Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s lectures from 1981 was the first time a Muslim scholar was asked to speak in the entire history of the Gifford series. Published in 1989 it is a staggering work of scholarship and perhaps one of the finest introductions to Islamic thought available in the West alongside his other work Ideals and Realities of Islam. Nasr’s central thesis throughout the ten lectures is focused on the close and intimate connection between knowledge (in all of its many and diverse forms) and the sacred.

Law and Wisdom in the Bible is the second volume of David Daube’s Gifford Lectures, and like the first volume (The Deed and the Doer, Templeton Press, 2008) contains ten lectures and has been edited by Calum Carmichael, his former student. In this volume Daube surveys the relationship between law and wisdom in ancient literature, and has a contemporary interest: what is right and how can we know it? 

This volume of lectures and essays from William Wallace serve as a much-needed introduction to an underappreciated Scottish philosopher and theologian. Much appreciated in his day as a brilliant tutor and professor of philosophy and well known as a lecturer, Wallace’s insights into German Idealism, theology and ethics hold some remarkable insight.

The Life of the Mind attempts to characterise two of three basic activities of mental life:Thinking (volume 1) and Willing (volume 2). Sadly, Arendt died before producing a third volume she had planned on what she saw as the third activity ‘Judging’.

In 1963—4 and 1964—5, Sir Alister Hardy, Emeritus Professor of Zoology at the University of Oxford and noted researcher in religious experience was invited to deliver the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen. This first volume concerns itself primarily with the relation between natural history and natural theology. Hardy consciously places himself in the tradition of Darwin and Wallace, “who, perhaps more than anyone else in their century, influenced the outlook of philosophers and shook at least some of the walls of theology.” (p.

Antony Flew, famous for his conversion from atheism to Christian belief, delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews in 1986–87. The subject––the logic of mortality––is a long standing philosophical interest throughout Flew’s work, and this collection of lectures forms a sequel of sorts to the previous year’s lectures, delivered by Richard Swinburne, on The Evolution of the Soul.

While the emergence and development of religion can be explained with the assistance of psychology and anthropology, the capacity for recognizing a Supreme Being may originally have been divinely instilled. This is how Andrew Lang sees the making of religion. In his book of the same name, Lang traces the rise of the modern science of the history of religion. Humanity grappled with questions of spirit or soul from reflections on sleep, dreams and death and came up with tentative answers.