Mytelka Memorial Lecture – Mutability and Mediation: The Kabbalah of Lady Anne Conway (1631-79)

The Program in Judaic Studies’ hosting of this year’s Mytelka Scholar, Paul Franks, continues with this public lecture on Wednesday, March 18.

Lady Anne Conway’s Principle of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy (1690) is widely recognized as a major work of early modern philosophy, responding creatively to Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza. Conway belonged to a circle involved in translating and commenting on Zoharic and Lurianic texts, and this is what she means by “the most ancient philosophy.” What approach should be taken to Conway’s engagement with kabbalistic ideas, with which scholars have struggled? What is the significance of this engagement for our understanding of Conway’s central ideas of the mutability of creatures and of the need for a mediator between this realm and the immutable God? Paul Franks will argue that Conway’s work demands a “constellation research” method, and that, notwithstanding Conway’s reference to “the most ancient philosophy,” her constellation includes contemporaneous Jewish thinkers. He will consider the relationship between her argument for the mediator and Abraham ha-Kohen Herrera’s argument for Adam Kadmon, kabbalah’s primordial human.

Open to the public. Kosher refreshments will be available.

More about Paul Franks

Paul Franks is Robert F. and Patricia Ross Weis Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Yale University. He works at the intersection of Jewish philosophy, Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, and contemporary analytic philosophy. Recent work has focused on Lurianic kabbalah and its development within early modern and post-Kantian philosophy. His current interests include purposiveness in nature and mind, the development of ethical personality, and the relationship between writer, authorial persona, and reader in kabbalah and philosophy. In addition to numerous articles on German Idealism and Jewish philosophy, Franks is the translator and annotator (with Michael L. Morgan) of Franz Rosenzweig: Philosophical and Theological Writings (Hackett, 2000), and he is the author of All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Harvard, 2005). He is currently writing a book on the central concepts of post-Kantian Idealism in light of their kabbalistic roots and, with Michael L. Morgan, a history of Jewish philosophy from the 1490s to the 1990s.