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Event
Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly / All Things Shining
Presented by Berkeley Arts & Letters
A wide-ranging look at the loss of meaning in the West, All Things Shining by UC Berkeley Professor Hubert Dreyfus and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Harvard Sean Dorrance Kelly is a joyful and enthralling guide for how to retrieve what so many people are searching fora meaningful life. Delving into some of the great works of Western Literature, Dreyfus, whose podcast lectures have hit the top 40 on iTunes, and Kelly discover what modern spiritual life is made of and what it's missing...
The Ancient Greeks believed that our actions, at their best, were not completely under our control, but that we worked in concert with the world around us, much as an athlete performs when he's in the "zone." The athlete or any master of his craft in this state makes choices that have little to do with thinking and everything to do with his skill and his environment. He is so intensely connected to what's around him that he can't make a "wrong" choice. Today, an unrelenting flow of choices confronts us at nearly every moment of our lives, but on what basis do we make these decisions? How can we tell what's irrelevant and what's important? Dreyfus and Kelly explain that a secular life charged with meaning is in our reach. It is achieved by a passionate, skillful engagement with people, events, and the wonders present in the most ordinary days that Western culture abandoned long ago.
Dreyfus and Kelly show that the burden of choice is essentially a modern problem to which there is an age-old solution. Homer's Greeks derived from their understanding of the world a sense of the sacred that shields them from the temptations of both our traditional monotheism and our modern nihilism, while giving them a positive sense of the joys and sorrows of a truly meaningful existence. Excellence was the highest good in Homeric Greece; but excellence in the Greek sense involves neither the Christian notion of humility nor the Roman ideal of stoic adherence to one's duty. Rather excellence in the Homeric world depends crucially on the notions of gratitude and wonder.
With great skill and ease, Dreyfus and Kelly walk the reader from Homer's polytheistic world to the monotheistic one in which Dante wrote his Divine Comedy and Martin Luther wrote his ninety-five theses. They then move forward to the rejection of this Christian ideal, to the Superman of Nietzsche and further onto the spiritual cornucopia of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Arriving at the ennui and sadness expressed in the work of Elizabeth Gilbert and David Foster Wallace arose, Dreyfus and Kelly offer a new and very old way to embrace the world, a fresh way to live a meaningful life in a secular world.
Throughout All Things Shining, Dreyfus' charm is matched by Kelly's electric new voice, both of which will capture a generation adrift. This is a book that will change the way we understand our culture, our history, our sacred practices, and ourselves.
Hubert Dreyfus was educated at Harvard, earning three degrees there (B.A in 1951, M.A in 1952, and Ph.D. in 1964). He is considered a leading interpreter of the work of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but especially of Martin Heidegger. While spending most of his teaching career at UC Berkeley, where he currently teaches, Professor Dreyfus has also taught at Brandeis University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The University of Frankfurt, and Hamilton College. Dreyfus is well known for making the work of continental philosophers, especially Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault, intelligible to analytically trained philosophers.
Sean Dorrance Kelly is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is also Co-Chair of Harvard's interdisciplinary committee for the study of Mind, Brain, and Behavior. Before arriving at Harvard, Kelly taught at Stanford and Princeton, and he was a visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He is considered a leading interpreter of the French and German tradition in phenomenology, as well as a prominent philosopher of mind. Kelly has published articles in numerous journals and anthologies and has received fellowships or awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the NSF and the James S. McDonnell Foundation, among others.
7:30 PM / First Congregational Church of Berkeley
2345 Channing Way at Dana / Berkeley
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LocationFirst Congregational Church of Berkeley
2345 Channing Way
Berkeley, CA 94704
United States
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