Past Event: Post-Kantian European Phil: Robert Stern (Yale and Univ. of Sheffield)

Title: Løgstrup’s Ethical Demand

Description:
The Danish theologian and philosopher K. E. Løgstrup (1905-81) wrote his main text The Ethical Demand in 1956, and it is increasingly being recognised as a major contribution to ethics within the broadly phenomenological tradition. The aim of this talk will be to introduce Løgstrup’s key ideas, particularly his claim that our interdependence as vulnerable creatures gives rise to an ethical demand to use our resulting power over other people for their own good rather than our own, a demand that is then characterised as radical, silent, one-sided and unfullfilable, and which Løgstrup claims only makes sense if we understand life as a gift, though not necessarily in any theological way