Standing on What is Given: A Symposium on Gratitude, Creation, and the Technological Mindset
Matthew CrawfordSenior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies and Culture
Mark ShiffmanSaint Patrick’s Seminary and University
Candace VoglerUniversity of Chicago
Open to students and faculty. For more information, contact dstrobach@lumenchristi.org. Location TBD.
This event is cosponsored by the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought and made possible through the support of ‘In Lumine: Supporting the Catholic Intellectual Tradition on Campuses Nationwide’ (Grant #62372) from the John Templeton Foundation.
In his Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Ratzinger saw that at the root of the “technological mindset” was an anxiety about how man can come to know the world. Ratzinger contrasted the technological orientation to the world with an orientation of belief. Belief was not incomplete or provisional knowing, but a trustful standing upon and loyalty to that which is given by Creation.
In this symposium, Matt Crawford, Mark Shiffman, and Candace Vogler will come together to discuss the problem of virtue in light of Ratzinger’s distinction. Crawford will begin by exploring how the virtue of gratitude often eludes us under a technological mindset. A better approach is to boldly entrust oneseslf to that which one cannot make or fully grasp.
Mark Shiffman will respond by using this same distinction between technocracy and givenness to and explain the difference between optimism and hope.
Candace Vogler will comment as well.
On Saturday, Matt Crawford and Mark Schiffman will lead a Master Class on Max Scheler's work, Ressentiment.
Matthew Crawford studied physics at UC Santa Barbara and then turned to political philosophy, earning a PhD from the University of Chicago. He has published articles on ancient Greek philosophy, neuroscience, and the philosophy of science. He is the author of Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road (2020); The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (2015); and Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (2009), a New York Times best seller that has been translated into seven languages.
Mark Shiffman is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Politics at Saint Patrick’s Seminary and University of the Archdiocese of San Francisco. He is the translator of Aristotle’s De Anima (Hackett, 2010). His scholarly studies span the fields of ancient philosophy, political theory, and the Catholic tradition, and his writings have appeared in Communio, Commonweal, First Things, Public Discourse, and New Polity and on Front Porch Republic.
Candace Vogler is the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Philosophy and Professor in the College at the University of Chicago, and Principal Investigator on "Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life," a project funded by the John Templeton Foundation. She has authored two books, John Stuart Mill's Deliberative Landscape: An Essay in Moral Psychology (Routledge, 2001) and Reasonably Vicious (Harvard University Press, 2002), and essays in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and literature, cinema, psychoanalysis, gender studies, sexuality studies, and other areas. Her research interests are in practical philosophy (particularly the strand of work in moral philosophy indebted to Elizabeth Anscombe), practical reason, Kant's ethics, Marx, and neo-Aristotelian naturalism.
She received a Ph.D. from University of Pittsburgh in 1994 and a Ph.D. certificate, Program for the Study of Culture, in 1992. She received a B.A. from Mills College in Philosophy with Honors in 1985.
