University Gifford Lectures
The University’s 2024 Gifford lecture series begins on 6 May 2024.
This year’s six-part series examines the role of philosophy and art in addressing challenges in today’s world. It will be delivered by Professor Cornel R. West who will discuss ‘A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane’.
Although the in-person tickets are now sold out, all lectures will be live-streamed.
Professor West, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, teaches on the works of theologian, pastor and philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as on the philosophy of religion and African-American critical thought.
In decades of research into race, gender, and class struggle in the US and beyond, Professor West draws on influences spanning politics, classics, cultural theory, literature, music, and philosophy. His collaborations with musicians, filmmakers, and artists alike distinguish him as an innovative and contemporary public intellectual, who continually forges connections between academic inquiry and popular culture.
Professor West will reflect on his passionate conviction that the vocation of philosophy can be, in the words of jazz musician John Coltrane, a force for good in a broken world. Drawing on a decolonizing and democratizing model of Christianity, his lectures evoke philosophers and artists from Plato to T.S. Eliot, Erasmus to Toni Morrison, to reveal how disruptive hope, the holy folly of faith, and a revolutionary love might sustain us through catastrophe.
All lectures are live-streamed between 5pm and 7pm. Please register via Eventbrite:
Register for Gifford Lectures 2024
About the Gifford Lectures
The Gifford Lectures were established in 1887 under Adam Lord Gifford, a Senator of the College of Justice. They are held at each of the four ancient Scottish universities, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St Andrews. For well over a hundred years, the lectures have enabled notable scholars to contribute to the advancement of philosophical and theological thought.