Very grateful to Hermitix Podcast for an hour-long conversation about my books on Pilate & Jesus. We range from myths about Judas to a drinks party in Paris in 1947. Watch it here.
Author: David Lloyd Dusenbury
Postdoctoral fellow at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Author of The Space of Time (2014), Platonic Legislations (2017), The Innocence of Pontius Pilate (2021), and Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature (2021). Regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, etc.
Lecture on Jan Patočka at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna
Honored, & sobered, to be at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna next month to give a lecture on the dark phenomena of war & "the will to war" in the last of Jan Patočka's Heretical Essays (Prague samizdat, 1975).
Innocence of Pontius Pilate on Hermitix (London)
Very pleased to be talking to Hermitix this afternoon about Pilate & Jesus & "fringe philosophy". It takes a lot of work to find a place on the fringe. More to come --
Second lecture on Jan Patočka’s dissident philosophy of history
Here's a recording of my second lecture on Jan Patočka, "Philosophy & the Experience of History" -- with glances at the writing cultures of Egypt & Babylonia, the first pages of Genesis, the first democratic cities, & "the wonder of being".
Jan Patočka lecture at Belgrade’s Institute of European Studies
Honoured - & sobered - to be returning to Belgrade this week, to give a lecture at the Institute of European Studies on “War & the Fate of Europe in the Underground Writings of Jan Patočka”. Watch the lecture in its first iteration, at the Danube Institute in Budapest, here.
“The Innocence of Pontius Pilate”: Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
Very pleased to be giving a public lecture, "The Innocence of Pontius Pilate: Notes on an Unnoticed Theme in Judaic and Islam", at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest next Monday, 6 p.m., as part of a series of lectures, "The Faces of Writing: A History of Bible Interpretation and Culture".
Derrida’s strongest line
"If things were simple, word would have gotten around." via The TLS
“Arresting & erudite”: Alexander Faludy reviews The Innocence of Pontius Pilate
Thrilled to see a very generous review of my Pilate book, on the cusp of Holy Week. "Arresting & erudite", writes Alexander Faludy. "Inquiry into the interpretation history of Jesus’s Roman trial cannot be the same after Dusenbury’s work." Read here.
How a philosopher toasts a god
How a philosopher toasts a god he's drinking with -- "One of the gods shall fall by the hand of mortal man." - Anaxarchus of Abdera, offering a dark (& ironic) toast to the "divine" conqueror, Alexander - per Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers IX.60
“Victims of a transitional period”: Osamu Dazai
"[We are] victims of a transitional period of morality ... [but] however much the waves on the surface of the sea may rage, the water at the bottom, far from experiencing a revolution, lies motionless." - Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun, 1947
D. L. Dusenbury 