Athens and Jerusalem

This workshop engages the trope “Athens and Jerusalem” as both history and critique. The terms suggest tensions between the peoples of the Book(s) and Greek philosophy, and they continue to shape scholarly discourse through the assessment of thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, who are more popular now than ever. “Athens” suggests the golden age of philosophy, moral realism, and the mapping of analytical categories, including praxis, poesis, and phronesis. “Jerusalem” is the term given to revelation and its realism grounded in texts emanating from the divine, eternal, and natural—to use Thomas Aquinas’ terms. What do the terms mean today for present representations of politics, philosophy, history, and literature? The terms suggest continuity with past tradition, but how deeply rooted historically is the notion that they are indeed in tension? What do the tropes imply for twenty-first century thought and for contemporary politics? Are they embedded in discourses that animate specific ideological directions? Does it make sense to trace the genealogy of the terms if not their respective core meanings if such exist? This genealogy requires an examination of the changing nature of reason and revelation through central lines of western thought. That requires also that we take account of the influence of Medieval Islam. What notion of reason did Islam and medieval Judaism bring to the table? What notion of revelation? More particularly, what claims about Aristotelian natural law were made, and how did they inform Thomas, whose work is a bedrock for a significant part of the natural law tradition. Considering this medieval moment becomes important if we are to unravel reason from revelation or revelation from reason.

Faculty coordinators:
Leonard Kaplan, Mortimer Jackson Professor of Law, Director of the Project for Law and the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and Law Fellow in Humanities at the Institute for Research in the Humanities;
Rudy Koshar, George L. Mosse WARF Professor of History and Religious Studies, and Director of the Religious Studies Program;
Mary Layoun, Professor of Comparative Literature.