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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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 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, and...

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' DogLecture 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 cosmos,...

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 19 April 2011 at the McEwan Hall, Edinburgh.

Prof Patricia Churchland's Gifford Lecture - Recorded 11 May, 2010 at St Cecelia's Hall, The University of Edinburgh. Self-caring neural circuitry embodies self-preservation values, and these are values in the most elemental sense. Whence caring for others? Social problem-solving, including policy-making, is probably an instance of problem-solving more generally, and draws upon the capacity, prodigious in humans, to envision consequences of a planned action. In humans, it also draws upon the...

Professor Terry Eagleton's Gifford Lecture - The God Debate. Recorded 1 March, 2010 at the Playfair Library Hall, the University of Edinburgh. Audio version. In his lecture, Professor Eagleton asks "Why has God suddenly reappeared in intellectual debate? His lecture attempts to put these contentions in the broader political context of the so-called 'war on terror'.

The sixth in a series of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael Gazzaniga. Recorded 22 October, 2009 at the Playfair Library Hall, the University of Edinburgh. Audio version.

The fith in a series of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael Gazzaniga. Recorded 20 October, 2009 at the Playfair Library Hall, the University of Edinburgh. Audio version.

The fourth in a series of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael Gazzaniga. Recorded 19 October, 2009 at the Playfair Library Hall, the University of Edinburgh. Audio version.

The third in a series of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael Gazzaniga. Recorded 15 October, 2009 at the Playfair Library Hall, the University of Edinburgh. The interpreter is the device we humans enjoy that provides us with the capacity to see the meanings behind patterns of our emotions, behavior and thoughts. This concept is central to understanding the relationship between our brain and our strong sense of self. In a way, it is the device that liberates us from our automatic ways...

The second in a series of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael Gazzaniga. Recorded 13 October, 2009 at the Playfair Library Hall, the University of Edinburgh. Our brains are organised in such a fashion that very little of the processing, which is to say neural work, goes on in our conscious minds. Any simple act, such as pointing to your nose, involves forming the desire to touch your nose, planning a motor response, gathering information about the location of your nose, calculating in a...

The first in a series of Gifford Lectures by Professor Michael Gazzaniga. Recorded 12 October, 2009 at the Playfair Library Hall, the University of Edinburgh. What do we need to know about the human brain in order to discuss the weighty questions of free will, mental causation, morals, ethics, and the law? To understand anything from a biologic perspective we must place this effort in an evolutionary context, consider the nature of the organ that allows us to be asking these questions, and to...

The first in a series of Gifford Lectures by Prof Diana Eck. Recorded Monday 27 April 2009 at the University of Edinburgh. In 1893, the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago convened under the banner of universalism. How do pluralism and globalism today stand in contrast to the spirit of universalism, and signal a new reality? While the phenomenon of globalization clearly relates to economics and politics, to environmental and security concerns, how has it altered our religious...

The second in a series of Gifford Lectures by Prof Diana Eck. Recorded 28 April 2009 at The University of Edinburgh. Multireligious societies have long been a historical reality in some parts of the world. Today, however, there are many recently-multireligious societies, especially in the west, where people of different faiths live in close proximity and struggle with religious difference as citizens of a common society. What are the challenges to the common "we" in the context of religious...

The third in a series of Gifford Lectures by Prof Diana Eck. Recorded on 30 April 2009 at The University of Edinburgh. Cities are the focal point of religious pluralism, for in cities the cultures and traditions of the world are concentrated. They are, as Lewis Mumford put it, "energy converted into culture." The term "cosmopolis" has long signaled the world-city, and indeed some of the great cities of the world have had a cosmopolitan texture for many centuries. Today, however, the number of...

The fourth in a series of Gifford Lectures by Prof Diana Eck. Recorded 4 May 2009 at The University of Edinburgh. Religious diversity poses questions that are not only global, national, and civic, but also theological. In 1910, the World Conference on Mission convened in Edinburgh and addressed the world's religions from the standpoint of Christian missions. Today, as people encounter neighbors of other faiths, face to face, and as communications enable people of every faith to know those of...

The fifth in a series of Gifford Lectures by Prof Diana Eck. Recorded 5 May 2009 at The University of Edinburgh. Looking more broadly, the religious traditions of the Indic world have distinctive views on religions, on the diversity of religions and the engagements we would call pluralism. Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim communities have lived in complex relationship with one another, with distinctiveness as well as common discourse. Discussions of pluralism and its relation to...