Conference 9:00am Monday 18 June – 6:30pm Tuesday 19 June 2012, Trinity College, Oxford

Organised by the Ian Ramsey Centre and the Centre for Theology and Modern European Thought

To register, please go to the Oxford online shop. For enquiries, please contact: katie.bastide@queens.ox.ac.uk

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Provisional Conference Programme

18 June:

9.00-10.30: Johannes Zachhuber (Oxford): On Forgetting. Theological reflections on a neglected anthropological phenomenon (Response: Stephen Mulhall)

10.30-11.00: Coffee/Tea

11.00-12.30: Paul Fiddes (Oxford): Memory, Forgetting and the Problem of Forgiveness (Response: Simon Podmore).

1.00: Lunch

2.00-3.30: Philipp Stoellger (Rostock): Use and Abuse of History for Faith. The role of forgetting in the formation of religious identity (Response: George Pattison ?)

3.30-5.00: Bradford Vivian (Syracuse University): Up from Memory. Epideictic Forgetting in Booker T. Washington’s Cotton States Exposition Address (Response: Joel Rasmussen)

5.00-5.30: Coffee/Tea

5.30-7.00: Michael Bentley (St Andrews/Oxford): Memory and Forgetting as problems for comparative historiography (Response: Markus Bockmuehl).

7.15: Dinner

19 June:

9.00-10.30: Aleida Assmann (Konstanz): How much forgetting does memory need? Exploring the margins of memorial culture (Response: Hartmut von Sass).

10.30-11.00: Coffee/Tea

11.00-12.30: Brigitte Boothe (Zürich): „I cannot have done this, says my pride.“ Psychoanalysis of our motives for forgetting (Response: Agata Bielik).

1.00: Lunch

2.00-3.30: Lutz Jäncke (Zürich): Remembering and forgetting as biological processes. The perspective of neuroscience (Response: Miguel Farias ?).

3.30: Coffee/Tea

4.00-5.30: Viktor Meyer-Schönberger (Oxford): Forgetting in the face of infinite memory. Political, social, legal, and cultural dilemmas of the internet age (Response: Graham Ward).

5.30-6.30: Final Discussion

PLENARY SPEAKERS

Simon Blackburn

Timothy Chappell

A.C. Grayling

Peter Hacker

Iain McGilchrist

David Papineau

Sally Satel

Roger Scruton

Murray Shanahan

Raymond Tallis

Registration and Call for Papers

It is now over 20 years since Churchland’s book Neurophilosophy was published, and in its wake whole disciplines have sprung into being, proudly sporting the prefix ‘neuro-’ by way of attaching themselves to Churchland’s banner. We have entered a new period in which philosophy, among a substantial community of its practitioners, might be seen as the handmaiden of neuroscience, whose role is to remove the obstacles that have been laid in the path of scientific advance by popular prejudice and superstitious ways of thinking. Brain imaging techniques, which enable us to allocate mental functions to precise cortical areas, and in some cases to establish the neural pathways through which information is processed and decisions formed, have cast doubt on the reality of human freedom, have revised the description of reason and its place in human nature, and caused many people to suspect the validity of the old distinctions of kind, which separated person from animal, animal from machine and the free agent from the conditioned organism. In addition, the more we learn about the brain and its functions, the more do people wonder whether our old ways of managing our lives and resolving our conflicts – the ways of moral judgment, legal process and the imparting of virtue – are the best ways, and whether there might be more direct forms of intervention that would take us more speedily, more reliably and perhaps more kindly to the right result.

These developments appear to sit uneasily with the traditional concept of the person, a central concern of philosophy since at least the early Middle Ages. From infancy each of us singles out persons from the rest of our environment as recipients of love, affection, anger and forgiveness. We face them eye-to-eye and I- to-Thou, believing each person to be a centre of self-conscious reflection who responds to reasons, who makes decisions, and whose life forms a continuous narrative in which individual identity is maintained from moment to moment and from year to year. Are we then justified in treating the traditional attributes of persons, such as self-identity, thought, free will and consciousness, simply as “folk psychological” concepts to be revised in a physically reductionistic manner, or can developments in neuroscience be interpreted within alternative philosophical frameworks? Furthermore, what are the broader implications for new first, second and third-personal understanding in moral judgment, in the law, in religion, politics and the arts?

The purpose of this conference is to discuss and debate these developments from a variety of perspectives, to examine the relevance of neuroscience both to philosophy and to the other humanities of the post-Enlightenment university, and to confront the intellectual issues that surround the emergence of what might reasonably be called a ‘neuroculture’.

REGISTRATION

All those wishing to attend the conference are invited to register via:

Oxford University Online Store: Persons and their Brains

The registration fee includes lunch, tea and coffee for each day. The booking process also offers the following options for accommodation and meals:

(1) A room at St Anne’s College, Oxford, arriving Wed 11 July, departing Sunday 15 July in the morning. This option includes the cost of all conference dinners.

(2) Purchase individual dinners only, without accommodation. This option includes a discounted rate for students.

SHORT PAPERS

Short papers are also invited on topics directly relevant to the conference themes, to be delivered in parallel sessions of 30 minutes duration (20 minutes for the paper, 10 minutes for discussion).

Those wishing to contribute a paper should submit a title, a 200 word abstract, and institutional affiliation, by email to the Ian Ramsey Centre administrator, Sarah Retz:

irc.admin@theology.ox.ac.uk

with the subject line “Persons and their Brains Abstract.”

Closing Date for Abstract submissions: Friday 3^rd February, 2012.

Notification of accepted papers will take place by the end of February 2012.

Full schedule

Short paper schedule

If you have any questions about the conference, please email Meg Tissier at irc.admin@theology.ox.ac.uk

The URL to access these recordings is: http://m.ox.ac.uk/podcasts/theofac/irc-audio/

ABSTRACT:

In recent decades, the study of ‘religious’ or ‘mystical’ experiences has been criticised by postmodern scholars who argue that because all experience is dependent upon language and culture, it is unintelligible to speak at all of some cross-culturally comparable event called ‘religious experience’. Such scholars assert that because experience cannot precede culture, it is ‘naive’ or otherwise methodologically or theoretically unsound to claim that the origins of religious beliefs can lie in ‘religious’ experience. Furthermore, the argument goes, in claiming that there is such a thing as cross-culturally comparable ‘religious’ experience, we leave the realm of the (ostensibly) objective Study of Religions, and cross the boundary into a kind of universalist theology. The issue thus intersects with various other theoretical problems at the core of the Study of Religions, including comparison per se, and views that the term ‘religion’ itself is a theologising construct. In defence of the study of ‘religious’ experience, this paper will attempt to demonstrate the weaknesses in these arguments, firstly by showing that they are based upon a number of mutually-reliant but unproven axioms (themselves culturally-situated within a particular anti-scientific academic paradigm); and by giving cross-cultural examples which show a clear connection between ‘religious’ experience and religious beliefs (with particular reference to near-death experiences).

Dr. Gregory Shushan is Perrott-Warrick Researcher at the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, University of Oxford, researching comparative afterlife beliefs in small-scale societies worldwide in the contexts of shamanic and near-death experiences. His book, Conceptions of the Afterlife in Early Civilizations: Universalism, Constructivism, and Near-Death Experience (Continuum Advances in Religious Studies, 2009) was nominated for the 2010 Grawemeyer Award.

Please note that there will be no parking available for delegates, and due to the nature of parking generally in Oxford, it is advisable not to hire a car, or to drive to the conference, unless you know of a place to leave vehicles. Neither the Ian Ramsey Centre nor St Anne’s College can be responsible for vehicles.

Please contact irc.admin@theology.ox.ac.uk if you have any further questions

Speakers (listed in alphabetical order) and topics

Click on a Speaker’s name to obtain brief biographical details.

• Prof. John Barrow FRS: Lemaître’s Legacy
• Prof. Bernard Carr : Lemaître and the shifting border between physics and philosophy (to be confirmed)
• Dr William Carroll : Aquinas and Contemporary Cosmology: Creation and Beginnings
• Prof. Robin Collins : Modern Cosmology in Philosophical and Theological Perspective
• Dr George Coyne SJ: Lemaître: Science and Religion
• Prof. George F. R. Ellis FRS: A Critique of Multiverse Theories
• Prof. Michal Heller : Lemaître, the Big Bang and the Quantum Universe
• Revd Dr Rodney Holder FIMA FRAS: Lemaître and Hoyle: Contrasting Characters in Science and religion
• Prof. Helge Kragh : Lemaître and the Primaeval Atom: Contributions to Science
• Prof. Dominique Lambert : Introducing Lemaître: His life, Work and Faith
• Prof. Don Page : Making the Case for the Multiverse
• Revd Dr John Polkinghorne KBE FRS: Final Theological Reflections
• Prof. Paul Shellard : The Big Bang: Recent Advances