This event will feature a lecture by Joseph Cohen (Professor of Philosophy, University College Dublin) and a response by Nicolas De Warren (Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies, Penn State).

Professor Cohen's lecture is entitled “From Antijudaism to Another Promise for Justice.”

Beginning with the important distinction between anti-judaism and anti-semitism, we shall trace the history of antijudaism culminating in antisemitism from Hegel to Heidegger. Reading from Hegel’s early theological writings – to identify certain major traits of philosophical anti-judaism – as well as from Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte – to mark how and where a resolute antisemitism has conjoined with the “history of the truth of Being” – we will seek to develop an interpretative hypothesis as to how and why antijudaism and antisemitism enjoins and informs the history of philosophy. From this hypothesis, we will deploy an idea of justice which at once undermines this historical becoming of antijudaism and antisemitism in philosophy as well as proposes, in a specific relation to a certain reading of the Judaic idea of the Law, an irreducible attention and responsibility for singularity. Indeed, we shall examine how the traditional divide between Law and Love will shift to a wholly other trope of signification commanding another impulse irreducible to this traditional binarism and incessantly formulating an exceptional responsibility in an each time singular reiteration of justice in and for our historical “consciousness” and “identity”.

Professor De Warren's response is entitled “Peace, the watchword for humankind: Judaism in the Time of the Nations.”

The aim of this talk is to examine the affirmation of Judaism as an original philosophical ethics committed to the cultivation of peace among the nations and hospitality among strangers and exiles on the earth in the time of war in the writings of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas.

JOSEPH COHEN is professor of philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland since 2007. He has held numerous visiting professorships of philosophy at various European universities in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium. He has authored Le spectre juif de Hegel (Paris, Galilée, 2005 ; Italian transl. : Il Spettro Giudaico in Hegel, Milan, Mimesis, 2026), Le sacrifice de Hegel (Paris, Galilée, 2007 ; Italian transl. : Il Sacrificio di Hegel, Milan, Mimesis, 2025), Alternances de la métaphysique. Essais sur E. Levinas (Paris, Galilée, 2009). He co-authored, with D. Moran, The Husserl Dictionary (London, Bloomsbury-Continuum, 2012) and, with R. Zagury-Orly, L’adversaire privilégié. Heidegger, les Juifs et nous, (Paris, Galilée, 2021). He has co-edited, with R. Zagury-Orly, Heidegger et « les juifs » (Paris, Grasset, 2015), Heidegger. Qu’appelle-t-on le lieu? (Paris, Gallimard, 2008), Derrida. L’événement déconstruction (Paris, Gallimard, 2012) and Judéités – questions pour Jacques Derrida (Paris, Galilée, 2003 ; English transl. : Fordham University Press, 2009). He is the founder and lead project investigator of “Jewish Thought and Contemporary Philosophy”, housed at the Newman Centre for the Study of Religions, University College Dublin and co-founding member of the Irish Phenomenological Circle. Joseph Cohen has also published extensively on German Idealism (Kant, Hegel, Schelling), Judaism and Antijudaism/Antisemitism in the history of philosophy, phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas) and deconstruction (Derrida). His philosophical research is focused on contemporary continental philosophy and the questions of sacrifice and history, forgiveness and alterity, truth and justice.

Nicolas de Warren is the author of four books: Husserl and the Promise of Time (2010), A Momentary Breathlessness in the Sadness of Time (2018), Original Forgiveness (2020), and German Philosophy and the First World War (2023). He is currently working on a book project on a phenomenology of the afterlife that examines different senses in which, whether individually, collectively, or historically, the dead haunt the living. He is in the final stages of completing two co-authored books: The Erosion of Trust and Truthfulness in the Age of Democratic Uncertainty and We Nuclear People: Responsibility for Nuclear Waste in the Vastness of Time. de Warren has published widely in the areas of phenomenology, ethics, nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, aesthetics, political philosophy, and literature. Among my most recent published papers:  “The Darkest of Secrets: Waste, Temporality, and the Planetary Accumulation of Hades” (2025), “Conceptions of the Concept in Cohen, Cassirer, Rickert, Dilthey, and Nietzsche" (2025), “Husserl’s Phenomenology of Image-Consciousness in the Age of the Iconic and Digital Turns" (2025) “Cash Rules Everything Around Me: Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money" (2024), “‘Grand, Ungodly, God-Like Man’: On the Symptomatology of Fanaticism" (2023), “On the Many Senses of the Political in Sartre’s Writings” (2023), and “Where were you when I laid earth’s foundations? Levinas and The Book of Job" (2022). de Warren had also edited a number of volumes, most recently: Phenomenology of the Digital Age: The Virtual, the Fictional, the Magical (2024) and The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Europe (2021). He is the editor of Levinas Studies, and co-editor of the book series Contributions to Phenomenology and the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology as well as co-editor at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He has held visiting professorships in China, Hong Kong, Japan, France, and Italy.