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A New 'Scientia': Can Theology Unify the Sciences and Humanities?

Jun 7, 2019
Gavin House
1220 E 58th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
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Open to current students and faculty. Lunch will be served. A PDF of the reading will be provided when you register. Cosponsored by the Morris Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine.
 

a luncheon discussion with philosopher Conor Cunningham (University of Nottingham) on his current research project, which will be published as Soul and the Marriage of Discourse: Theology as Effective Theory.

The question of the relation between the sciences and that of the Humanities has been a source of tension ever since the advent of Modernity. Over the last hundred years this has only grown more pronounced, not only between the Humanities and the sciences (both social and natural), but within the natural sciences, as there has been an internecine jostling for priority, especially considering high-energy physics’ pursuit of a Theory of Everything, a ‘master science’.

Wittgenstein warned us of such temptation: ‘A main cause of philosophical disease—a one sided diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example’. More powerfully, Dostoevsky in his own inimitable manner warns: ‘Half-knowledge is a tyrant without precedent, one that has its own priests and slaves; a tyrant that is worshipped with unprecedented awe and adulation and before which science itself fawns and cringes’.

Against such apartheid, and its concomitant ‘theocracy’, this research project develops an original, expansive and mutually beneficial understanding of the relation between different modes of knowledge (scientia) that eliminates such conflicts, whilst concurrently encouraging synthetic engagements with existence that do not discourage specialisms; rather they provide space for them.

REQUIRED READING
"Theology as Effective Theory: A Metaphysics of Mixt"

SUGGESTED READING
"Soul and the Marriage of Discourse"

Prof. Cunningham will also give a talk on June 11 at Loyola University Chicago's Water Tower Campus on "Saving Darwin's Soul and Science's Life."