Franke Lectures to explore Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’

German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s “Being and Time” is the topic of the fall Franke Lectures in the Humanities sponsored by the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC).

This semester’s series has been organized in conjunction with the Yale College seminar taught by Martin Hägglund, professor of comparative literature and of humanities. Taylor Carman will deliver the opening lecture, “Narrative and Pictorial Truth,” at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 6.

Carman, professor of philosophy at Barnard College, Columbia University, is the author of “Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in ‘Being and Time’” and “Merleau-Ponty” and co-editor of “The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty.” He has written on topics in phenomenology, existentialism, and contemporary European and analytical philosophy. Carman is currently writing a book on the history and critique of metaphysics in Heidegger’s later works. 

Other guest speakers and lectures in the series include:

Tuesday, Nov. 13, 5 p.m. — Robert Pippin, “Radical Finitude in the Anti-Idealist Modern European Philosophical Tradition”

Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought in the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of “Kant’s Theory of Form,” “Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness,” “Modernism as a Philosophical Problem,” “Hegel’s Practical Philosophy,” a book on philosophy and literature titled “Henry James and Modern Moral Life,” and three books on film. Pippin’s forthcoming book is “Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic.” Pippin is a past winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and was recently elected a member of the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina.

Tuesday, Nov. 27, 5 p.m. — Robert Brandom, “A Spirit of Trust: Magnanimity and Agency in Hegel’s Phenomenology”

Robert Brandom is the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and a fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of 13 books, including “Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment.” Brandom’s most recent book, “A Spirit of Trust, on Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology,’” is forthcoming. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. He is a recipient of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities Award, and the Anneliese Maier Forschungspreis from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. Brandom has delivered the John Locke lectures Lectures at Oxford (published as “Between Saying and Doing”), the Hempel Lectures at Princeton, the Townsend and Howison lectures at Berkeley, and the Woodbridge lectures at Columbia. He has held fellowships at All Souls College Oxford and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and was the Leibniz Professor at the University of Leipzig. 

Tuesday, Dec. 4, 5 p.m. — Steven Crowell, “Methodological Atheism: An Essay in Second-Person Phenomenology”

Crowell is the Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor of Humanities and professor of philosophy at Rice University, where he has taught since receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale in 1981. Crowell’s research focuses on Continental philosophy since Kant, with an emphasis on the classical phenomenological tradition. He is the author of “Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology and Normativity” and “Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger.” He is the editor of the “Cambridge Companion to Existentialism” and, with Jeff Malpas, “Transcendental Heidegger.” With Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl, Crowell co-edits the journal Husserl Studies. His current research centers on “second-person phenomenology” (our experience of being the addressee of normative claims) and on the relation between meaning and metaphysics.

All events will be held in the WHC auditorium and are free and open to the public.

The lectures are made possible by the generosity of Richard and Barbara Franke, and are intended to present important topics in the humanities to a wide and general audience.  

For more information, contact the Whitney Humanities Center at 203-432-0670 or whitneyhumanitiescenter@yale.edu.