Professor Jeffrey Stout, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Religion since Cicero". It is the first lecture in the series 'Religion Unbound: Ideals and Powers from Cicero to King’. The term 'religion' has roots in Ancient Rome. It can be used neutrally to designate acts, attitudes, dispositions, practices, obligations, roles, and institutions related in some way to divine worship, devotion, or piety. Cicero spoke of religion in that way, but...

Professor Richard English delivers a Gifford Lecture entitled 'Nationalism, Terrorism and Religion'. 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Professor Sheila Jasanoff, the Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Cosmopolitan Visions: Science and Reason in a World of Difference". Recorded on Thursday 3 March 2016 at the University of Edinburgh's Playfair Library. Lecture abstract: 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,...

Professor Helga Nowotny, Professor Emerita of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Beyond Innovation. Temporalities. Re-use. Emergence." In her lecture, Professor Nowotny will assess how innovation has raised hopes in political and scientific situations where few alternatives are in sight. She will argue that although it is often a solution to major challenges facing societies - equated with the dynamics of wealth and job creation - that it can...

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.

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 Recorded on 2 February 2015...

Professor Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University Law School, delivers the third 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.