SPAH Seminar Series Week 11: David Batho

Part of the SPAH Seminar Series, David Batho gives a talk on Kierkegaard’s Ethico-Religious Psychology of Silence

Kierkegaard’s writings on silence are ambiguous. In certain places, silence is presented as an essential feature of ’the demonic’. In other places, silence is presented as the sole route by which humans can meet with the eternal in time. So silence seems to be both demonic and divine. How can this be so? In this paper I elaborate Kierkegaard’s category of the demonic with special attention to silence. I disambiguate between the ‘muteness’ that defines the demonic, on the one hand, and the silence expressive of ‘a pact with the good’, on the other, and show how the latter can come to service in aid of someone trapped in the former.

About the speaker:
David Batho is Associate Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He has previously held positions at UCSB, Christ Church (Oxford), and the University of Essex.

To attend, please email spahpg@essex.ac.uk for the Zoom link.