Feb 2: Horst Lange lecture

LECTURE
Professor Horst Lange
University of Central Arkansas
Thursday, February 2, 5:00-6:00pm
602 Cathedral of Learning (Humanities Center)
On the Complexities of Religious Discourse in the
Eighteenth Century: The Case of Goethe
Reception to follow
Professor Lange, who has advanced degrees from the Universities of Virginia and Tübingen, has published extensively at the intersection of literature with both philosophy and religious studies. His monograph on Kant’s metaphysics of experience reconstructs the transcendental deduction as a version of Wittgenstein’s private language argument. In addition to a series of recent articles on the semiotics of divine intentions in Goethe; Goethe and Spinoza; and sexuality and Christianity in Goethe’s Classicism, Professor Lange is working on two monographs. The first will try to overturn the standard reading of Goethe’s Werther as a document of sentimental literature by analyzing it against the background of a proper understanding of Spinoza’s Ethics. The second, which reconstructs Goethe’s thinking about religion in a heretical way, is the topic of this lecture.
Sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center, the Departments of German and Religious Studies, the Programs in Cultural Studies, West European Studies, and Jewish Studies, and the Group on Eighteenth Century Studies
Questions? Contact the Department of German at 412-624-5909 or grmndept@pitt.edu