Plenary Speakers

Richard Kearney holds the Charles B. Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and has served as a Visiting Professor at University College Dublin, the University of Paris (Sorbonne), the Australian Catholic University and the University of Nice.

He is the author of over 20 books on European philosophy and literature (including two novels and a volume of poetry) and has edited or co-edited 16 more. His most recent publications include Anatheism (2012), Reimagining the Sacred (2015), Carnal Hermeneutics (2015) and Twinsome Minds: An Act of Double Remembrance (2018).

J. Aaron Simmons (Ph.D. Vanderbilt) is Professor of Philosophy at Furman University and current President of the Søren Kierkegaard Society (USA). Simmons is the author or editor of numerous books, including God and the Other, Christian Philosophy, The New Phenomenology, Kierkegaard’s God and the Good Life, Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion, and Phenomenology for the Twenty-First Century. Recently, he has also started a youtube channel called “Philosophy for Where We Find Ourselves.”

Keynote Address Title and Abstract:

“Of God and Trout Fishing: Phenomenology, Desire, and Faithfulness.”

Internal to the lived realities of the human condition, new phenomenology offers resources for thinking about relational identity and an open future (especially in light of the uncertainty, anxiety, and isolation occurring due to the pandemic). In particular, the stress on phenomenological “excess” enables a consideration of how the human condition is defined by desire for what remains yet to come. In contrast to the attempt to satisfy desire in concrete “successful” ways, this orientation of continued expectation might rightly be termed “faithfulness.” In the attempt to offer a constructive proposal for how we can appropriate such resources for where we find ourselves, J. Aaron Simmons looks to trout fishing as a phenomenological case study. Combining the religious, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of existence, trout fishing is a lived practice of desire for an expected end, and yet it also trains us for living into a future in which those expectations remain unfulfilled. Using selected works of the Snite Museum of Art as signposts for this phenomenological investigation, Simmons will suggest that by bringing together new phenomenology, trout fishing, and a little bit of open theism, we can get a better picture of how desire facilitates faithful living in light of embodied vulnerability.