Professor Cornel West Lecture Four: History Adagio

Prof. Cornel West delivers the 2024 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled ‘A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane’. This is the fourth of six lectures, titled ‘History Adagio’.

In this lecture, Prof. West argues that the greatest breakthrough in modern philosophy is found in the works of the Italian Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), whose perceptions wedded wisdom, eloquence, prudence, and providence. His 1725 work, The New Science, was the first great philosophic European response to the New World. In it, Vico saw Europe as locked into a dominant ‘barbarism of reflection’, yielding a rapacious individualism, and reducing philosophy to a paralyzing scepticism. As Prof. West discusses in this talk, Vico responded to this scepticism with his conception of ‘ingenium’, a kind of ingenuity or improvisation that accentuates our creative power to transcend savagery.

Prof. West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy & Christian Practice, Union Theological Seminary, New York. His teaching and publications focus on roles of race, gender, and class struggle in American society, synthesizing influences from Christianity, the Black Church, democratic socialism, left-wing populism, neopragmatism and transcendentalism. A musician and spoken word artist, Prof. West has collaborated with acts across the rap, hip-hop and funk genres, as well as appearing in the Matrix series and many documentary films.

The prestigious Gifford Lectureships, held at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St Andrews, have been delivered annually since 1888 by a succession of distinguished international scholars. The Lectureships were established by Adam Lord Gifford (1820-1887) to ‘promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term – in other words, the knowledge of God’, and have enabled a most notable field of scholars to contribute to the advancement of theological thought.

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