Uploaded January 2022 | Updated September 2026, 48 minutes ago
There is a reason Edmund Husserl invokes the theological trope “conversion [Konversion]” as a critical term describing the well-known epoché or suspension-cum-bracketing of the naturalist interpretation of the psyche and its world. This talk tracks the motif of conversion towards the anti-naturalist attitude in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology and Cartesian Meditations, together with its analogical terms in authors such as Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion. What emerges is a more complex understanding of the relationship between religion and spiritual experience, theology and philosophy than has been suggested in the standard reception of phenomenology’s distinctive “turn.”
Professor Hent de Vries is Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities and Professor of German, Religious Studies, Comparative Literature, and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is currently serving his second term as director of the summer School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University (SCT), Ithaca. In 2018, he was the Titulaire of the Chaire de Métaphysique Étienne Gilson at the Institut Catholique, Paris. In November 2020, he was the recipient of the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises, one of the Grands Prix awarded yearly by the Académie Française. He is the editor of the book series “Cultural Memory in the Present,” published by Stanford University Press. His research interests are Modern European thought, history and critique of metaphysics, philosophy of religion, religion and violence, religion and media, literature and temporality.
There is a reason Edmund Husserl invokes the theological trope “conversion [Konversion]” as a critical term describing the well-known epoché or suspension-cum-bracketing of the naturalist interpretation of the psyche and its world. This talk tracks the motif of conversion towards the anti-naturalist attitude in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology and Cartesian Meditations, together with its analogical terms in authors such as Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion. What emerges is a more complex understanding of the relationship between religion and spiritual experience, theology and philosophy than has been suggested in the standard reception of phenomenology’s distinctive “turn.”
Professor Hent de Vries is Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities and Professor of German, Religious Studies, Comparative Literature, and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He is currently serving his second term as director of the summer School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University (SCT), Ithaca. In 2018, he was the Titulaire of the Chaire de Métaphysique Étienne Gilson at the Institut Catholique, Paris. In November 2020, he was the recipient of the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises, one of the Grands Prix awarded yearly by the Académie Française. He is the editor of the book series “Cultural Memory in the Present,” published by Stanford University Press. His research interests are Modern European thought, history and critique of metaphysics, philosophy of religion, religion and violence, religion and media, literature and temporality.
