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Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) |
Voegelin is one of the great minds of the 20th century, and in the philosophies of history and consciousness he stands alone. Because his thinking embraced philosophy, law, history, politics and theology, his thought does not fit into any one academic discipline.
He fled Vienna in 1938 to escape the Nazis. He settled at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge after interim appointments at Harvard University and the University of Alabama. Eventually he became a US citizen. He became one of the first to hold a Boyd professorship at LSU. During this time he delivered his famous Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago, published as The New Science of Politics (1952). In 1956 and 1957 he published the first three volumes of his magnum opus, Order and History.
In 1958 he accepted a position at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and was given the chair vacant since the death of Max Weber in 1920. It gave him the opportunity to create a political science institute modeled along the lines of classical science, rather than the usual voter pattern analysis he derisively termed “descriptive institutionalism.” Several of the doctoral candidates he supervised became prominent in America and Europe. During his Munich years, he alternated semesters in Munich with semesters teaching in the US, often at the University of Notre Dame.
In 1968 he retired from Munich and returned to the US, settling in Palo Alto at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where he became the Henry J. Salvatori Distinguished Scholar. He continued to write, teach, lecture and mentor students until his death. The capstone of his thinking, his philosophy of consciousness, was developed during these later years.
Voegelin was also a prolific correspondent and a selection of his letters is being published in two volumes, including his letters to such varied personalities as William F. Buckley, Jr., Karl Löwith, and Marshall McLuhan.
Voegelin in Toronto
The final panel discussion, "Criticism: Science, and/or Scholarship," included Roger Poole, Voegelin, Bernard Lonergan, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Frederick Lawrence moderated both panels and the second panel was co-moderated by Philip McShane.
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The conference was videotaped by students and the tapes may be found in the York University archives. This DVD is based on copies prepared for the Eric Voegelin Society by Kathryn Elder, Film and Video Librarian of York University.
Maben Poirier published Professor Zdravko Planinc's Conference Schedule and Synopsis in the Voegelin Research News. When the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin were being assembled for publication, the editors included the transcription in Volume 33 under the title, “Structures in Consciousness.” There the editors quoted Planinc:
'. . .Voegelin did not have time to complete his lecture, as he had outlined it. From comparing his lecture outline with the video-tapes of his subsequent impromptu remarks during the question period and on other panels, it became quite evident that Voegelin simply continued to speak along the lines drawn up in his outline throughout the conference."
[Voegelin's second intervention in the Panel on Reading is not found in any text so can be enjoyed as original material here.]
The Panelists
Bernard Lonergan, S.J.
( 1904–85)
"Lonergan's most noted book, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, explores what it is, and what it can be, to inquire attentively, intelligently, reasonably, and responsibly, whatever the object of the inquiry may be. Method in Theology stands, with Insight, as Bernard Lonergan's most important work. It is Lonergan's answer to those who would argue that in this time of cultural change and dissolution the believer is afloat on a sea of multiplying theologies, without rudder or compass."
Lonergan Institute, Boston College
Hans-George Gadamer (1900-2002)
Hans Georg Gadamer was born in Marburg, Germany. He studied with Nicolai Hartmann and the neo-Kantian philosopher Paul Natorp. Gadamer met Husserl and Heidegger at Freiberg in the early '20's. He earned a doctorate under Heidegger and later credited Heidegger's hermeneutics as the foundation for his own development. Gadamer's most important work was Truth and Method, first published in 1960 as Wahrheit und Methode. In it he repudiated the view that the methods of the natural sciences were valid in matters of the person and society.
Allan Bloom
(1939-1992)
Allan Bloom studied under Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago. Leaving Chicago in 1962, he taught at Yale, Cornell and the University of Toronto. In 1979 he returned to the University of Chicago and remained there until his death. He was best known in academia for his translations of Rousseau's Emile and Plato's Republic.
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