English
and
Languages
and
Committee for Comparative Literature
Our mission is to encourage and support inter- and multi- disciplinary studies in the Humanities with special emphasis on language and literary studies.
ELL organizes lectures, literary readings, and subsidizes theater visits
.
Spring 2008
ELL welcomes
Dr. William Rasch
Professor and Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies
Indiana University
to present on
Enlightenment As Religion:
On Being European – and Human
In an interview with a Spanish newspaper in 2006, the German Nobel Prize winning novelist, Günter Grass, said the following about Europe: “We have the luck to have had the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and therefore have undergone a painful process that has brought us a series of freedoms that are still threatened. The Islamic world has not undergone this process; they find themselves at a different stage of development.” What does it mean to identify European (and, by extension, North American) culture with the Enlightenment and with secularization, which values not only individual freedom but also magnanimous tolerance of difference, while at the same time assuming that European culture is the culmination of cultural progress? Is what we call the Enlightenment the medium by which and through which differences can be mediated, or is the Enlightenment itself the mark of a certain type of unbridgeable cultural difference? This talk will examine some of the ways “the West” currently describes itself and its relationship with what it describes as the “fanaticism” of the non-European world.
Thursday, April 24,
2008
5:00 p.m. Reception and Lecture
Sturm Hall 151
Students, faculty and guests
are welcome to attend
For further information or questions, please contact Wilfried Wilms at wwilms@du.edu or Susan Walter at swalter@du.edu
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Join ELL
and
Dr. William Rasch
Professor and Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies
Indiana University
As We Explore
Max Weber’s
“Science as a Vocation”
To the existential questions “What should we do?” and “How shall we live?” reason can give us no definitive answer. This assertion is the starting point of Max Weber’s mature reflections on the nature of Western modernity. Perhaps paradoxically, Weber’s own response to the modern predicament was to advocate the passionate pursuit of reason, that is, of science (Wissenschaft) and scholarship. By treating the scholarly life as a calling Weber emulates the Puritan ethos he examined in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Living the life of reason leads not to truth but to the indirect cultivation of an ethos that is itself the answer to the problem reason cannot solve. If latter-day believers in pre-modern, substantive reason cannot accept such a non-rational grounding for the reasonable life of the mind, it nevertheless may still inspire those who wish to think their way through a distinctly modern “crisis” in the human sciences and the purpose of the contemporary university in general.
Friday, April 25, 2008
11:00 a.m. – 2:00p.m.
Sturm Hall 286
Lunch will be served and a Reception is to follow
R.S.V.P. to Wilfried Wilms at wwilms@du.edu or Susan Walter at swalter@du.edu
The first 20 persons to R.S.V.P. will receive a complimentary copy of
Max Weber’s The Vocation Lectures,
(Hackett Publishing Company, 2004)
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