“Dialectical Philology as the Art of Answering the Question ‘What Are We Now’?”

Annual Danforth Lecture in the Study of Religion

The lecture proposes a philological method that attempts to transcend the limitations of earlier methods, including those of the revisionists. It demands of philology not only to address the late modern forms of knowledge and their deleterious effects but also to engage the question of what sort of subjects we have become – and what we should be.

Wael B. Hallaq is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he has been teaching ethics, law, and intellectual history since 2009.

He has written over eighty scholarly articles and numerous books, treating logic, legal history, the modern state, and moral philosophy, within an overarching project concerned with the critique of modernity. This critique manifests itself particularly in the last three books he has published: The Impossible State (2013); Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (2018); and Reforming Modernity (2019), all published by Columbia University Press.

Professor Hallaq’s work has won many distinguished awards and is widely debated around the world, with numerous books, dissertations, and articles devoted to the study and analysis of his writings. His life and work have been featured in many symposia, talk shows, and documentaries by major media outlets. Many of his books and articles have been translated into over a dozen major languages, including  French, German, Italian, Japanese, Indonesian, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Russian, and Bengali.