Professor of Religious Studies Heidi Ravven gave a paper at the iternational conference on "Kant and Maimonides: In Commemoration of the 1000 Years since their Respective Deaths," of the Hermann Cohen-Gesellschaft, The Academy for Jewish Philosophy and Arizona State University in October in Tempe. Her paper was titled "Maimonides' Non-Kantian Moral Psychology: Maimonides and Kant on the Garden of Eden and the Genealogy of Morals."
The conference gathered together a select group of experts on Maimonides and on the 19th century Neo-Kantian philosopher, Hermann Cohen. Cohen, who wrote on Jewish philosophical matters as well as on Kant, shaped the interpretation of Maimonides in a Kantian direction for several generations of scholars.
After the conference, Ravven conducted 10 days of interviews with Navajo activists and professors on Navajo ethical and religious ideas. The interviews were conducted as part of Ravven's Ford Foundation project to rethink philosphical ethics and American pluralism in the light of Spinoza's philosophy. Ravven is exploring native and other non-Christian approaches to ethics and politics that resonate with Spinoza's understanding of the human person as a natural system within ever larger natural systems, biological and social. Her aim is to expose and critique the normative and pervasive Christian presuppositions underlying the standard Western discourses of philosophical ethics and political theory. She is hoping to discover resources among native and immigrant non-Christian communities for alternative points of view, as Spinoza did in the 17th century. Ravven aims to help develop ways to introduce these alternative understandings into how we think about what it means to be an ethical and humane person and also what we mean by calling the United States a pluralistic society.
