pit (oil on canvas, 2007), courtesy Megan Craig

Judith Butler:
Is Judaism Zionism? Religious Sources for the Critique of Violence

Jürgen Habermas:
"The Political" - The Rational Sense of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology

Charles Taylor:
Why We Need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism

Cornel West:
Prophetic Religion and The Future of Capitalist Civilization

UPDATE: audio from this event has been posted at The Immanent Frame, an SSRC blog.

Biographies

Judith Butler is among the most prominent scholars working today in fields from rhetoric to feminist theory, and a central voice in interdisciplinary political and cultural discourse. She is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler is the author of numerous articles and books, including Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex"; The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection; Excitable Speech; Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death; and Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning. Most recently, Butler has written, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (Verso), and she has co-authored Is Critique Secular? with Saba Mahmood, Talal Asad, and Wendy Brown (forthcoming with University of California Press).

Jürgen Habermas is without question one of the most important living German philosophers, and arguably one of the most important European public intellectuals. He has authored about forty books, including The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and, most recently, The Dialectics of Secularization and Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays. Habermas has also edited a dozen other works, and he has been the subject of thousands of articles and monographs. In 2003, Habermas was awarded The Prince of Asturias Award in Social Sciences; in 2004, he was an Arts and Philosophy Kyoto Laureate; and in 2005 he received the Holberg International Memorial Prize.

Charles Taylor, who has recently won both the Kyoto and Templeton prizes, is among the world's most prominent philosophers and political theorists and among Canada's most important public intellectuals. Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University and the author of numerous books and articles, including, most recently, A Secular Age. He is also a contributor to The Immanent Frame, the Social Science Research Council's blog on secularism, religion, and the public sphere.

Cornel West is among America's most prominent public intellectuals, and he is also a leading philosopher, theologian, and cultural analyst and theorist of race. West is University Professor of Religion at Princeton University. His teaching and research interests include philosophy of religion and cultural criticism, and his current research focuses on the tragic, the comic, and the political. He is the author of numerous articles and books including The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, The Cornel West Reader, Race Matters, and Democracy Matters.

This event is co-sponsored by the Social Science Research Council & Stony Brook University.

This event is open to the public with photo ID.