While the details of this lecture have not yet been released, Professor Sideris gave some indication of what she's planning on in a recent interview (see here), a portion of which has been reproduced below:
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David Haberman:
Lecture 1 - Introduction: murderous games
Monday 6 May 2019
This lecture introduces some of those moral and ethical dilemmas in studying the classical world, asking how we understand remote ancient cultures that have come to stand both for the pinnacle of "civilisation" and for the nadir of corruption and cruelty. Choosing the gladiatorial games as one case study, it takes aim at the sense of moral superiority that we so often display in the face of some of antiquity's worst "crimes".
From the St Andrews Gifford Lectures blog:
How Did Evil Come Into the World?
Mark Johnston, Henry Putnam University Professor, Director of Cognitive Science, Princeton University
Lecture 1: Why Reject Reductive Naturalism?
Tuesday September 17th 2019
From the University of Edinburgh:
This lecture series explores the concept ‘in God's image’. Human existence, ranging ‘from dust to dust’ to ‘only a little lower than God’, challenges us to discern the moral, scientific, technological, and religious powers that human beings bring to bear most effectively within this broad spectrum. An examination at an intellectual level and beyond illuminates the emergence of the human potential for justice, freedom, truth, and peace.
Theologians have produced an impressive body of scholarship about scientific ways of knowing and particular religious traditions. Yet, for a fuller understanding of the relationship between religion and science, we need to consider how a range of contemporary people in different societies view the interface of science and religion. In this lecture, Elaine Howard Ecklund offers a social scientific approach to science and religion in global public life.
The question of 'natural theology' interlocks with the related questions of whether we can conceive of God acting in the world at all, as well as why, if God is God, evil persists in the world. Can specific events in history, like those reported in the Gospels, afford the necessary point from which to ask and answer such questions? Widely shared cultural and philosophical presumptions have conditioned our understanding of history in ways that truncate our epistemic horizons and make the idea of historical divine action problematic.
‘What does inequality have to do with non-violence?’ These lectures will suggest that a philosophy of non-violence has to take into account forms of inequality that value certain lives more highly than others. So the task is to develop a philosophy of non-violence that allows the moral questions usually associated with non-violent practice to be seen as bearing on questions of political inequality as well.
In this series of six lectures Professor David Novak (University of Toronto) explores the dynamic interrelation of reason and revelation in the history of Jewish (primarily) and Christian (secondarily) theology and Western philosophy from antiquity. Contrary to the prevalent opinion that theology (designated as “Jerusalem”) is based upon revelation while philosophy (designated as “Athens”) is based upon reason, these lectures contend that both Hebraic theology and Hellenic philosophy alike arise from revelations.
Humans can see the world around them, imagine how it might be different, and translate those imaginings into reality ... or at least try to. Humans believe. Meaning, imagination, and hope are as central to the human story as are bones, genes, and ecologies. Neither selfish aggression nor peaceful altruism dominates human behavior as a whole. We are a species distinguished by our extraordinary capacity for creative cooperation, our ability to imagine possibilities and to make them material, and our powerful aptitudes for belief, hope, and cruelty.
Lecture 1: Hidden God
Between them, nationalism, terrorism and religion have substantially shaped the modern world. From the First World War to the 9/11 Wars, from the politics of Empire to the process of decolonization, from the establishment of national states to their rivalries and dissolution, these three phenomena have done much to create what we have inherited in the twenty-first century. They are also often viewed as destructive forces.
“Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?”—Martin Luther King Jr.
The current configuration of capitalism, in which finance plays a dominant role, has the capacity to shape people in ways that hinder the development of any critical perspective on it. This series of lectures will explore the various cultural forms of finance-dominated capitalism and suggest how their pervasive force in human life might be countered by Christian beliefs and practices with a comparable person-shaping capacity.
The Enlightenment ideal of humanity united in a common vision of the good, based on growing scientific knowledge and understanding, lies in tatters. Around the world, some deny evidence that we are changing the climate to our peril, that chemicals and genetic modification may threaten biodiversity, that research on pathogens could pose pandemic risks, and even that human beings evolved from earlier forms of life.
This series of five lectures are structured so as to explore the theme of human struggle, suffering and hope in a comparative and interdisciplinary manner that analyses the writings of both Christian and western scholars alongside those of Muslim writers. This distinctive way of working has marked the style and approach to constructive theology in Professor Siddiqui’s most recent publications, opening up unique insights that afford the important work of contemporary comparative theology greater depth and import.
1. Cosmos, Time, Memory (no video, slides only)
Exemplarist virtue theory is a comprehensive ethical theory in which all central terms in moral discourse (“virtue,” “good life,” “wrong act,” etc) are defined by direct reference to exemplars of goodness, picked out through the emotion of admiration. The theory maps the moral domain for theoretical purposes, but it also has the practical aim of helping to make people moral by structuring the theory around a motivating emotion– admiration.
1. Interreligious Theology: Whither and Why?
The quest for innovation has become ubiquitous. It is high on the political agenda and raises hopes where few alternatives are in sight. It continues to be equated with the dynamics of wealth and even job creation and is hailed as solution to the major challenges facing our societies. Yet, as Schumpeter observed more than one hundred years ago, innovation is not only disruptive, but can also be destructive. It creates winners and losers and therefore remains a double-edged sword.
That humans are all one another’s equals, and this makes a difference to how we ought to deal with each other and to organize ourselves legally, politically, socially and economically. Indeed, this has been an enduring theme in Western philosophy, including Jewish and Christian thought (with a few disgraceful exceptions), for thousands of years. Yet it is woefully under-explored.
Courts in constitutional democracies face tough questions in developing a principled jurisprudence for the adjudication of claims based on faith.
This lecture will consider some of the recent jurisprudence from Europe, North America, India and South Africa and discuss key questions including whether it is possible to identify a principled basis for the adjudication of claims based on faith, whether cross-jurisdictional learning is possible and proper and whether different social, political and religious contexts should and do make a difference to answering these questions.
In this series, Professor David Livingstone examines the role of place, politics and rhetoric in the way religious communities sharing a Scots Presbyterian heritage engaged with Darwinism in different venues - Edinburgh, Belfast, Columbia and Princeton.
What emerges is the degree to which debates over Darwin were deeply embedded in local circumstances whether to do with anxieties over the control of higher education, views about the politics of race relations, challenges to traditional cultural identity, or attitudes to higher criticism.
Contrary to the popular impression view that we are living in extraordinarily violent times, rates of violence at all scales have been in decline over the course of history. I explore how this decline could have happened despite the existence of a constant human nature.
Communication has a myriad purposes, but two are ubiquitous. One is theoretical: we hope (and often need) to judge whether others' claims are true or false. The other is practical: we hope (and often need) to judge whether others' commitments are trustworthy or untrustworthy. Yet many contemporary discussions of speech rights and speech wrongs seem ambivalent or indifferent to norms that matter for judging truth and trustworthiness.
When considering how language about God enters into our ordinary human discourse, it helps to look at some of the ways in which language itself is stranger and more problematic than we may have thought. This, in turn, prompts us towards a greater openness to references to the transcendent.
In this series of lectures, we will examine how language poses such questions as:
There could be no better theme for a lecture series on natural religion than that of Gaia, this puzzling figure that has emerged recently in public discourse from Earth science as well as from many activist and spiritual movements. The problem is that the expression of "natural religion" is somewhat of a pleonasm, since Western definitions of nature borrow so much from theology. The set of lectures attempts to decipher the face of Gaia in order to redistribute the notions that have been packed too tightly into the composite notion of "natural religion".
From cryptanalysis and the cracking of the German Enigma Code during the Second World War to his work on artificial intelligence, Alan Turing was without doubt one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. An extraordinarily gifted mathematician, he is rightly regarded as the father of computer science having set in place the formal rules that govern the way every computer code ever written actually work.
Denis Alexander speaks in this four-part lecture series to the complex interplay between biological claims about genes, philosophical claims about determinism and theological claims about God.
V.S. Ramachandran, Professor at the University of California, San Diego and Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, argues in his 2012 Gifford Lectures, “Body and Mind: Insights from Neuroscience,” that neurology provides the tools to bridge the often hermetically sealed fields of study in the humanities and those in the material sciences.
In the 2012 Gifford Lectures, Sarah Coakley seeks to listen to contemporary mathematical and empirical reconsiderations of ‘cooperation’ and ‘sacrifice’ in evolutionary biology; yet the lectures also aim at critically investigating evolutionary theory’s own narratives of meaning so as to raise once more the question of God. ‘Natural theology’ is therefore ‘reconceived’, argues Coakley, in light of global economic and ecological challenges precipitated by false notions of ‘sacrifice’.
1. Introduction: voices and silence in Tanakh and Christian New Testament
David Hume's thinking was radical and thorough. This was his strength, but also a source of ammunition to his enemies. He has been interpreted as being scathingly negative in all of his conclusions - whether about morality, religion or basic epistemology.
The lecture will argue that Hume has much that is positive to teach us about all of these topics.
However, the main focus will be upon the nature and foundations of Civil Society, including both ethical and social insights, and their relevance to contemporary talk of 'broken' or 'fractured' society.
This lecture series will offer a revised history of science-religion interactions in the West. It will consider the way in which religious concerns have shaped the study of nature over the past 2000 years, with a particular focus on the changing boundaries of science and religion.
It will be argued that these two ideas—science and religion—are distinctively Western and modern, that they are mutually interdependent, and that a recognition of their history will help revise our understanding of their present relations.
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown returns to his former university to give a talk on economics. The lecture argues that there is an alternative to a future of low growth and high unemployment; that the alternative is a future of jobs and justice.
Self-caring neural circuitry embodies self-preservation values, and these are values in the most elemental sense. Whence caring for others?
Professor Gianni Vattimo, Emeritus professor of Philosophy at the University of Turin presents four lectures for the Gifford Series organised around the notion of the “End of Reality.” The four in-depth lectures begin with a careful and considered critique of Alfred Taski’s truth definition – that “P” is “P” if, and only if, “P.” Or, as
Scruton suggests that the crisis of the modern world has arisen from losing a sense of its sacred “subjectivity” in persons, culture, and finally God’s presence. Science only addresses “objects,” so it will be resources such as philosophy and religion that help explain the mystery of the subject. Scruton identifies the subject through the theme of “faces” in the world and the fact that every human being experiences an “I” and “you,” and ultimately asks the question “why” regarding existence.
Why has God suddenly reappeared in intellectual debate? The lecture attempts to put these contentions in the broader political context of the so-called 'war on terror'.
The historic religious traditions of humankind are being reshaped in our time by the encounter of people of every faith with one another. The past half-century has accelerated this encounter, and the awareness of religious diversity is today part of the experience and consciousness of people throughout the world.
Secularist regimes are the subject of vigorous debate in many countries: France, USA, Turkey, India and others. What are the defining features of secularism (or laîcité)? Very often we reach for some institutional definition, like 'the separation of church and state', or 'neutrality of the state.' But in fact, we need to define better the goals or values we are trying to foster or defend by these institutions. The centre of gravity of secularist regimes is changing in our day, and this is a positive development.
LECTURE ABSTRACTS:
1. What We Are
"I shall begin by considering what we are. What do we need to know about the human brain in order to discuss the weighty questions of free will, mental causation, morals, ethics, and the law?
The basis of moral engagement in modernity has been the realization that human beings are importantly similar to one another; its aim is to act toward others in ways these similarities support and justify. That has made the aspirations of modern moral philosophy impartial and universal. The values of morality bind us together. Emblems of our commonalities, they urge us to expand our range of concern. But there are other values as well. Badges of our particularities, these values favour imposing limits on our solicitude.
The Hippocratic Oath is often assumed to be a timeless, if platitudinous, summary of the moral duties of members of the healing professions. In fact, it is a controversial code of ethics apparently developed for an ancient Greek cult having many of the characteristics of a mystery religion.
Neither the state nor the market, the two dominant institutions in liberal democracies, are society-creating forces. They do not sustain relationships, or provide a framework for meaning, identity and community. That is why, against prediction, religion survives and will grow stronger in the course of the 21st century. How can we ensure that it does not bring with it the religious conflicts of the past?
Martin Rees’ Gifford lectures present an overview of the current scientific understanding of reality and the unique set of challenges that face the next generation of scientists and indeed the entire global community. As an astrophysicist, Rees brings to the discussion a cosmic perspective to the present human situation and asks his listeners to learn from this perspective on ‘deep time’. He concludes that the advances of science and technology in the last century have had considerable impact on our understanding of reality and our place in it.
Professor Simon Conway Morris delivered a series of six Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2007 entitled Darwin’s Compass: How Evolution Discovers the Song of Creation.
Professor Stephen Pattison delivered a series of six Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen, entitled Seeing Things: From Mantelpieces to Masterpieces.
In the first of his six lectures, ‘Ordinary Blindness’, Professor Pattison outlines how a practical theologian approaches contemporary beliefs and practices, in this case related to sight and seeing. He examines the cultural assumptions and practices adopted by Westerners and describes how we tend to overvalue and misunderstand the apparently autonomous sense of sight.
