Graduate Philosophy

Jean-Luc Marion

In April of 2008 Jean-Luc Marion discussed his work with a class of graduate philosophy students who had been studying his writings during the spring semester. Jean-Luc Marion is an internationally known French Catholic philosopher and theologian who works in the areas of modern philosophy, contemporary phenomenology and philosophy of religion and is known for his attempt to synthesize the Catholic intellectual tradition with post-modernist thought. Marion studied at the University Paris X ñ Nanterre and the Sorbonne. He did graduate work in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris where he studied with Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. Marion was also influenced by the theologians Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar and the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. He has taught at the University of Poitiers, the University Paris X ñ Nanterre. He currently teaches at the Sorbonne and the University of Chicago. In 1992 Prof. Marion was awarded the Grand Prix du Philosophie de l'Academie Francaise. Some of his original work in philosophy concerns the notion of a saturated phenomenon; the idea that there are phenomena of such overflowing givenness that our consciousness of these phenomena are flooded or saturated. Marion is a prolific writer. His writings include:

• God Without Being
• Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger and Phenomenology
• Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics
• On Descartes' Metaphysical Prism
• The Idol and Distance: Five Studies
• Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness
• In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena.
• Prolegomena to Charity
• The Crossing of the Visible
• The Erotic Phenomenon: Six Meditations
• On the Ego and on God
• Descartes' Grey Ontology: Cartesian Science & Aristotelian Thought in the Regulae
• The Visible and the Revealed
• Descartes' White Theology