French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion returns to Villanova for three-week seminar

Jean-Luc Marion, professor of philosophy at the Université de Paris/Sorbonne and the University of Chicago, spent three weeks in September at Villanova as Visiting Professor of Christian Philosophy. Marion gave a mini-seminar titled "God and Phenomenology," which was attended by faculty, students and several invited local professors. He also delivered a public lecture, "The Formal Idea of the Infinite."

According to Dr. John R. Caputo, the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy, Marion is the leading Catholic philosopher in France and, arguably, Europe and the United States as well. He is an internationally recognized expert in the philosophy of Descartes. Several of his books on Descartes, including The Metaphysical Prism of Descartes and Cartesian Questions, have been translated into English.

However, Marion is best known as the author of what Caputo describes as "a new and creative phenomenology of religion, centered around the idea of what he calls ‘God without being.’" This was the focus of his Villanova seminar.

"Marion goes back to the Patristic tradition and the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, which emphasized the primacy of the Good over Being as a predicate of God," Caputo said. "The distinctive turn that he has introduced has been to link the older tradition with the postmodern one, which has undertaken as systematic critique of the metaphysics of Being,"

Translations of Marion’s God Without Being: Hors Texte (Chicago, 1991), and Reduction and Givenness: Investigations on Husserl and Heidegger (Northwestern, 1998) have enabled him to have a major impact in the English-speaking world. Three new books, Idol and Distance (Fordham), Given Being (California) and Prolegomena to Charity (Fordham) will be available in the new future.

Marion is no stranger to Villanova. During his first visit in 1997, he engaged his friend and former teacher, Jacques Derrida, in a now famous debate on the problem of the "gift" at the first Religion and Postmodernism Conference. The book based on that conference, God, the Gift and Postmodernism (Indiana, 1999), was co-edited by Caputo and the Rev. Michael J. Scanlon, O.S.A, the Josephine C. Connelly Professor of Christian Theology.

Marion himself said he was pleased to make his recent return to Villanova, which he says is recognized in Europe, especially France, as a "stronghold for speculative, continental philosophy."