ESR will welcome Jeffrey Dudiak to campus on Wednesday, February 9th. Dudiak, Associate Professor of Philosophy at The King's University College in Edmonton, Canada, will speak on "The Spirit of Truth among Friends" in the ESR dining room, beginning at 4:00 pm. All are welcome!

For more information, contact Jennie Isbell, Director of Outreach, at 765-983-1585 or isbelje@earlham.edu.

Talk Overview

“The Spirit of Truth among Friends”

Modernity has bequeathed to us a version of truth governed by the perceived relationship between a knowing subject, and a known object, or between what Charles Taylor has recently called a “buffered self,” and what Martin Heidegger insightfully referred to as the “world as picture.” This results, however, in the bifurcation of truth, giving us both subjective truth, and objective truth, but with no way of reconciling them. Modern religious thought, and Quaker thought with it, I maintain, is animated by the question of whether religious truth should be conceived of as being of the subjective, or the objective, variety. That is, one of the principal divisions within contemporary Quakerism is, I argue, a side-effect of this modernist conceptualization. As “modernity” gives way to “post-modernity,” might this be an opportunity to re-think truth, and open up new possibilities for conversation among Friends? In this essay I will hint at such a possibility, proposing a “truth” that is “spiritual” before it is epistemological.

Jeffrey Dudiak Bio

Jeffrey Dudiak is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at The King’s University College in Edmonton, Canada, an Adjunct Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta, and Adjunct Faculty at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. He holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit te Amsterdam (Free University of Amsterdam), and specializes in 19th and 20th Century Continental philosophy of religion and ethics, particularly in the phenomenological tradition. His principal publication to date is The Intrigue of Ethics: A reading of the Idea of Discourse in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas (Fordham U.P., 2001). He is currently working on a book, entitled In Spirit and in Truth, in which he is attempting to understand truth as most fundamentally a spiritual phenomenon. This work is both inspired by, and hopes to inform, his experience as a life-long Quaker. He cu rrently serves as clerk of Program Committee of the Friends Association for Higher Education, and is Canadian Yearly Meeting’s representative to Friends United Meeting. His wife Julie Robinson is active in the poetry scene in Edmonton, having recently completed a manuscript of poems based on the life of Elizabeth Fry, and his 10-year-old son is happiest on the mound, throwing strikes.