10/07/2025 08:30
- 10:45
HALL: Lecture Hall 03
Proponent:
Schlenker C.,
Stoppel H.
Chair:
Schlenker C.,
Stoppel H.
Speaker:
Goldberg M.N.,
Okafor A.,
Schlenker C.,
Stoppel H.
Humans used to live in a world in which all the important things were eternal and immutable. So immutable in fact, that the question of how things can move (and therefore change) needed intense discussion. And for a long time, the Christian God and humans coram Deo were seen by the same terms. God is eternal, immutable, apathetic, omnipresent, omnipotent… and so on. The human soul is immortal and will be eternalized after death. Substance of any kind remains the same, independent of accidentals and time. With one decisive difference: Everything but Godself has a beginning, is created. But created to remain selfsame from their creation onwards.
Now, most of us seem to live in a post-postmodern world that is fragmented, where things are fleeting and almost impossible to grasp except retrospectively. Philosophy has come to a similar view, especially historicism and phenomenology. Theology has adapted as well, turned to the historical, the processual, the contextual. This turn is appreciated by many, viewed with concern by some. But across the board there seems to be a renewed awareness of the importance of phenomena that endure and persist: God, the Crucified and/as Resurrected, the identity and restitution of the human person beyond their death, some kind of history of humans on this planet. Therefore, also, an awareness that undesirable phenomena persist, be it vulnerability or exposedness.
So how can we talk about persistency, of God, of humans, of history - but also of evil and suffering? Do we need to go back to metaphysics of the classical kind or are there new ways of thinking about those phenomena and of duration, change, and persistency as phenomena themselves? This panel invites contributions that reflect on one or several of those questions of persistency or on the question of persistency itself. From theological and philosophical perspectives, be they phenomenological, historical, scholastic, metaphysical…