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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Lecture 6: Silence in modern and future Christianities We consider the democratisation of the quest for silence in industrial society: the tangling of a secular society with the silences provided by Christian tradition, through for instance the popularity of retreats, or the observance of silence in remembrance. We see the importance of 'whistle-blowing' to modern Christianity, and its use of the historical discipline. We ponder the relation of agnosticism to silence; the role of music in...

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 rediscovery of classical discussion of silence took...

Lecture 4: Silence transformed: the third Reformation 1500-1700 The noisiness of Protestantism, particularly exacerbated by the end of monasticism, unsuccessfully countered in the Church of Zürich but transcended first among radical Reformers (especially Caspar Schwenckfeld and Sebastian Franck) and a century later by the Society of Friends. The difficulties of contemplatives in the Counter-Reformation, where activism was the characteristic of the new foundations of Jesuits and Ursulines,...

Lecture 3: Silence through schism and two Reformations: 451-1500 The significance of the threeway split in Christianity after the Council of Chalcedon (451). The purposeful Chalcedonian forgetting of Evagrius Ponticus and the contribution of an anonymous theologian who took the name Dionysius the Areopagite. The role of Augustine in the Western Church: a theologian of words, not silence. The transformation in the use of silence and its function after the Carolingian expansion of Benedictine...

Lecture 2: Catholic Christianity and the arrival of ascetism, 100-400 Counter-strands to silence in the early Church, encouraged by its congregational worship and cult of martyrdom, and the effect of gnostic Christianities in shaping what the emerging Catholic Church decided to emphasise or ignore.The emergence of new positive theologies of silence: negative theology and its sources in the Platonic tradition; the development of asceticism in the mainstream Church in Syria from the second...

Silence in Christian History: the witness of Holmes' Dog Lecture 1: Introduction. Voices and silence in Tanakh and Christian New Testament. Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch presents his introductory lecture in our 2012 Gifford lecture series. He discusses a change in emphasis between the Hebrew Scripture (the Tanakh) and what Christians made of what is arguably a minority positive strand in Judaic thinking on silence; we survey the growth of a consciousness of silence, particularly in the...

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...

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. Recorded on 19 April 2011 at McEwan Hall.

Lecture 6: Religion and the Future of Science The last few decades have witnessed a growing public disillusionment with a scientific enterprise that for much of the twentieth century had enjoyed unparalleled prestige. The narrative of progress without limit now also looks a little threadbare. This final lecture considers whether the new ‘flight from science’ represents a regrettable defection from reason and ‘Enlightenment values’, or whether it presents an opportunity to reconnect the...

Lecture 5: Science and Progress The Fall-Redemption narrative not only informed the goals and methods of the new sciences, but also placed the scientific revolution within the larger context of Christian history. The great efflorescence of scientific activity that characterised the seventeenth century was regarded variously as a prelude to the millennium, as one facet of a general reformation of religion and learning, or as a means of helping to restore to the human race a mastery of nature...

Lecture 4: Fallen Knowledge One factor in the disenchantment of nature was the doctrine of the Fall, which had risen to prominence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On this view, because the world had fallen from its original integrity it could not be an impeccable source of theological or moral truths. The human mind, in its fallen condition, was also now thought to lack the capacity to discern the true natures of things. These ideas promoted the emergence of experimental...

Lecture 3: The Disenchantment of the World In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the contemplative approach to nature, along with the emphasis on religious and intellectual formation, was replaced by a more utilitarian project, and nature itself was stripped of much of its symbolic religious significance. This process of disenchantment was partly driven by religious factors. At the same time, related developments saw the transformation of both philosophy and religion. The former became...

Lecture 2: The Cosmos and the Religious Quest In antiquity and for much of the Middle Ages the formal study of nature—natural philosophy—was, as the name implies, part of the discipline of philosophy. Philosophy itself, from its inception in ancient Greece, had been understood as a form of spiritual exercises. As a consequence, a primary goal of what we call science was, in this earlier period, moral and spiritual formation. These conceptions were to influence the identity of Western...

Professor Peter Harrison presents his first in a series of Gifford lectures, The Territories of Science and Religion. So familiar are the concepts ‘science’ and ‘religion’, and so central to Western culture have been the activities and achievements that are usually labelled ‘religious’ and ‘scientific’, that it is natural to assume that they have been enduring features of the cultural landscape of the West. However, this view is misleading. Only in the past few hundred years have religious...

Self-caring neural circuitry embodies self-preservation values, and these are values in the most elemental sense. Whence caring for others? Recorded on 11 May 2010 at St Cecilia's Hall.

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'. Recorded on 1 March 2010 at Playfair Library.

The sixth in a series of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael Gazzaniga. Downward causation is the key concept upon which to build a foundation for a modern view of ethics and with it, a system of values and laws. We all tend to forget that we are the law in the sense that we make the rules as a function of our current societal and personal values. As the rationale for our values and beliefs change, so too can the laws we choose to live by. Recorded on 22 October 2009 at Playfair Library.

The fifth in a series of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael Gazzaniga. Once the self emerges, look around. You are not alone; there are others—more than 6 billion of us now, up from 150 million in 200 BC. When agriculture was invented in 10,000 BC, there were only 4 million humans. Our species evolved in a social landscape that required our ancestors to think about the other guy and to adopt strategies that facilitated success in this social setting. Naturally, this led to an explosion...