The lecture will return to a concept which seems fairly out of fashion today: courage. It will start revisiting this concept from the analysis of a simple problem: There seems to be almost no reference made or value assigned to courage today in most of contemporary philosophy, yet, as a quick glance through the history of philosophy can show, there seems to be almost no philosophy without a conception of courage. What is it that speaks to the contemporary (at least philosophical) invalidation and expiration of courage? This question, as the lecture will argue, can only be answered if one starts to re-examine what the concept (or affect) constitutively entails, namely peculiar operations of working with anxiety.
Frank Ruda is a newly-appointed Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee. His many publications include the books Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Continuum, 2011); For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism (Northwestern UP, 2015); Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), and (with Rebecca Comay) The Dash – the Other Side of Absolute Knowing (MIT Press, 2018).
Wednesday, 21 March, 4-6pm
Dalhousie 1S06
All welcome!