Dear Colleagues and Friends, and GTU students

Peter Costello will be lecturing for SOPHERE this coming Friday, April 7, at 10 am, a JST.  Some of you emailed me that they would like to come, but they are not familiar with phenomenology. Phenomenology is simply a philosophical approach which focuses on subjectivity, and studies human experience;  do not let the terminology to turn you off because the knowledge of human experience is very important skill for religious leaders. Myself and Fr. Vincent Pastro will be there to answer questions and help with understanding of philosophical terms if needed (and in the Fall 2017 we will offer a series of seminars on the basics of phenomenological approach to religion and pastral practice. Please pass this information to those who may be interested

This is the ZOOM access if you decide to attend.

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    Meeting ID: 166 840 646
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Here is Peter's topic and description.

Givenness and Explication: Phenomenology As Being-Towards the Margins, Key Biblical texts in light of reading of Husserl

Using Derrida’s notion of hospitality from Of Hospitality, I argue in this lecture that Husserl’s phenomenology has always attempted to write its descriptions of objects, world, and other people in as welcoming a way as possible.  Phenomenology welcomes and stands in solidarity, in other words, with what remains on the margins.  Using the famous text concerning “The Principle of All Principles” from his first book of the Ideas, as well as sections from Formal and Transcendental Logic, Cartesian Meditations, and The Crisis of the European Sciences, I will show more specifically how the manner and motion of givenness is to draw us toward the margins of experience.  Our objects, our world, an the other people who lead us toward them from within–these all are meaningful dis-placements toward and from the margin.   Phenomenological explication, for Husserl, becomes then a kind of “absolute beginning” and a continuation of givenness as it founds the non-primordial dichotomies of inner and outer, immanent and transcendent.

After having determined to what extent phenomenology is primordial, hospitable and aims at the margins, I will turn to texts from the Books of Deuteronomy, ​Ruth and Esther, as well as the Gospels of Luke and John to show how phenomenology demands a privileging of the discourse of the stranger and the act of welcoming.  Phenomenology demands, in other words, that we fashion our political and religious lives in a hospitable way toward the stranger as an echo of the very motion of experience.