Under the above title, the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences organized an international conference dedicated to the phenomena of religion in contemporary philosophy as part of the 5th Bratislava Philosophical Days.
The international scientific workshop Religion and Nihilism, which took place on 23 and 24 April 2009 at the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, was part of the Bratislava Philosophical Days in April. This time, their fifth year focused on the current question of the phenomena of religion in contemporary philosophy and the examination of the stimuli and discussions that this topic has brought with it. In their analyses, lecturers from seven countries touched on the interpretation of the nature of transcendence and religiosity, the development of the concept of nihilism and the reactions of contemporary thinkers to stimuli from the philosophy of religion of the 19th century.
The conference began by opening the problem of nothingness and nihilism – Françoise Bonardel (France) put them in a discussion with Buddhism, Ronald Bruzina (USA) in a polemic with Husserl’s phenomenology, and Prof. Jean-François Lavigne (France) presented them in a Nietschean context. Together with Mikkel B. Tin (Norway), the conference moved to the second round of the conference – to the reflection of the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion – and his contribution Nihilism and the Gift of Appearance was thematically followed by five lectures by Slovak participants (Róbert Karul, Jana Tomašovičová, Anton Vydra, Jana Trajtelová and Jaroslava Vydrová). The concepts introduced or revived in philosophical discourse by Jean-Luc Marion describe a similar bipolarity as religion and nihilism. The individual forms of meaning-saturated phenomena such as icon, idol, living body, event and revelation are linked to his original concept of giving.
The second day of the conference smoothly followed up on the stimuli drawn from French philosophy in the paper of Karel Novotný (Czech Republic) The Limits of Classical Phenomenology: Face in Lévinas and Giving in J.-L. Mariona. Questions from theological axiomatics and phenomenology were presented by Thomas Alferi (Germany). Other thematic areas – violence (Michael Staudigl, Austria), ethics (Martin Muránsky, Slovakia) and religious acosmism (Peter Šajda, Slovakia) – pointed out how religiosity and nihilism are the boundary points of the human situation. Josef Fulka (Czech Republic) presented an interesting paper Ambivalences of Faith: Klossowski and His Interpretation of Barby. The conference was closed by a speech by Jozef Sivák (SR).
The Bratislava Philosophical Days took place thanks to the support and cooperation with the Embassy of the French Republic in the Slovak Republic, the Goethe Institute, the Slovak Philosophical Association and the Schola Philosophica. Special repeated support for the event was provided by the law firm of Róbert Bockanič. Those interested will be able to find the results of the scientific workshop in the upcoming collective publication, and the organizers will also publish a video recording of some of the lectures on the website of the online journal for the humanities Ostium (www.ostium.sk). Next year’s event will be the culmination of a three-year grant project focused on intersubjectivity issues.
Text: Jaroslava Vydrová
Photo: Archive of the Slovak Academy of Sciences