Terrence Deacon on the Emergent Process of Thinking as Reflected in Language Processing
Release Date: 09/16/2020
From Revolution to Survival?
THEORY TO NO END
The Left's transition from revolution to strategies of survival reflects the realization that the old hope for a sudden, miraculous break is now obsolete. Svenungsson, Jayne. “Prophetic Political Theology: Daniel Bensaïd’s Alternative Radicalism.” Nordisk Judaistik, vol. 36, no. 1, 2025.
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Can Prophetic Politics Resist Tyranny?
THEORY TO NO END
Prophetic politics does not weaken resistance. Rashkover, Randi. “Prophetic Politics and Tyranny: A Reassessment of Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption.” Political Theology : The Journal of Christian Socialism, vol. 22, no. 8, 2021, pp. 725–30.
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Close Reading: Elad Lapidot on Levinas's Political Theology
THEORY TO NO END
Levinas’s political theology views Rome, not Christianity, as Judaism’s most significant rival. Lapidot, Elad. “Rome Better Than Christ: Levinas’s (Negative) Political Theology.” Political Theology : The Journal of Christian Socialism, vol. 25, no. 7, 2024, pp. 740–58.
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Close Reading: Julia Brown on Locke's Scriptural Hermeneutics
THEORY TO NO END
Locke subordinated revelation to reason out of political caution against religious enthusiasts. Brown, Julia. “John Locke on Reading the Bible: Rational Obscurity and the Lockean ‘Rule.’” Political theology : the journal of Christian Socialism 24.5 (2023): 447–464.
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György Geréby on the Political Theology of Erik Peterson
THEORY TO NO END
György Geréby is Associate professor in the Medieval Studies Department at the Central European University, Budapest and Vienna. He is Historian of Medieval and Late Antique philosophy and theology, with a research interest in methodology in medieval philosophy and theology, theory of language and proof, and its applicability to conceptual analysis. He has an additional interest in early Christianity and the apocrypha, and political theology. In this episode we discuss his article titled, "Political Theology versus Theological Politics: Erik Peterson and Carl Schmitt," published...
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Menachem Fisch on Contrasting Paradigms of Rabbinic Religiosity
THEORY TO NO END
Menachem Fisch is Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science, and Director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is former President of the Israel Society for History and Philosophy of Science, and former Chair of the National Committee for History and Philosophy of Science at the Israel Academy of Science. He has held several visiting research positions and published numerous monographs and articles in a variety of fields related to the theology of the talmudic literature In this episode we discuss , forthcoming...
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György Geréby on the Political Theology of Carl Schmitt
THEORY TO NO END
György Geréby is Associate professor in the Medieval Studies Department at the Central European University, Budapest and Vienna. He is Historian of Medieval and Late Antique philosophy and theology, with a research interest in methodology in medieval philosophy and theology, theory of language and proof, and its applicability to conceptual analysis. He has an additional interest in early Christianity and the apocrypha, and political theology. In this episode we discuss his article titled, "The Theology of Carl Schmitt," published in Politeja 18 (2021).
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Adi Ophir on Divine Violence in the Hebrew Bible
THEORY TO NO END
Adi Ophir is a visiting professor affiliated with the Cogut Institute for the Humanities and the Center for Middle East Studies. At the Cogut Institute, he directs the initiative. He is also Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University. His current research focuses on political concepts as events, performances, and discursive apparatuses, with special attention to three concepts: “concept,” “political,” and “the Other.” He studies types of Others in general, and the structure and genealogy of one type of Other in particular–the Goy, the Jew’s Other. He is the founding editor of...
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Siphiwe Dube on Black African Neo/Pentecostal Political Subjectivity
THEORY TO NO END
Siphiwe Ignatius Dube is Senior Lecturer and former Head in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He is an author of numerous interdisciplinary articles and chapters (and has also supervised) on a range of topics covering African politics and religion, feminisms, post-colonial literature, race, religion and masculinities, religion and identity politics, religion and popular culture, and transitional justice. He is a United World College (Atlantic College) alumnus, recipient of the Prince of Wales Scholarship, the Don Norton Award, the NRF-DST...
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Miguel Vatter on Atheism, Post-secularism and the Legitimacy of Democracy
THEORY TO NO END
Miguel Vatter is Professor in Political Science at the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University. He has published extensively on political theology. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, his most recent books are Living Law: Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt ( 2021) and Divine Democracy: Political Theology After Carl Schmitt (2020). A complete list of publications is found here: In this episode we discuss his book chapter titled, "Atheism, Post-secularism and the Legitimacy of Democracy" published in Political Theology Today: 100 Years after Carl...
info_outlineTerrence W. Deacon is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. His research combines developmental evolutionary biology and comparative neuroanatomy to investigate the evolution of human cognition, and is particularly focused on the explanation of emergent processes in biology and cognition.
Dr. Deacon received a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from Harvard university in 1984. He taught at Harvard from 1984-1992, at Boston University from 1992-2002, and was a research associate at McLean Hospital and the Harvard Medical School from 1992-2000, before joining the University of California, Berkeley. His honors include being a Harvard Lehman Fellow, a Harvard Medical School Psychiatric Neuroscience Fellow, a Western Washington University Centenary Alumni Fellow, and the 69th James Arthur Lecturer for the American Museum of Natural History.
He has published over 100 research papers in collected volumes and scholarly journals, and his acclaimed book, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (W. W. Norton & Co., 1997) was awarded the I. J. Stanley Prize for the most influential book in Anthropology in 2005 by the School of American Research.
His 2012 book, Incomplete Nature: The Emergence of Mind from Matter, explores the problem of explaining the emergence of end-directed processes in nature, from biological functions to mental processes, and integrates many of his interests in complex biological systems.
In this interview we discuss his article titled, "The Emergent Process of Thinking as Reflected in Language Processing."