epstein, F. Orsitto, A. Righi's Tot Art: The Visual Arts, Fascism(s), and Mass-Society (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge: UK).