Professor Kathryn Tanner the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Which World?". The sixth lecture in the series discusses how finance-dominated capitalism encourages one to relate to oneself, which in turn has a bearing on the understanding of one’s relations with others. It will consider the emphasis on individual performance and responsibility in finance-dominated capitalism, the specific forms of competition typical of wage...
May 13, 2016
Professor Kathryn Tanner the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Another World?". The fifth lecture in the series explores how present and future are collapsed in the evaluation of assets on secondary financial markets, and the way efforts are made, by way of derivatives and other tactics typical of finance-dominated capitalism, to limit the potentially disturbing character of an unpredictable future. The lecture will seek to ...
May 12, 2016
Professor Kathryn Tanner the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Nothing but the Present". The fourth lecture in the series investigates the causes and consequences of a preoccupation with the present in the lives of both workers and the indebted poor, and of the short-term time horizons that are characteristic of finance-dominated capitalism. It will lay out the different reasons for Christian attention to an urgent present, ...
May 10, 2016
Professor Kathryn Tanner the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Total Commitment". The third lecture in the series explores the strategies used in finance-dominated capitalism to ensure worker compliance with company demands. It will contrast these strategies, point by point, with the way in which a person’s commitment to God is related to the person’s more mundane commitments. Recorded 5 May 2016 at the University of Edinbur...
May 09, 2016
Professor Kathryn Tanner the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Chained to the Past". The second lecture in the series considers the way in which persons, as both workers and debtors, are encouraged to relate to past decisions that constrain present action within finance-dominated capitalism. The presumed inevitability of this way of relating to the past is undercut by appealing to Christian forms of self-repudiation in conve...
May 09, 2016
Professor Kathryn Tanner the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism". The first lecture in this series discusses the Weberian approach to the influence of Christian beliefs and practices on economic behaviour, and ties it to the sort of comparison of ‘spiritualities’ offered by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his Collège de France lectures. The lecture explores the general c...
May 09, 2016
Professor Kathryn Tanner the Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Total Commitment". The third lecture in the series explores the strategies used in finance-dominated capitalism to ensure worker compliance with company demands. It will contrast these strategies, point by point, with the way in which a person’s commitment to God is related to the person’s more mundane commitments. Recorded 5 May 2016 at the University of Edinbur...
May 09, 2016
Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the sixth in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "Hard and Heart-breaking Cases: The Profoundly Disabled As Our Human Equals". In this lecture, Professor Waldron explores ways of thinking about these aspects of the human condition that allow us to maintain the integrity of basic human equality. Recorded on 5 February 2015 at the University of Edinburgh's Playfair Library.
Feb 10, 2015
Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the fifth in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "Human Dignity and Our Relation to God". In this lecture Professor Waldron will relate our intimations about a transcendent basis for human equality to the work that was done in the previous lectures about the basic logic of the position. Recorded on 3 February 2015 at the University of Edinburgh's Playfair Library
Feb 05, 2015
Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the fourth in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "A Load-bearing Idea: The Work of Human Equality". Defending basic equality is not just a matter of ‘coming up with’ some suitably shaped property that all humans share. The description must be relevant to the work that basic equality has to do. That work is comprehensive and foundational, across all aspects of morality. Recorded on 2 February 201...
Feb 05, 2015
Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the third in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "Looking for a Range Property: Hobbes, Kant, and Rawls". In 'A Theory of Justice' Rawls introduced the idea of a 'range property' - a sort of threshold-based approach to the significance of variations in a certain range. Professor Waldron explores this idea, which Hobbes and Kant also implicitly relied on. Recorded on 29 January 2015 at the Univers...
Feb 02, 2015
Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the second in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "Everyone To Count For One - The Logic of Basic Equality". In this lecture, Professor Waldron will distinguish basic equality from various normative positions - both egalitarian and non-egalitarian - that are built up on it. Professor Waldron will seek to make sense of Jeremy Bentham’s maxim. That maxim, 'Everyone to count for one', is tantalizing...
Jan 29, 2015
Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the first in the 2015 Gifford Lecture series, entitled "More Than Merely Equal Consideration, - the Rev. Hastings Rashdall" In 1907, an Anglican clergyman teaching at New College, Oxford elaborated a theory of human inequality in Volume 1 of his book, The Theory of Good and Evil: A Treatise on Moral Philosophy. Hastings’ theory is highly offensive to modern ears: for it is a form of philosophical racis...
Jan 28, 2015
Justice Catherine O’Regan, former judge to the South African Constitutional Court and chairperson of the United Nations Internal Justice Council, delivers the University of Edinburgh's 2014 Gifford Lecture. Courts in constitutional democracies face tough questions in developing a principled jurisprudence for the adjudication of claims based on faith. This lecture considers some of the recent jurisprudence from Europe, North America, India and South Africa and discuss key questions including whet...
May 22, 2014
Lord Rowan Williams of Oystermouth delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Making Representations: Religious Faith and the Habits of Language". Lecture 6: Can Truth be Spoken? In what sense can we legitimately think about silence as a mode of knowing? We need to be cautious about using such a notion as an excuse for giving up the challenges of truthful speech. But it is true that, if what is ultimately most important is to be attuned to the reality that we invite to 'inhabit' us, silence m...
Nov 21, 2013
Lord Rowan Williams of Oystermouth delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Making Representations: Religious Faith and the Habits of Language". Lecture 1: Representing Reality When we speak about the world we inhabit, we do so in terms that go well beyond simply listing the elements of what we perceive; that is, we construct schematic models, we extrapolate, we invent, and we use our imagination. If we think harder about what is involved in representing things (rather than simply describin...
Nov 21, 2013
Lord Rowan Williams of Oystermouth delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Making Representations: Religious Faith and the Habits of Language". Lecture 5: Extreme Language - Discovery Under Pressure One of the most complex aspects of our language is that we refine the patterns we create in it - by rhyme and metre and metaphor - in the confidence that through this process we will discover something about what our habitual language does not disclose. The language of art - and in striking mea...
Nov 15, 2013
Lord Rowan Williams of Oystermouth delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Making Representations: Religious Faith and the Habits of Language". Lecture 4: Material Words - Language as Physicality When we analyse speech, we are not only discussing how words work. Speech also includes gesture and rhythm. As such, speech is a means not only of mapping our environment, but also of 'handling' our environment and its direct impact upon us (a point that can be illustrated with reference to studie...
Nov 15, 2013
Lord Rowan Williams of Oystermouth delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Making Representations: Religious Faith and the Habits of Language". Lecture 3: No Last Words: Language as Unfinished Business Intelligent life has something to do with knowing what to do next, and how to 'go on'. The focus of knowledge is not necessarily the would-be final, or exhaustive, system. We can learn something about the nature of knowing if we think about the sorts of knowledge involved in physical crafts,...
Nov 13, 2013
Lord Rowan Williams of Oystermouth delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Making Representations: Religious Faith and the Habits of Language". Lecture 2: Can We Say What We Like? Language, Freedom and Determinism. If speech is a physical act, is it ultimately something we must think of as part of a pre-determined material system? It is difficult to state this without contradiction. Indeed, once we recognise the unstable relationship between what we say and the environment we are seeking t...
Nov 11, 2013
Baroness Onora O’Neill presents a special Gifford Lecture in Memory of Professor Susan Manning (1953-2013), entitled 'From Toleration to Freedom of Expression'. This lecture is part of the University's Gifford Lecture series. For more than a century, the Gifford Lectures have enabled scholars to advance theological and philosophical thought. Recorded on 28 October 2013 at the University of Edinburgh's Playfair Library Hall.
Nov 01, 2013
Professor Steven Pinker delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity". 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. This lecture explores how this decline could have happened despite the existence of a constant human nature. Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in ...
Jun 04, 2013
Professor Bruno Latour delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Facing Gaia. A new enquiry into Natural Religion". Lecture 6: Inside the 'Planetary Boundaries': Gaia's Estate Although the resources of "paganism", New Age cults, renewed themes of Christian incarnation, and process theology offer rich mythological insights, it is not clear whether they are at the scale and sensitivity needed to face Gaia. A search for collective rituals should begin with works of art and experiments able to e...
Mar 04, 2013
Professor Bruno Latour delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Facing Gaia. A new enquiry into Natural Religion". Lecture 5: War of the Worlds: Humans against Earthbound In the absence of any Providence to settle matters of concern — and thus of nature, its barely disguised substitute — no peaceful resolution of Gaian conflicts can be expected. The recognition of a state of war and the designation of enmity is indispensable if a state of diplomacy is later to be reached. Under the pressure...
Mar 04, 2013
Professor Bruno Latour delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Facing Gaia. A new enquiry into Natural Religion". Lecture 4: The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe The paradox of what is called "globalization" is that there is no "global globe" to hold the multitude of concerns that have to be assembled to replace the "politics of nature" of former periods. What are the instruments —always local and partial— that are sensitive enough to Gaia's components for the lim...
Mar 01, 2013
Professor Bruno Latour delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Facing Gaia. A new enquiry into Natural Religion". Lecture 3: The Puzzling Face of a Secular Gaia In spite of its reputation, Gaia is not half science and half religion. It offers a much more enigmatic set of features that redistribute agencies in all possible ways (as does this most enigmatic term "anthropocene"). Thus, it is far from clear what it means to "face Gaia". It might require us to envisage it very differently from ...
Mar 01, 2013
Professor Bruno Latour delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Facing Gaia. A new enquiry into Natural Religion". Lecture 2: A Shift in Agency - with apologies to David Hume Once nature and the natural sciences are fully ''secularized'', it becomes possible to revisit also the category of the supernatural. Then, a different landscape opens which can be navigated through an attention to agencies and their composition. Such a freedom of movement allows the use of the rich anthropological lit...
Mar 01, 2013
Professor Bruno Latour delivers the Gifford Lecture series entitled "Facing Gaia. A new enquiry into Natural Religion". Lecture 1: 'Once Out of Nature' - Natural Religion as a Pleonasm The set of questions around the two words "natural religion" implies that only the second word is a coded and thus a disputed category, the first one being taken for granted and uncoded. But if it can be shown that the very notion of nature is a theological construct, we might be able to shift the problem somewhat...
Feb 26, 2013
Lecture 5: Getting behind noise in Christian history So far, the story has largely been about overt history: the positive utterances and actions of public Christianity. We turn now to further and more complex varieties of silence: first the phenomenon of ‘Nicodemism’, simultaneously audible to those with ears to hear, and not to be heard by others. New politic silences were caused by the fissuring of Western Christianity, through efforts to sidestep the consequent violence and persecution; a red...
May 17, 2012
Lord Sutherland of Houndwood presents, "David Hume and Civil Society". 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 So...
May 17, 2012
