Chris Watkin

Chris Watkin is a lecturer in the department of French at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Murray Edwards College. His publications include Phenomenology or Deconstruction? (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), Difficult Atheism (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) and From Plato to Postmodernism (Bristol Classical Press, 2011). Difficult Atheism argues that ‘atheism’ as traditionally conceived is increasingly inadequate to describe the positions taken by French philosophers today, and that philosophical atheism is, as yet at least, non-existent. From Plato to Postmodernism takes the reader on a cultural journey through 3000 years of Western history, telling the story of the philosophy, literature, music and art that has shaped Western civilization. He is currently working on the notion of equality in contemporary thought and society.Chris completed his doctoral thesis in philosophy (on the relation of deconstruction and phenomenology) at Cambridge University in 2006, looking particularly at the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricœur, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida.

2011 Forum Sessions

Luncheon Workshops

Pre-Forum Seminar

Post-Forum Seminar

Luncheon Workshops

Western Cultural Overview. The Death of God, Modernism and Existentialism

This workshop is offered in the spirit of John Stott’s ‘double listening’. For Stott, Christians are to be ‘listening to the voice of God in Scripture, and listening to the voices of the modern world, with all their cries of anger, pain and despair’. When it comes to listening to God’s word, many Christians have benefited from a ‘bible overview’, showing how the narrative of Scripture unfolds God’s revelation as one coherent story. But we are often less aware of the narrative that makes sense of our contemporary world. As a result, contemporary art can seem impenetrable, contemporary philosophy nonsensical, and contemporary culture impervious to the claims of the gospel. This workshop, then, continues the speaker’s ‘cultural overview’, weaving its way through Western philosophy, literature, art and music in order to show how nearly four thousand years of Western history unfold one coherent story in terms of which we can understand the cultures that surround us today. This workshop picks up from the pre-forum Western cultural seminar to consider what Nietzsche meant (and what he did not mean!) by the ‘death of God’, and how the death of God influences early twentieth-century modernism and mid twentieth-century existentialism. On our way through the overview I shall seek to offer a brief Christian appraisal of the cultural themes and ideas covered. The workshop is intended to be accessible for those who have not attended the Pre-Forum Seminar.

 The Denominations of Atheism Understood as Christian Heresies

This workshop identifies two main ‘denominations’ of contemporary Western atheism: an ‘imitative atheism’ which includes the Anglo-Saxon new atheists, and an ‘ascetic atheism’ which includes postmodern atheism. It is argued that both these denominations of atheism are reductions of the Christian gospel, and they argue against each other in important and illuminating ways. In the seminar we explore and celebrate how the Christ who comes ‘full of grace and truth’ (John 1:14) provides us with a way of engaging with both denominations of atheism in a manner that is both sympathetic to their concerns and sensibilities but also fundamentally challenging to their approaches.

Equality: Christian and Secular Perspectives

The notion of equality is coded into the DNA of modern Western political discourse. It is perhaps the key term in radical left European politics today, and in an age of severe economic and fiscal retrenchment arguments about equality are set to play a central role in the public square for some time to come. This workshop lays out a biblical understanding of, and argument for, equality, setting this biblical position alongside contemporary European philosophical accounts of the basis and extent of equality. We see that each secular account of equality can only resist the violence of hierarchical inequality on the basis of fresh inequalities, but a Trinitarian understanding of equality subverts the violence that the secular accounts are powerless to resist.

Pre-Forum Seminar

Western Cultural Overview: From the Ancient World to the Scientific Revolution

This seminar is offered in the spirit of John Stott’s ‘double listening’. For Stott, Christians are to be ‘listening to the voice of God in Scripture, and listening to the voices of the modern world, with all their cries of anger, pain and despair’. When it comes to listening to God’s word, many Christians have benefited from a ‘bible overview’, showing how the narrative of Scripture unfolds God’s revelation as one coherent story. But we are often less aware of the narrative that makes sense of our contemporary world. As a result, contemporary art can seem impenetrable, contemporary philosophy nonsensical, and contemporary culture impervious to the claims of the gospel. These seminars, then, are a ‘cultural overview’, weaving their way through Western philosophy, literature, art and music in order to show how nearly four thousand years of Western history unfold one coherent story in terms of which we can understand the cultures that surround us today. This pre-forum seminar covers the first four chapters of our survey of Western cultural and intellectual history, considering the West’s Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian origins and moving through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the Reformation and Scientific Revolution. On our way through the overview I shall seek to offer a brief Christian appraisal of the cultural themes and ideas covered.

Post-Forum Seminar

Western Cultural Overview: From the Enlightenment to Postmodernism

This seminar is offered in the spirit of John Stott’s ‘double listening’. For Stott, Christians are to be ‘listening to the voice of God in Scripture, and listening to the voices of the modern world, with all their cries of anger, pain and despair’. When it comes to listening to God’s word, many Christians have benefited from a ‘bible overview’, showing how the narrative of Scripture unfolds God’s revelation as one coherent story. But we are often less aware of the narrative that makes sense of our contemporary world. As a result, contemporary art can seem impenetrable, contemporary philosophy nonsensical, and contemporary culture impervious to the claims of the gospel. This seminar, then, continues the speaker’s ‘cultural overview’, weaving its way through Western philosophy, literature, art and music in order to show how nearly four thousand years of Western history unfold one coherent story in terms of which we can understand the cultures that surround us today. This Post-Forum Seminar covers the final three chapters of our survey of Western cultural history, considering the Enlightenment, nineteenth-century Romanticism, Darwin, Marx, Freud, feminism, and postmodernism, bringing us to the present day. On our way through the overview the speaker will seek to offer a brief Christian appraisal of the cultural themes and ideas covered.

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