“To Be One with Everything, that is the Life of the Divine, that is the Heaven of Man.”
Visions of Nature between Poetology and Philosophy in Friedrich Hölderlin.
Claudia Luchetti, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen: As few Hölderlin scholars have already shown, the contribution Hölderlin made to contemporary and later philosophical reflection is quite extraordinary.
Hölderlin made a decisive impact not only on the formation of German idealist system thought, but also on the reception of ancient Greek thought, with particular emphasis on the pre-Socratics (especially Heraclitus and Empedocles) and Platonism (especially Plato and Plotinus).The twofold influence, produced on the one hand by the philosophical-cultural constellation of his time, and on the other by his extraordinary attachment to ancient Greece, which led him, as a poet, to consider himself (as Hölderlin's friend and biographer Wilhelm Waiblinger points out), a herald of the Idea of Beauty and interpreter of the gods of classical mythology, results in a vision of nature that is as layered as it is profound.
My attempt to reconstruct it is articulated on three levels, interwoven throughout my exposition, which respect three of the communicative modes adopted by Hölderlin in his works. The first level is that of the theoretical writings: a reflection on the complex fragment Judgment and Being (Urteil und Seyn), will show how behind central concepts such as those of Primordial Division, Necessity, Being and Injury (or Violation), which are foregrounded in the context of Hölderlin's objections to Fichte's (and possibly Schelling's) philosophy of identity, lie the foundations of the Hölderlinian conception of nature.
"And, behold, it was very good". Perfection and perfectibility of creation in Ancient Christian exegesis of Gen 1
Benjamin Gleede, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen
The goodness and perfection of the world created is one of the most prominent affirmations in the Mosaic account of its generation in Gen 1 (vv. 4, 8, 12, 18, 21, 25 and 31). Christian exegesis of this text, however, starts from a reality in need of salvation, a world deeply corrupted and distorted by sin and death. Especially the presupposition of an intially all good, even prefect creations provokes the problem of theodicy, the question how a creator god who had everything laid out perfectly in the beginning can be expected to allow it all to take a turn for the worse. How this problem is tackled by Christian exegetes during the first five centuries, will be the main subject of this presentation.
Programme
09.00 Lecture Claudia Luchetti
10.30 Coffee break
11.00 Lecture Benjamin Gleede