Saturday 20th July 2024
10am-4pm, Rudolf Steiner House, London NW1 6XT
Civilisation is shaped by different expressions of language, ranging from religious revelation, poetic vision, philosophic speculation, political discourse and the various arts and sciences. Each of these sees the world in its own distinctive way and so bears particular kinds of witness to reality, while together they express how civilisation understands itself, embodied in its history and traditions. But language also shapes how we see the world and has a power of its own. Just as we relate to the world, so we relate to language. According to the ancient poets and philosophers, there is a moral duty to guard language from abuses, especially through rhetoric. Speech therefore makes man a moral being and so the use of language always bears a moral responsibility. The four talks presented on this Study Day offer reflections on how language situates us in the world.
Hilary Davies – W. S. Graham and Dylan Thomas: How Language Constructs the World
Dr Joseph Milne – The Bond of Speech: How Discourse Founds Community
Esmé Partridge – The Search for a Universal Language: From Babel to ChatGPT
Dr Duane Williams – Homelessness and the House of Being: An Essay on Destitution and Dwelling in Language
Speakers
Hilary Davies has published four collections of poetry from Enitharmon and is also a translator, essayist, and critic. She was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at King’s College, London 2012-2016 and at the British Library, 2018-19; she has served as the Chair of the Poetry Society of Great Britain. In November 2023 she was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year Award.
Joseph Milne is editor of Land and Liberty, the magazine of the Henry George Foundation, author of several Temenos Academy Papers, including The Mystical Cosmos (2013) and The Lost Vision of Nature (2018). His Natural Law and the Just Society is forthcoming from Shepheard-Walwyn. He is a Trustee of The Eckhart Society and a Fellow of the Temenos Academy.
Esmé Partridge is an MPhil candidate at the University of Cambridge where she is researching the religious pluralism of the Renaissance philosopher Jean Bodin. She previously studied Religion at SOAS, and has worked as a consultant on a number of interfaith and religious freedom initiatives. She also writes for publications including The Critic, First Things and UnHerd.
Duane Williams is Associate Professor in Theology, Philosophy and Religious Studies and co-facilitator of the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion at Liverpool Hope University, UK. His most recent book, Language and Being: Heidegger’s Linguistics, was published in 2017 by Bloomsbury. He also co-edited Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy, published in 2017 by Routledge. He is a trustee of The Eckhart Society and chief editor of the international, peer-reviewed journal, Medieval Mystical Theology.
Admission
Limited to a maximum of 50 participants
£40 or £30 Members/Full-time students with ID
Advance bookings only – please email temenosacademy@myfastmail.com or call 07513 883 335
Refreshments will be provided; lunch may be obtained from the Rudolf Steiner House Café at the venue.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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