Wolterstorff Explores Empathy, Anger

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Noah Porter professor emeritus of philosophical theology at Yale University, examines what accounts for hardening of the heart in a talk, “Empathy and Anger in the Struggle Against Injustice,” on Monday, Oct. 17, at 3:30 p.m. in Hieronymus Lounge at Westmont’s Kerrwood Hall. The Erasmus Society Lecture, sponsored by the Westmont Philosophy Department, is free and open to the public.

“Most people who struggle against some particular case of injustice are energized to do so by emotional engagement with the victims or the perpetrators: empathy with the victims, anger at the perpetrators, or both,” Wolterstorff says. “But almost always there are also people who are acquainted with the plight of victims but feel neither empathy with them nor anger at the perpetrators. Why is that? What blocks empathy and anger?”

Wolterstorff was among a group of Christian philosophers who were particularly influential in the 1980s in defending the rationality of religious belief. “He and Alvin Plantinga (Notre Dame) have helped Christians form a prominent minority in academic philosophy,” says lecture organizer Edward Song, associate professor of philosophy at Westmont. “He is just about the most eminent Christian philosopher in the business.”

Wolterstorff has written many substantial books and articles in virtually every area of philosophy, including aesthetics, history of philosophy, epistemology, philosophical theology, metaphysics, philosophy or religion, and most recently political philosophy. He helped to establish the journal Faith and Philosophy and the Society of Christian Philosophers.

Wolterstorff, who taught at Yale from 1989-2002, also taught at Calvin College, the Free University of Amsterdam and Notre Dame.

He graduated from Calvin before earning a Master of Arts and a doctorate from Harvard.