Week 1
Week 1: 23 January
Paul Franks (Yale)
‘Published and Yet Not Published’: The German Idealist Struggle to Overcome the Obscurity of Philosophy
The Ethical Reading Seminar is not meeting this year (2026).
Conveners: Constanze Güthenke (Corpus Christi) and Hindy Najman (Oriel)
Week 1: 23 January
Paul Franks (Yale)
‘Published and Yet Not Published’: The German Idealist Struggle to Overcome the Obscurity of Philosophy
Week 2: 30 January
Christoph Markschies (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften/Humboldt-Universität)
Obscurity as driving force in Origen’s Bible Philology and Interpretation
Week 3: 6 February
Avigail Manekin (Hebrew University)
Obscure Words and Pseudo-Scripts in Ancient Jewish Magical Texts
Week 4: 13 February
Lea Niccolai (Cambridge)
Neoplatonic unknowns and the limits of logos
Week 5: 20 February
Frank Griffel (LMH)
Is There More to Causality than Correlation? Discussions About Evident and Obscure Causal Connections in Pre-Modern Islamic Philosophy and Theology
Week 6: 27 February
Giulia Maltagliati (Cambridge)
Trying Obscurity in Forensic Oratory: Between Rhetoric and Philology
Week 7: 6 March
Avishai Bar-Asher (Hebrew University)
Formatting the Book of Formation (Sefer Yeṣirah):
How Textual Restoration Illuminates the Obscurity of the Major Treatise of Jewish Mysticism
Week 8: 13 March
Felix Christen (Zürich)
Obscurity and the Time of Writing: Towards an Ethics of Philology in Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, and Szondi