the CENTRE of THEOLOGY and PHILOSOPHY presents WHAT IS LIFE? Theology, Science, and Philosophy

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

Kraków, Poland 24-28 June 2011 Page x

Table of Contents

Sponsors...... 1 Centre of Theology and Philosophy Info...... 2 Conference Schedule At-a-Glance...... 3 Detailed Conference Programme Friday...... 4 Saturday...... 5-7 Sunday...... 8 Monday...... 9-10 Tuesday...... 10-11 CoTP Series Insert: INTERVENTIONS...... 12-13 CoTP Series Insert: Veritas...... 14 Directions/Maps & Rec’d Restaurants...... 15 Banquet Menus...... 16-17 Submitting your paper...... 18-19 Paper Abstracts...... 20-63 Page 1 Sponsors

The University of the CENTRE of Nottingham THEOLOGY and www.nottingham.ac.uk/theology PHILOSOPHY www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk

Centro di Ateneo per la dottrina sociale della Chiesa http://www.unicatt.it/dottrinasociale/

w w w . b a y l o r . e d u / i f l /

COPERNICUS CENTER FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES h t t p : / / w w w . c o p e r n i c u s c e n t e r . e d u . p l Page 2 Centre of Theology and Philosophy www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk

'Every doctrine which does not reach the one thing necessary, every separated philosophy, will remain deceived by false appearances. It will be a doctrine, it will not be Philosophy', (Maurice Blondel, 1861-1949)

The COTP is a research-led institution organised at the interstices of theology and philosophy. It is founded on the conviction that these two disciplines cannot be adequately understood or further developed, save with reference to each other. This is true in historical terms, since we cannot comprehend our Western cultural legacy, unless we acknowledge the interaction of the Hebraic and Hellenic traditions. It is also true conceptually, since reasoning is not fully separable from faith and hope, or conceptual reflection from revelatory disclosure. The reverse also holds, in either case. The Centre is concerned with: ?The historical interaction between theology and philosophy ?The current relation between the two disciplines ?Attempts to overcome the analytic/ Continental divide in philosophy ?The question of the status of ‘metaphysics': Is the term used equivocally? Is it now at an end? Or have 20th Century attempts to have a post-metaphysical philosophy themselves come to and end? ? The construction of a rich Catholic humanism

‘I am very glad to be associated with the endeavours of this extremely important Centre that helps to further work of enormous importance. Among its concerns is the question whether modernity is more an interim than a completion - an interim between a pre- modernity in which the porosity between theology and philosophy was granted, perhaps taken for granted, and a postmodernity where their porosity must be unclogged and enacted anew. Through the work of leading theologians of international stature and philosophers whose writings bear on this porosity, the Centre offers an exciting forum to advance in diverse ways this challenging and entirely needful, and cutting-edge work’ Professor William Desmond (Leuven) Page 3 Conference Programme At-a-Glance

FRIDAY 24th June MONDAY 27th June 11.00-13.30 Registration & Coffee 09.00-11.00 Papers 13.30-15.30 Papers 11.00-11.30 Coffee 15.30-17.30 Papers (Lunch)* 17.30-18.00 Coffee 11.30-13.30 Papers 18.00-20.00 Plenary 15.00-17.30 Papers 20.45 Banquet #1 17.30-18.00 Coffee 18.00-20.00 Plenary SATURDAY 25th June 20.45pm Banquet #2 09.30-11.00 Parallel Student Papers 11.00-12.30 Parallel Student Papers TUESDAY 28th June 13.30-15.30 Parallel Student Papers 09.00-11:00 Papers 15.45-17.15 Parallel Student Papers 11.00-11.30 Coffee 17.15-18.30 Coffee Break & Travel to (Lunch)* next session 13.00-15.00 Papers 18.30-20.00 Plenary (De Duve) 15.00-17.00 Papers 17.00-18.00 Coffee SUNDAY 26th June 18.00-19.00 Plenary 09.00-11.00 Plenary 19.00-19.15 Closing 11.30-13.30 Plenary 19.15-20.45 Closing Mass 11.00-11.30 Coffee (Lunch)* 13.30-15.30 Papers 16.00-18.00 Plenary 18.00-18.30 Coffee 18.30-20.30 Plenary

*Please note: Breakfast is provided by your respective hotel. Lunches are not provided unless you have booked lunches on the 26th, 27th, and 28th at the Qubus. The two optional banquets are on the 24th and 27th and are at the Pod Różą Restaurant and Hotel Stary Restaurant . Page 4 FRIDAY 24th JUNE

11.00 am - Registration & Coffee

13.30-15.00 – Plenary Room (Chair: Adrian Pabst) Gary Mills Dealing with Life & Death in the History Classroom: How Do Teachers Deal with Historical when Teaching the Holocaust & the 1994 Rwandan Genocide Michał Łuczewski The Demons and (Social) Life

13.30-15.30 – Sala H (Chair: Philip Goodchild) Wayne Hudson Bloch, Speculative Materialisms and Hypostasis Neil Turnbull Albert says that E=MC2: Romantic Positivism and the Philosophy of Energy Jeffrey Hanson Being In and Not of the World: In What Sense is Life Absolute?

14.00-15.30 – Sala G (Chair: Simon Oliver) Elizabeth Smith Religion ‘Versus’ Science: Past Issues and Possible Conversation Partners Samuel Kimbriel Knowing from within: Cognitive science of religion and the Thomistic notion of affinity Ivana Pločicová & Anikó Kláriková Finding the Value of Human Life in the Face of a Speciesism Theory Today

15.00-17.30 – Plenary Room INTERVENTIONS Panel (Chair: Graham Ward) Adrian Pabst Discussion of Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy Karen Kilby Discussion of Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction Aaron Riches Discussion of Christ: The End of Humanism Antonio Lopez Discussion of Gift and the Unity of Being Conor Cunningham Discussion of Darwin's Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong

17.30-18.00 - COFFEE BREAK 18.00 - Welcome by John Milbank 18.00-20.00 – Plenary Room (Chair: Adrian Walker) John Milbank The Life of the Imagination David L. Schindler America’s Technological Ontology and the Gift of the Given: Benedict XVI on the Cultural Significance of the Monastic Quaerere Deum Robert Spaemann On the Notion of Life

20.45 Banquet #1 in Pod Różą Restaurant (Florianska Street 14) Page 5 SATURDAY 25th JUNE

09.30-11.00 – Sala H (Chair: Adrian Walker) Joseph Keating Personal Life: A Reading of Homer's Odyssey in light of Robert Spaemann's Philosophical Anthropology Matthew Vest Challenging Nature in Modernity: Technology and Sacramentum Ian Clausen Awakening to Life: The Early Augustine's Admonition to (would-be) Philosophers 09.30-11.00 – Sala G (Chair: Jeffrey Hanson) Ben Schewel Naturalizing Phenomenology, Phenomenologizing Nature Jarrod Longbons “The Chief End of All Life” Joseph Rivera Individuation, Temporality and Life: A Critique of Michel Henry 09.30-11.00 – Sala F (Chair: Adrian Pabst) Jacob Baker Life Universal: Philosophical Cryptobiosis and the Creation of a Viable Intellectual Ecosystem for the 21st Century Tomasz Bialokurec Walking in Newness of Life: The Rhetorical Analysis of Romans 6:1-23 Courtney Innes An Organizational History of Building Bridges for Peace: Finding Meaning in Life 09.30-11.00 – Boardroom (Chair: William Desmond) Elena Bugaite Metaphysical Desire as Desire of God in Emmanuel Levinas Dennis Vanden Auweele Wisdom and Love: Nietzsche’s Noble Lie Juliet Bennett Panentheism and Peace: A Creative and Adventurous Story of Life 11.00-12.30 – Sala H (Chair: Aaron Riches) Matthew Moser Being-Toward-Life: Resurrection and the Ontological Transvaluation of Death David Wilmington Why Theodor Can't Swing: A Jazz Critique of Adorno's “Culture Industry”

11.00-12.30 – Sala G (Chair: Brent Driggers) Josh Broggi Raising the Textual Dead: Between Divination and the Abyss of Mirrors Rowena Wilding The Inspired Word of God: Masculine Translation versus Feminist Hermeneutic Justin White A Plurality of Existential Worlds and Translatability 11.00-12.30 – Sala F (Chair: Karen Kilby) Huseyin Taha Topaloglu “Dar al-Shahadah” (the Abode of Testimony to the Islamic Message): The Possibilty of Living in Liberal Societies for Muslims Elisa Grimi The Rediscovery of Practical Syllogism in G.E.M. Anscombe's Philosophy Michele Paolini Paoletti Human Agency: Three E. J. Lowe's Arguments against Physicalism Page 6 SATURDAY 25th JUNE (continued)

13:30-15.30 – Sala H (Chair: David C. Schindler) Joseph Vnuk The Bread of Life: John 6 and a Life-Giving Economy Ian Warlick Live and Love in Irigaray and Henry Mike DiFuccia Owen Barfield's Critique of Modern Science Eric Austin Lee Who is Life?: Human and Divine Persons in Aquinas, Yannaras, & Balthasar

13.30-15.00 – Sala G (Chair: Scott Stephens) Joseph Spencer Immortality or Eternal Life: The Religious Significance of Atheist Living K Jason Wardley Être-en-danger: Spiritual life and the phenomenology of the Surnaturel Nigel Zimmermann On Human Life and the Eucharist: A Consideration of John Paul II's Eucharistic-Anthropology of the Gift 13.30-15.00 – Sala F (Chair: Louis Dupré) Paul Tyson Cunningham’s Pious Idea: A Promising and Problematic Understanding of the Relationship between Theology and Science Matthew Tan We Proclaim a Cyborgified Christ: the Church & the Salvation of Life on the Internet Nathan Strunk A Reinterpretation of Aristotle's “In Living Things to Live is to Be”: The Metaphysics of Act and Life in Thomas Aquinas

15.45-17.15 – Sala H (Chair: John Behr) Sophia Barinova & Valentin Krassilov Theological Roots of Evolutionary Theory Aaron Yom The Spirit as the Life-Force: Towards Reconstructing the Pneumatological Theology of Life Massimiliano Pollini The Communional Rhythm of Life. The Personalistic Meditation on Human Life according to Karol Wojtyła 15.45-17.15 – Sala G (Chair: Tracey Rowland) Pia de Simone The debate on creation in Origen's Contra Celsum Francesca Corno The Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred: Pure Nature Samuele Busetto “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often”: The Relation between 'Real' and 'Certitude' in J. H. Newman 15.45-17.15 – Sala F (Chair: Conor Cunningham) Justin Devore Virtue, Knowledge, and Mysticism: Uncovering the Telos of Rational Thought in Action Benjamin Cave The Theological Higgs-Boson: Why Emergence Offers the Best Reconciliation of Theology and Evolutionary Psychology David Opderbeck Law, Neurobiology, and the Soul Page 7 SATURDAY 25th JUNE (continued)

17.15-18.30 COFFEE & TRAVEL to Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences

18.30-20.00 – Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (Chair: John Milbank)

Speaker: Christian De Duve, 1974 winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine

Location:

Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences ul. Sławkowska 17 31-016 Krakow

Directions: 1. Head northeast on Nadwislanska toward Port Solny (250 m) 2. Nadwislanska turns slightly left and becomes most Powstanców Slaskich(200 m) 3. Continue onto Starowislna (1.3 km) 4. Continue onto Sienna (350 m) 5. Turn right onto Rynek Glówny (100 m) 6. Turn left to stay on Rynek Glówny (190 m) 7. Turn right onto Slawkowska. Destination will be on the right Page 8 SUNDAY 26th JUNE

09.00-11.00 – Plenary Room (Chair: John Milbank) John Betz The Analogy of Life Ryan Nash Human Dignity and Vitalism: An Exploration of Transcendent Dignity Christopher Ben Simpson Theologia corporum and the Cappadocian Fathers

11.00-11.30 Coffee Break

11.30-13.30 – Plenary Room (Chair: Graham Ward) Philip Goodchild Meaningless Suffering William Desmond On the Surface of Things: Transient Life and Beauty in Passing Harm Goris Aquinas' Interpretation of the Ternary 'being-living-understanding’

13.30-15.50 – Plenary Room (Chairs: Philip Goodchild & Thomas Murphy) Michael Thomas The Economic Crisis and the Crisis in Economics Marcia Pally The Market Economy in an Ethics of Life: Theology and Practice among America's “New Evangelicals” Nur Yeliz Gülcan Ethics as the Centre of Human Life Murray Bell Architecture and Life: A Sustainable View

13.30-15.30 – Sala H (Chair: Graham Ward) Ralph Hancock Epochē, Agency, Responsibility: Political Dimensions of the Meaning of Life James Faulconer No Artful Dodger Daniel Bell The Law Exceeding Every Madness: Excess and the Law of Love

16.00-18.00 – Plenary Room (Chair: Conor Cunningham) Louis Dupré Can We Still Speak of a 'Natural Desire' of God in a Godless World? Rémi Brague Is Life Worth Giving? (sic! not: “living”) Graham Ward Trauma and Affect: Revisiting Religious Experience

18.00-18.30 Coffee Break

18.30-20.30 – Plenary Room (Chair: John Milbank) Adrian J. Walker By Nature Undivided: Reflections on the Unity of the Living Being David C. Schindler Analogia Naturae: Mechanism and the Philosophy of Life John Behr “Let us Make a Human Being”: Divine Intent and Human Response Page 9 MONDAY 27th JUNE

09.00-11.00 – Plenary Room (Chair: John Milbank) Michael Wladika Vita beata, vitalis motus, vita mea, fons vitae: Life on Many Levels in St.Augustine Steven Cone Self-Transcending Life: Lonergan’s Appropriation of Augustine and Aquinas on Authentic Being-in-the-World Julio Jensen The Author of Life and the Modern Notion of Author

09.00-11.00 – Sala H (Chair: Adrian Walker) Güncel Onkal The Value of Life in Paley’s Natural Theology Johannes Hoff Life in Fullness: Christoph Schlingensief's Deconstruction of (Post-) Modernity Simon Oliver Teleology and Life

11.00-11.30 Coffee Break

11.30-13.30 – Plenary Room (Chair: Simon Oliver) Andrew Davison Life and Evolution as Hylomorphic Peter Bernardi Maurice Blondel and the Nature-Grace Relationship James Orr The Fullness of Life: Edith Stein's Neglected Critique of Heidegger's Thanatological Eschatology 11.30-13.30 – Sala H (Chair: Tracey Rowland) Michael Kelly A Life of Envy, not Ressentiment, Rots the Bones: Some Phenomenological Differences between Envy and Ressentiment Alessandra Gerolin Eric Voegelin on Race Theories: A Critique on the “Superstition” of Science Ira Brent Driggers The Life of Jesus, Metaphysically Examined

15.00-17.45 – Plenary Room (Chair: David C. Schindler) Kenneth Oakes Praising “the Lord the Giver of Life”: Life as a Doxological Problem Mark Shiffman Utrum Vita et Gaudium Convertantur Larry Chapp Mythopoesis and the Phenomenon of Life James Mensch Religious Intolerance: Hating Your Neighbor as Yourself

15.00-17.30 – Sala H (Chair: Neil Turnbull) Adam Miller Resistance, Availability, Life: Bruno Latour on the Difference between Science and Religion David Deane Alain Badiou’s Parodic Sacramentality of Numbers Giulio Maspero Life as Relation: Classical Metaphysics and Trinitarian Ontology Ilaria Vigorelli Life as Significant Page 10 MONDAY 27th JUNE (continued)

17.30-18.00 BREAK

18.00-20.00 – Plenary Room (Chair: John Milbank) Michel Morange Recent Transformations in the Answers to the Question “What is Life?” Lenny Moss Nature Explores Greater Levels of Detachment - a Theory/Philosophy of Nature, Life and Humanity Michael Heller Cosmic Environment of Life

20.45 Banquet #2 in Hotel Stary Restaurant (Szczepanska Street 5)

TUESDAY 28th JUNE

09.00-11.00 – Plenary Room (Chair: John Milbank) Scott Stephens A Politics of Life: Against the Idolatry of the Body Mary Taylor Environmental Solidarity and Life: Overcoming Anthropocentrism, Biocentrism, and Postmodern Ambiguity Stratford Caldecott Is Life a Transcendental?

09.00-11.00 – Sala H (Chair: Philip Goodchild) Joeri Schrjivers Life as Strong as Death? The Primacy of Life in J-Y Lacoste's Etre en Danger Steven Peck Life as Emergent Agential Systems: Purpose without Teleology John McCarthy Life as Transparent: Fore-thinking Life at the Intersection of Science, Philosophy and Theology

11.00-11.30 Coffee Break

13.00-15.00 – Plenary Room (Chair: Conor Cunningham) Kimbell Kornu The Aesthetics of Medicine: Life, Beauty, and the Other Pete M. Candler, Jr. Resurrection: The Truth of the Physical (to be read by Conor Cunningham) Jeffrey Bishop The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying

13.00-15.00 – Sala H (Chair: David C. Schindler) Michael Funk Deckard Kant's Biological Expressionism Adrian J. Reimers Antinomies of Freedom Beáta Tóth Life as an Analogical Concept: Earthly and Eternal Page 11 TUESDAY 28th JUNE (continued)

15.00-17.00 – Plenary Room (Chair: John Milbank) Chris Hackett Anthropomorphism and the Meaning of Life Martin Bieler Why Do We Want to live? On Master Eckhart's Understanding of Human Life Agata Bielik-Robson Taking Life out of Nature: Jewish Messianic Vitalism & the Problem of Denaturalisation

15.00-17.00 – Sala H (Chair: David L. Schindler) Marcelo López (Memory and Hope) as a Privileged Perspective for Understanding Sebastián Montiel The Heroism of Reason and the Reson of Sanctity (On the Theological Assumptions of the Scientific Weltanschauung) Mátyás Szalay Life as Gift: From a Mere Datum to a Full Donum Aaron Riches Humanism, Cyborgs and Christology

17.00-18.00 COFFEE BREAK

18.00-19.00 – Plenary Room (Javier Martínez) Izzeldin Abuelaish Life is Hope (Nobel Peace Prize Nominee)

19.00-19.15 Closing

19.15-20.45 Archbishop of Granada Javier Martínez to Celebrate Closing Mass (Venue to be announced) Page 12 Centre Publications

Conor Cunningham and Peter M. Candler, Jr. GENERAL EDITORS It’s not a question of whether one believes in God or not. Rather, it’s a question of if, in the absence of God, we can have belief, any belief.

"If you live today," wrote Flannery O'Connor, "you breathe in nihilism." Whether "religious" or "secular", it is "the very gas you breathe." Within and without the academy, there is an air common to both deconstruction and scientism, both of which might be described as species of reductionism. The dominance of these modes of knowledge in popular and professional discourse is quite incontestable, perhaps no more so where questions of theological import are often subjugated to the margins of intellectual respectability. Yet it is often the case that—unwittingly or no—it is precisely the proponents and defenders of religious belief in an age of nihilism who are among those most complicit in this very reduction. In these latter cases, one frequently spies an accomodationist impulse, whereby our concepts must be first submitted to a prior philosophical court of appeal in order for them to render any intellectual value. To cite one particularly salient example, debates over the origins, nature, and ends of human life are routinely partitioned off into categories of "evolutionism" and "creationism", often with little nuance. Where attempts to mediate these arguments are to be found, frequently the strategy is that of a kind of accommodation: how can we adapt our belief in creation to an already established evolutionary metaphysic, or, how can we have our evolutionary cake and eat it too? Sadly, it is the case that, despite the best intentions of such "intellectual ecumenism", the distinctive voice of theology is the first one to succumb to aphony—either from impetuous overuse or from a deliberate silencing.

The books in this unique new series propose no such simple accommodation. Rather, they seek and perform tactical interventions in such debates in a manner that problematizes the accepted terms of such debates. They propose something altogether more demanding: through a kind of refusal of the disciplinary isolation now standard in modern universities, a genuinely interdisciplinary series of mediations of crucial concepts and key figures in contemporary thought. These volumes will attempt to discuss these topics as they are articulated within their own field, including their historical emergence and cultural significance, which will provide a way into seemingly abstract discussions. At the same time, they aim to analyze what consequences such thinking may have for theology, both positive and negative, and, in light of these new perspectives, to develop an effective response—one that will better situate students of theology and professional theologians alike Page 13

within the most vital debates informing Western Society, and so increase their understanding of, participation in and contribution to these.

To a generation brought up on a diet of deconstruction on the one hand, and scientism on the other, INTERVENTIONS offers an alternative that is otherwise than nihilistic—by approaching well- worn questions and topics, as well as historical and contemporary figures, from an original and interdisciplinary angle, and so avoid having to steer a course between the aforementioned 'Scylla' and 'Charybdis'.

This series will also seek to navigate not just through these twin dangers, but also through the dangerous "and" which joins them. That is to say, it will attempt to be genuinely interdisciplinary in avoiding the conjunctive approach to such topics that takes as paradigmatic a relationship of "theology and phenomenology" or "religion and science". Instead, the volumes in this series will, in general, attempt to treat such discourses not as discrete disciplines unto themselves, but as moments within a distended theological performance. Above all, they will hopefully contribute to a renewed atmosphere shared by theologians and philosophers (not to mention those in other disciplines)—an air that is not nothing . . .

www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/Interventions/ Page 14

V E R I T A S

‘. . . the truth will set you free.’ (john 8.32)

Pontius Pilate said to Christ, “What is truth?” And He remained silent. In much contemporary discourse, Pilate’s question has been taken to mark the absolute boundary of human thought. Beyond this boundary, it is often suggested, is an intellectual hinterland into which we must not venture. This terrain is an agnosticism of thought: because truth cannot be possessed, it must not be spoken. Thus, it is argued that the defenders of “truth” in our day are often traffickers in ideology, merchants of counterfeits, or anti-liberal. They are, because it is somewhat taken for granted that Nietzsche’s word is final: truth is the domain of tyranny.

Is this indeed the case, or might another vision of truth offer itself? The ancient Greeks named the love of wisdom as philia, or friendship. The one who would become wise, they argued, would be a “friend of truth”. For both philosophy and theology might be conceived as schools in the friendship of truth, as a kind of relation. For like friendship, truth is as much discovered as it is made. If truth is then so elusive, if its domain is terra incognita, perhaps this is because it arrives to us—unannounced—as gift, as a person, and not some thing.

The aim of the Veritas book series is to publish incisive and original current scholarly work that inhabits “the between” and “the beyond” of theology and philosophy. These volumes will all share a common aspiration to transcend the institutional divorce in which these two disciplines often find themselves, and to engage questions of pressing concern to both philosophers and theologians in such as way as to reinvigorate both disciplines with a kind of interdisciplinary desire, often so absent in contemporary academe. In a word, these volumes represent collective efforts in the befriending of truth, doing so beyond the simulacra of pretend tolerance, the violent, yet insipid reasoning of liberalism that asks with Pilate, What is truth? – expecting a consensus of non-commitment; one that encourages the commodification of the mind, now sedated by the civil service of career, ministered by the frightened patrons of position.

The series will therefore consist of two ‘wings’: 1, original monographs, and 2, essay collections on a range of topics in theology and philosophy. The latter will principally be the products of the annual conferences of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy (www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk).

Conor Cunningham Peter Candler Series Editors www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/Veritas/ s c m Page 15 Directions & Map: from Campanile to Qubus Hôtel Campanile Ul.sw.tomasza 34 31-023 Kraków, Poland

1. Head west on swietego Tomasza toward Swietego Krzyza (54 m) 2. Turn left onto Swietego Krzyza (200 m) 3. Turn left onto Sienna (110 m) 4. Continue onto Starowislna (1.3 km) 5. Continue onto most Powstanców Slaskich (200 m) 6. Turn right onto Nadwislanska. Destination will be on the right (260 m)

Qubus Hotel Kraków Nadwislanska 6 30-527 Kraków, Poland

Recommended Restaurants Ancora http://www.ancora-restaurant.com/_en/ ul. Dominikanska 3 (corner of ul. Poselska and Dominikanskaj) 31-043 Kraków Szara http://www.szara.pl/main.html Rynek Główny 6 Copernicus http://www.copernicus.hotel.com.pl/coper_pl/RESTAURACJA1 ul. Kanonicza 16 Aqua e vino http://www.aquaevino.pl ul. Wislna 5/10 31-007 Kraków Cyrano de Bergerac http://www.cyranodebergerac.pl ul. Slawkowska 26 Chlopskie jadlo http://www.chlopskiejadlo.pl/main.php ul. Sw. Agnieszki 1 or ul. Sw. Jana 3 (both locations near Campanile) Page 16 Banquet Menu (#1, 24 June) Pod Różą Restaurant (Florianska Street 14)

PROPOZYCJA/Menu I Mus czekoladowy z kandyzowaną pomarancza Rostbef pieczony w gorczycy Chocolate mousse with candied orange Rump with light charlock marinade Bigne z musem waniliowym I Pasztet cielęcy z marynowanymi grzybami pistacjowym Veal pate with marinated mushrooms Bigne stuffed with vanilla mousse and Indyk marynowany w ziolach z sosem pistachio oliwkowym Owoce sezonowe Slice of turkey with herbs and olives sauce Fresh fruits Tatar z sledzia i ogórków na grzance Ciastka francuskie z: szpinakiem, serem Herring and cucumber tartar on toasts pecorino, pomidorami Sakiewki wolowe z farszem serowym French strudels with: spinach, pecorino Carpaccio purse with ricotta stuffing cheese, tomatoes Losos marynowany w soli na salacie z Pieczywo naszego wypieku jogurtem naturalnym Bread Slice of marinated salmon on colorful Woda, soki, kawa, herbata lettuce, sprinkled with yogurt Soft drinks Salaty / Salads Mieszana salata z warzywami i serem Feta Cena: 200 PLN (cena zawiera 375ml wina Colorful lettuce with vegetables and Feta na osobe) Caprese z bazylia o oliwa Price: 200 PLN, a half bottle of wine Caprese with fresh Basil leaves and olive oil included Cieple danie / Hot dishes Poledwiczki wieprzowe z sosem WINO BIALE / White wine: kolendrowym i warzywami gotowanymi Delicate pork with coriander sauce and PEPESTRINO ’08 I.G.T. Toscana boiled vegetables Fattoria di FELSINA Sandacz w papilocie ziemniaczanym podany & w sosie chrzanowym PINOT BIANCO ’09 D.O.C.ST. Pike-perch roast with potatoes and MICHAEL-EPPAN horseradish sauce WINO CZERWONE / Red wine: Ravioli z kozim serem Ravioli with goat cheese stuffing LUCILLA ’07 I.G.T. FATTORIA DI FELSINA Desery / Desserts & LAGREIN ’08 D.O.C. ST. MICHAEL- Tarta karmelowa z jablek EPPAN Caramel apple tart Page 17 Banquet Menu (#2, 27 June) Hotel Stary Restaurant (Szczepanska Street 5)

PROPOZYCJA II / Menu II Strudel gruszkowy z bakaliami Pear strudel with delicacies Terrina z łososia w cukinii z czarnymi oliwkami Krem z ciemnej czekolady z orzechami Salmon terrine with zuzchini and black olives laskowymi Chocolate cream with hazelnuts Pasztet wieprzowo-kaczy Pork and duck pate Owoce świeze Fresh fruits Przysmak z poledwicy wolowej w aromatach trufli Ciastka francuskie z: szpinakiem, serem Beef delicacy with truffle aroma pecorino, pomidorami French strudels with: spinach, pecorino Selekcja warzyw z grilla cheese, tomatoes Selection of grilled vegetables Pieczywo naszego wypieku Pstrag smazony w baklazanie ze swiezym Bread koprem Trout in egg plant and fresh dill Woda, soki, kawa, herbata Soft drinks Rolada z sandacza i lososia w sosie szafranowym Cena: 200 PLN (cena zawiera 375ml wina Salmon and pike perch roulade with saffron na osobe) sauce Price: 200 PLN, a half bottle of wine Salaty / Salads included Salata z marynowanym kurczakiem w occie balsamicznym WINO BIALE / White wine: Balsamic vinegar marinated chicken on lettuce Mix salat z serem gorgonzola i orzechami CHARDONNAY ’09 D.O.C. ST. Colorful lettuce with Gorgonzola cheese and MICHAEL-EPPAN walnuts & Cieple danie / Hot dishes PINOT GRIGIO ’09 D.O.C. ST. Policzki wolowe w czerwonym winie i MICHAEL-EPPAN pieczone ziemniaki Beef cheek with red wine sauce and roast potatoes WINO CZERWONE / Red wine: Strudel z lososia w sosie z bialego wina Salmon strudel with white wine sauce SANGIOVESE ’08 I.G.T. DI MAJO Aksamitny krem z cukinii z grzankami NORANTE Cream of zucchini soup with croutons & Desery / Desserts PINOT NERO ’09 D.O.C. ST. Mus waniliowy z sosem truskawkowym MICHAEL-EPPAN Vanilla mousse with strawberry sauce Page 18 Submitting your Paper

Option 1:

Selected papers from this conference will be published together in a collected volume entitled What is Life?: Theology, Science, Philosophy (SCM Press). Deadline for submissions is 31 August 2011, and should be approximately between 5,000 - 7,500 words. If you would like to submit your conference paper for consideration in this volume, please e-mail it to [email protected]. Page 19 Submitting your Paper Option 2:

Radical Orthodoxy: A Journal of Theology, Philosophy and Politics is an internationally peer reviewed journal dedicated to the exploration of academic and policy debates that interface between theology, philosophy and the social sciences. The editorial policy of the journal is radically non-partisan and the journal welcomes submissions from scholars and intellectuals with interesting and relevant things to say about the nature and trajectory of the times in which we live. The journal intends to publish papers on all branches of philosophy, aesthetics - including literary, art and music criticism - as well as pieces on ethical, political, social, economic and cultural theory. The journal will be published four times a year; each volume comprising of standard, special, review and current affairs issues. The journal will also attempt to pursue an innovative editorial policy by publishing pieces both longer and shorter than those typically published in mainstream academic journals (along with those of standard length). The first special issue will be on the topic, ‘What is Life?’ Deadline for submissions is 31 August 2011. Please send all paper submissions through the official journal’s user account creation and submission process, by following the CFP link here: http://journal.radicalorthodoxy.org/index.php/ROTTP/announcement/view/1

Editorial Board: John Milbank Editor: Neil Turnbull Peter M Candler, Jr. Simon Oliver Managing Editor: Eric Austin Lee Conor Cunningham Adrian Pabst Reviews Editor: Aaron Riches Andrew Davison Catherine Pickstock Alessandra Gerolin Aaron Riches Michael Hanby Tracey Rowland

Advisory Board: Boris Gunjević Nicholas Rengger Talal Asad David Bentley Hart Michael Symmons Roberts William Bain Stanley Hauerwas Charles Taylor John Behr Johannes Hoff Rudi A te Velde John R Betz Austen Ivereigh Graham Ward Oliva Blanchette Fergus Kerr Thomas Weinandy, OFM Cap. Phillip Blond Peter J. Leithart Slavoj Žižek Evandro Botto Joost van Loon David Burrell, C.S.C. E. J. Lowe Stratford Caldecott James Macmillan David Fergusson Javier Martínez Maurice Glasman Alison Milbank Michael S Northcott Page 20 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

Izzeldin Abuelaish – Life is Hope

Jacob Baker - Life Universal: Philosophical Cryptobiosis and the Creation of a Viable Intellectual Ecosystem for the 21st Century

Abstract: Philosophers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have resurrected the concept of universalism in a contemporary context. This paper would seek to build on their philosophies of universalism by including Neobaroque (Latin American) literary theory (including magical realism) in order to show that the Neobaroque concepts of hybridity, plenitude, and radical integration serve to establish a viable 21st century universalism. This 21st century universalism is a project of cryptobiosis: the search for hidden (intellectual) life, or the creation and preservation of an intellectual ecosystem that thrives on the integration of disparate cultures, concepts, traditions, theologies, philosophies that can effectively undergird the increasingly cosmopolitan structures of contemporary life.

John Behr - “Let us Make a Human Being”: Divine Intent and Human Response

Abstract: This paper will look at some of the earliest Christian writers - especially in the Asiatic trajectory of John: Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smryna, and Irenaeus of Lyons - to examine how they understood the verse in the first creation account in Genesis: “Let us make a human being”. Instead of regarding “human beings” as having been created at that point, these writers emphasized that this divine intent is only completed in the person of the crucified Christ (“it is finished” as Christ says in John, just after Pilate has affirmed: “behold the human being”) and those who respond to the call to live in Christ: it requires a human “fiat”, unlike every other aspect of creation which only required a divine "fiat". Seen in this perspective, life and death become reversed: we have come into this world, through no choice, into a life which inevitably culminates in death; Christ reverses the “use of death”, enabling it to become the, voluntary, means of life of a human being. Such a position challenges, dramatically, the usual understanding of the Christian narrative (best summed up as: Plan A, lapse, Plan B), offering a perspective which has great potential to engage contemporary science and philosophy.

Daniel Bell - The Law Exceeding Every Madness: Excess and the Law of Love

Abstract: This paper considers the theopolitics of law and love in Agamben, Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, and Žižek. Each of them problematize law in favor of some form of “excess,” frequently drawing on Paul to do so. In the course of correcting their reading of Paul and Christianity on law (and incidentally rescuing Judaism), I will offer a theology of law, developed from Augustine's “The Spirit and the Letter” among others (Aquinas), that nevertheless avoids many of the problems those thinkers associate with law, unmasking those problems to be the product of a univocal and not analogical reading of law. It is this law of love, and not a univocal antinomianism, that holds forth the promise of redemption from the lawlessness of capital enforced by the laws of the liberal political order. Page 21 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

Juliet Bennett - Panentheism and Peace: a Creative and Adventurous Story of Life

Abstract: Philosophical and theological insights from panentheism (the idea that everything is inside 'God') imply a universal unity between parts and their whole, between life and ecosystems, between all people, all species, and between past, present and future. Approaching the topic from an interdisciplinary Peace and Conflict Studies perspective, this paper inquires into whether panentheism might offer a natural, rational, and ecologically attractive alternative to the classic theism and atheism debates that dominate western discourse. Following a brief survey of the philosophical and theological roots of panentheism, I use a narrative approach to open up a conversation about the definitions 'self', 'other', and 'God'. In particular I refer to the works of three process thinkers: Alfred North Whitehead, Alan Watts, and Charles Birch, exploring their intersections with some emerging scientific perspectives. This paper tells a unifying story that is multi-layered and o pen-ended. It is a story that embraces the positive aspects of conflict and strives to use conflict in adventurous, creative, and non-violent ways.

Peter Bernardi - Maurice Blondel and the Nature-Grace Relationship

Abstract: The most acrimonious dispute in Roman Catholic theology in the twentieth century concerned the proper understanding of the nature-grace relationship. Recently, this dispute has been reignited by scholars associated with ressourcement Thomism who take issue with Henri de Lubac's reading of St. Thomas and his classical commentators. De Lubac (1896-1991) gave primary credit to Maurice Blondel (1861-1949) for helping Catholic thought overcome an “extrinsicist” understanding of the nature-grace relationship. However, Blondel was accused of blurring the distinction between the natural and supernatural orders. This accusation figured prominently in Blondel's polemical exchange with Pedro Descoqs (1877-1946) over Catholic participation in the political movement of Action Française. Descoqs argued that Blondel's philosophy of the supernatural tended to vitiate the proper autonomy of the natural order. In response to his scholastic critics, Blondel modified certain o f his positions in his later publications. My paper will examine the different understandings of the nature-grace relationship that figured in the clash between Blondel and Descoqs, indicate modifications that Blondel made in his later work, and comment on the work of the ressourcement Thomists.

John Betz - The Analogy of Life

Tomasz Białokurec - Walking in Newness of Life: The Rhetorical Analysis of Romans 6:1-23

Abstract: Following the achievements of a rhetorical analysis on Romans, especially some of J.N. Aletti's remarks, this paper argues that Romans 6:1-23 plays the key role in a renewed understanding of Paul's concept of Christian life. The point to be proved is that the Apostle's idea of the baptism conceived in terms of ‘being grown together with the likeness of the death and resurrection of Christ’ (Rom 6:5) is of great heuristic significance for an attempt to redefine what the Christian life is. Those who ‘have been buried with Him through baptism into death’ (Rom 6:4) may now 'walk in newness of life' together with the resurrected Lord. On Page 22 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Tomasz Białokurec, continued) the grounds of his paschal logic of argumentation Paul strives to define the believer's identity in Christ's life so as to constitute the ontological foundation for existential engagement in rational service to the Lord and others. The rhetorical analysis of the passage Romans 6:1-23, which forms one argumentative unit, focus es on the semantics of the text and rhetorical means used by the author with a view to persuading those addressed. The analysis aims at determining the purpose of Paul's persuasion as well as the way in which his argumentation is unfolded in the course of the discourse. Discovering such a strategy of argumentation may considerably develop research in the field of Pauline theology of life.

Jeffrey Bishop - The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying

Abstract: In this presentation, I will explore several key themes in my book, The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying. The main thesis is that the dead body is epistemologically normative for medicine, creating the illusion of a solid ground upon which to build medicine's sciences of life. In the process, I will describe how a metaphysics of efficient causation shaped physiological science as well as the rise of technological science in medicine. In physiology, the living body becomes dead matter in motion. Technological medicine understands the dying body as replaceable by interchangeable parts. In transplant medicine, the living organs of the dead replace the dead organs of the living. In addition, Bishop will also explore the rise of probabilistic and statistical medicine, along with the rise of the biopsychosocial model of medicine, which is touted as a remedy to an overly technological medicine. Yet, this biopsychosocial medicine, and then the new and improved biopsychosociospiritual medicine, collapses into techniques of control; total palliative care becomes totalizing, where each feature of human being—biological, psychological, social, and spiritual being—becomes the domain of medicine. Thus, in short, at the heart of the modern sciences of life is the dead body, resulting in a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, that on one desires, but no one can stop.

Rémi Brague - Is Life Worth Giving? (sic! not: “living”)

Joshua Broggi - Raising the Textual Dead: Between Divination and the Abyss of Mirrors

Abstract: How are the textual dead raised to a living presence? Several attractive potential methods of giving texts life and living speech are briefly examined: 'divination' as the necromantic recovery of authorial meaning, a structuralist account of the immediate production of speech by a reader, and finally an 'abyss of mirrors' as Derrida's infinite différance. These three attempts are abandoned in favor of the central thesis of ventriloquism. The textual dead are raised when they are appropriately ventriloquized. The life of a traditionary text, particularly Christian scripture, is found when it is ventriloquized with a diachronic community of voices. Only in this phenomenologically explicated act are the textual dead raised to a living presence. Furthermore, it is only by participating in this Page 23 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Josh Broggi, continued) historically unfolding collective life—by readers themselves becoming ventriloquized—that they also have the life of the community, that is, Christian life.

Elena Bugaite - Metaphysical Desire as Desire of God in Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract: Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) is one of the central figures of contemporary, phenomenological, thought. We could rightly sustain that a tentative to introduce a philosopher through his/her personal history is risky. Philosophy is much more than a systematic exposition of a personal experience. Philosophy goes further than individual limitations and considers everything that remains and is universal. The central aspect of Levinas’ philosophy affirms that alterity of other person overcomes any form of appearance or knowledge. Levinas tried to translate the message of Judaism and of Holy Scripture into a philosophical language. According to the position of Levinas, ethics is a real metaphysics, because ethics makes possible philosophy, as a possible and authentic knowing. The metaphysical transcendence is desire. Desire, in a different manner than a simple need, reveals the universal and the spiritual aspect of a human person and of society. The metaphysical desire is the source of authentic ethical relations, which are signed by universality and responsibility. The responsibility brings us to a horizon, which is being opened constantly towards the infinity. The face of the Other reveals Infinity in the finite world.

Samuele Busetto – “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often”: The relation between 'Real' and 'Certitude' in J. H. Newman

Abstract: Life is inevitably to change, but what makes possible to avoid a changing for nothingness? What is real? and how can we be certain of it? By his theological and philosophical works J. H. Newman suggests a path of a different modernity. In response to skepticism and liberalism he doesn’t explicitly propose a metaphysics, but a comprehensive description of human way to certitude of what is real, against what is nothing but shadow. Real living is to grasp real and be certain of it. This implies a continuous conversion to real, a change for real. Newman’s recalls to ‘knowing by aspects’, ‘imagination’, ‘probability’, the ‘personal’, ‘mystery’ and ‘conscience’ reveal a different modern reason which thinks along with reality and makes possible a conscious relation between the whole of person and the whole of reality.

Stratford Caldecott - Is Life a Transcendental?

Abstract: The British-American architect and designer Christopher Alexander, in his monumental study The Nature of Order, has suggested that ‘Life’ is a quality of space itself. Can this idea be integrated with Neoplatonic or Scholastic metaphysics? I want to look at the relationship between Life and Being, or between Life and the transcendental properties of Being - Unity, Truth, Goodness and Beauty - and draw out some implications for dialogue across cultures. Page 24 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

Benjamin Cave - The Theological Higgs-Boson: Why emergence offers the best reconciliation of Theology and Evolutionary Psychology

Abstract: How does one begin to consider approaching Theology in a postmodern age where the one who approaches has been discarded in the end of noetics. The problem is far from simple, if knowledge (or the capacity for such) is placed in a foundational role, one loses the very connection between the I of knowing and the I of experiencing. This dissolves the individual into dualism, split between Marion's l'etre and l'etant. Into this aporia of individual unity comes the postmodern response of community. This paper seeks to examine the productive capacity of community as unit over simply a community of individuals. It seems, as the religion of social Darwinism realised in a compressed timeframe, that the return to community is the only productive response to the end of modernity.

This paper contends that in emergence, the study of complex systemic effects not intended by any unit of the system nor by the sum of the unit's intentions, one can develop a productive understanding of the lack which individuals acknowledge in their very communality. It seems evident that the failure of the modern project is the very acknowledgement that the individual requires more than his own existence can produce: a fecundity beyond his intention, comprehension or ability to will. In short he requires the emergent phenomena that come from social interactions. Similarly, Evolutionary Psychology has, though through highly tenuous formulations, lighted upon potentially the most productive idea in the interplay between science and contemplative humanities: the meme.

Yet at the very moment of our apprehension, we realise, as Aquinas did with God, that the more we apprehend it, the less we comprehend it. Marion's warning is here more germane than ever; the schism of Noetic primacy is no less tyrannical than that of Ontic, yet both exist in an uncomfortable equilibrium here. We know that the emergent properties of society will proceed toward divinity, yet we as units of that society cannot comprehend the meta-level emergence that supracedes us. Thus both Darwinian psychology and postmodern theology return to the Higgs-Boson. We know that such a thing must exist, else the mechanisms of uniformity which it enforces would not be evident, yet we cannot yet comprehend its existence. We apprehend the aporia, we post what must fill such a gap, yet we are unable to transcend the communal in order to comprehend it.

Larry Chapp - Mythopoesis and the Phenomenon of Life

Abstract: Using the thought of Hans Jonas, Yves Congar, Alexander Schmemann and Hans Urs von Balthasar I will advocate for the retrieval of a robust Christian cosmology that restores the role of symbol, mythopoesis and sacramentality as forms of rationality that alone can ground a proper metaphysical understanding of the nature of life. The presumed theological and metaphysical “neutrality” of nature and of the scientific method will be challenged as anti- scientific and anti-evolutionary as well as for their unconscious acceptance of a Deistic Page 25 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Larry Chapp, continued) conception of a distant designer God. The phenomenon of life, it will be argued, can only be truly understood as the phenomenal appearance of a metaphysical interiority and depth and that mechanistic/reductionistic explanations of the same are inherently anti-life and thus fail to do justice, even on the level of science, to the true reality of the category of “the living”.

Ian Clausen - Awakening to Life: The early Augustine's Admonition to (would-be) Philosophers

Abstract: Early on in his career, Augustine makes the connection between the affirmation of life and the practise of philosophy. Summoning Romanianus in his earliest extant work to “arise” and embrace the philosophical life, he proceeds in On the Happy Life to bring readers face to face with the reality of their animated existence. With this proto-“cogitarian” argument, Augustine utters a word against the erroneous views of philosophy and human nature propounded by his contemporaries. Rather than being alive to truth, philosophers are among those slumbering fools who fail to assent to the surface of things; seafarers who have never sailed and yet boast in their accomplishments; and travellers who, at a fork in the road, decide to stay put rather than trust the local shepherd. Alternatively, the true philosopher does not look behind and above life, but enters into it. In this paper, I explore Augustine's way of “awakening to life”. This is a central insight that stays with Augustine throughout his career, and can speak a timely word to contemporary theologians and philosophers who are rethinking what it means to say: “I am alive”.

Steven Cone - Self-Transcending Life: Lonergan's Appropriation of Augustine and Aquinas on Authentic Being-in-the-World

Abstract: We live as selves embodied, situated in a universe of interlocking sets of meanings. After Marx, few would argue the powerful role that socio-economic factors play in constituting us. After Freud, the paleontology of our desire and family history show clearly as determinative for our core identity. After Ricoeur, we come to know that we are mediated to ourselves through language. Thoroughly, as we are constituted as those thrown into a world, constituted by factors and forces that are not external but intrinsic to who and what we are. Bernard Lonergan, the 20th century Jesuit, fully acknowledged the embodiment of all our being. Yet he argued that the selves that we are transcend space and time. For the hard determinacy of a metaphysics of presence cannot fully define human reality. The self that constitutes itself in wonder and love forms the possibility of the self as historically and linguistically constituted. The freedom of this self creatively emerges from these bounds, and it is known insofar as the self is grasped as human--a unity that both transcends and affirms any data posited about it, an identity that essentially is open to knowing and loving a world. Being-in-love, therefore, grounds the authentic existence of the self as embodied in the world. Lonergan draws on Augustine to insist that reason finds its healing and true home in love. For reason is not an instrument that we use but rather our very conscious selves as we are struck by wonder, contemplate, and affirm the world. Lonergan also develops Aquinas’ insight that the world is known only in charity, for love constitutes the antecedent willingness to engage a world. And Page 26 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Steven Cone, continued) love knows that we live in this world not as strangers, for it is not external to us, an outside we must reach from our interior cave. Rather we are embodied transcendent beings, fundamentally already with a world, a grand community of meaning and being that we differentiate and affirm in knowledge and love.

Francesca Corno - The Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred: Pure Nature

Abstract: The problem of the relation between nature and supernatural in the article “Internal causes of the Weakening and the Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred” by H. de Lubac. How the theological issue is forceful in our life.

Andrew Davison - Life and Evolution as Hylomorphic

Abstract: The traditional answer to the question 'What is life?' from Catholic theology would be cast in hylomorphic terms with reference to motion: to be alive is to have a living form, bestowing movement. Such language may suggest an approach to addressing the question of life rather than an outright ‘solution’, but as a conceptualisation it retains many strengths. These will be discussed in outline and it will be shown that more recent biochemical insights concerning the nature of life can readily be integrated. A hylomorphic approach was elaborated historically with living individuals in view. Evolution has been seen to invalidate such a model, as evolution seems to blur the category of 'form'. The idea of life as hylomorphic in structure can, however, be cast in theologically robust terms that can not only take in an evolutionary perspective but can also shed light upon it. Considered as an emergent process, evolution has, for instance, both material and formal aspects . Moreover, just as it is a characteristic of the living individual to be in motion so as to exceed over time what could be captured in any momentary snapshot, in evolution the species itself exceeds itself.

Pia De Simone - The debate on creation in Origen's Contra Celsum

Abstract: The different views concerning the origin of the world and of mankind held by Celsus and Origen contain in nuce arguments underlying the wider and modern debates on the same topics. Celsus and Origen's perspectives reflect and, at the same time, are the consequence of their divergent conceptions of God, mankind and nature. The ‘fictional’ comparison between Celsus and Origen develops around the value of the narrative of creation as told in the Scripture. Celsus considers the Mosaic story of the cosmogony 'very silly' (CC 6.49) and the biblical stories as 'the most improbable and crude' (CC 4.36); Origen, instead, argues for the need of appropriate categories in order to read the biblical texts, introducing the method of allegory. The Contra Celsum has the merit of showing clearly that these discussions are relevant not only according to a speculative perspective, but in particular according to an ontological one: if the universe and life are not gifts, human beings are nothing but a casual and meaningless product of evolution. Page 27 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

David Deane - Alain Badiou's Parodic Sacramentality of Numbers

Abstract: This paper will explore the attempts of Alain Badiou to re-invigorate a philosophy of the real through a very distinctive account of the functioning of numbers. Badiou sees his work as moving beyond modernity's onto-theological attempts to depict the real in a semiotic framework and then engage it vicariously, as numbers, uniquely for Badiou, collapse the space between the real and representation. From a theological perspective Badiou is effectively claiming a “sacramentality of numbers”, which alone collapses the space between sign and signified in a semiotics of the real presence of the real. In a somewhat circular argument, the real is both that alone identified by, and expressed by, numbers. Informed by Nietzsche's frequent attack on “the law of numbers” I will argue that Badiou’s attempts should be seen as one more failed iteration of the Kantian project where a semiotic system seeks to make coherent the real but in fact simply precludes any actual engagement with it. As such Badiou's attempts can only be seen as a parody of a sacramental theology, the sign obscuring, rather than mediating, the real.

Michael Funk Deckard - Kant's Biological Expressionism

Abstract: At the core of Kant’s oeuvre is a tension: formalism or expressionism. On the one hand, Kant is an idealist and rationalist, and on the other, he includes feeling and empirical influences. This paper wishes to emphasise how the latter is prominent from the beginning to the end of Kant's life and work, culminating in the Third Critique (1790) and Anthropology (1798). Underlying Kant’s critical project as well as his anthropology is the notion of the ‘feeling of life’ (Lebensgefühl), in which vitalistic sensation is key for aesthetics and his philosophy of biology. In fact, this notion is precisely what ties together the two parts of the third critique to Kant’s anthropology. This paper, while complementing the excellent work of R. Makkreel, J. Zammito, and R. Zuckert, hopes to aestheticise the tradition of life philosophy, and biologise aesthetics.

William Desmond - On the Surface of Things: Transient Life and Beauty in Passing

Abstract: Different conceptions of life seem to fall between two extremes. On one extreme, we find more objectifying, indeed reductive conceptions where life itself seems to disappear in the very claim to account for it. On the other extreme, we find more subjectifying conceptions in which the sense of immanent self-relation and its dynamic enjoyment claims to make intimate contact with life as lived. A purely objective account seems difficult to endorse finally, if life disappears in its being accounted for. An entirely immanent orientation raises for us questions about the passing of life beyond self-relating enjoyment. Life as transient (trans-ire: to go Page 28 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(William Desmond, continued) across) communicates more in the passage between these extremes. How relate this transience, neither objective nor subjective, to the passing of life, to passing as passing? In addressing this question, we need to recall that part of philosophy's vocation is to be true to the surface of things, in the transience of life on earth. Surfaces intermediate transient life. Beauty is crucially relevant as an intermediate happening, to be true to which, I will suggest, we have to be mindful of the rich surfaces of things. In beauty the surface of life and the depth enigmatically communicate. Beauty is an intermediary of transient life that communicates what cannot be completely objectified and what exceeds every self- relation of the subject. In beauty the surface is the depth communicating itself. Life as transient is also an intermediate happening, and passes between being at all and not being. Beauty is intimately related to this transience of the interim of life. Beauty shows something of surplus significance on the surface of things. Beyond the excessively objectifying approach and the excessively subjectifying, it communicates an affirming sense of the excess of life itself, even in its fugitive passing. In this reflection I will consider these themes more closely, as well as the initially stated contrast of objectifying and subjectifying options.

Justin Devore - Virtue, Knowledge, and Mysticism: Uncovering the Telos of Rational Thought in Action

Abstract: A time once existed when philosophers pursued wisdom towards the telos of virtue. As the Age of Science blossomed, men sought knowledge for its own sake and philosophy dared to ponder what thought alone might achieve. Following this course, philosophy morphed into immanentist science, seeking autonomous grounds and ultimate knowledge for its own sake, thus relegating life to pure nature. At the forefront of this philosophical shift, “metaphysics as first science,” led the way toward grounding ontology in thought itself. Grasping the very nature of existence through the power of reason alone suggests that nothing should escape our reach, not even God himself. However, philosophy has failed in this task and reached aporia in its attempt to ground life in reason. As a result, contemporary philosophers are returning to the mystical, favoring quasi-transcendence grounded in pure imminence, in place of any rebirth of Orthodoxy. The first part of this essay will highlight philosophical shifts: from virtue, to knowledge, and finally, mysticism. The second part of this essay will argue that (1) the shift toward mysticism demonstrates the failure of knowledge for its own sake, (2) mysticism is a necessary result of immanentism, and (3) a renewal of philosophy as wisdom for life is possible through the concept of action.

Michael DiFuccia - Owen Barfield's Critique of Modern Science

In his study of the history of consciousness Owen Barfield claimed to have identified a marked shift in sense-perception which he called the “evolution of consciousness”—the idea that human consciousness develops over time. He argued that the pre-modern imagination was not content with merely observing the world, but rather, sought to sink itself into, or participate, in the phenomenal world. However when modern man is stripped of this participatory element he finds himself cut-off from the outside world. Barfield believed that the key Page 29 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Michael DiFuccia, continued) to enriching modern man's conception of the world was to dissolve this subject/object duality by re-appropriating participation. Thus Barfield's project was highly critical of a science that viewed man as a detached observer. This paper will underscore Owen Barfield’s critique of modern science. Section I will identify Barfield’s polemic against the purported “pure nature” (or materialism) of modern science. Section II will underscore what Barfield believed to be cause of this obsession, namely nominalism. The final section offers a critique of Barfield's attempt to re-appropriate participation as a proper scientific model, which ultimately suggests that the only way to overcome the current “scientific” crises is a “theo-scientific” endeavor.

Ira Brent Driggers - The Life of Jesus, Metaphysically Examined

Abstract: This paper assesses the relevance of the modern ‘quest’ for the so-called ‘historical Jesus’ from the perspective of the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation. It contrasts this modern historical-critical project with the way the ancient church discerned Jesus’ identity by way of the patristic dialectic of ‘scripture and tradition.’ Based on this comparative analysis, it will be argued that the quest operates according to a problematic theology of history which, being devoid of metaphysics, cannot sufficiently account for the very humanity of the person it wishes to understand. This is particularly problematic when the historical reconstruction is intended as a basis for Christian faith. For while orthodoxy provides an account of the human's reality and telos within created history, the quest for the 'historical Jesus' can only beg such questions. It may be occasionally helpful for contextualizing the life of the first-century Nazarene, but it is irrelevant as a means of understanding his actual identity and mission, and it could never justify itself in these terms.

Louis Dupré - Can We Still Speak of a 'Natural Desire' of God in a Godless World?

James Faulconer - No Artful Dodger

Abstract: Ernst Bloch reminds us that Jesus “is anything but an artful dodger into invisible immanence.” Jesus announces that the kingdom of God is at hand, but he does so as an incarnate being rather than an other-worldly one: the kingdom at hand is a kingdom of this world. As Kierkegaard insisted, without the Incarnation Christianity is much like much other religion, a teaching here for how to obtain a reward in the other-world over there. As Kierkegaard noticed but failed to bring to the fore, with the Incarnation Christianity is a materialism, a teaching about and for this world. The paradox of the God-man is the paradox of Christian materialism, of transcendence in rather than above or attached to immanence.

I argue that materialism entails pluralism: onto-theology is monistic, demanding that there be ultimately only one ultimate being—or it argues at least for the univocity of being. But materialism allows for neither the reduction of all beings to one nor the univocity of being. Some beings remain absolutely—indissolubly—other. But unity, which is no monism, can be Page 30 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(James Faulconer, continued) created from the always already given plurality. Christianity is about that creation of unity in a material world, within material constraints and material economies.

Alessandra Gerolin - Eric Voegelin on Race Theories: A Critique on the “Superstition” of Science

Abstract: Considering the topic of race and state, Eric Voegelin draws a distinction between race theories and race ideas. The specific feature of race ideas at his times (characterized by the political ascendency of National Socialism) consisted in the claim to be not only political ideas, but the result of a scientific reflection. This distinction gives to Voegelin the opportunity to point out to the reader the ideological attitude of scientism, which claims to offer as true a series of statements whose foundations are not scientifically tested, as they belong to the field of anthropology. Race theories are affected by difficulties which come from the fact that the methods proper to one of the realms of being are applied unjustifiably to other spheres. Following Helmuth Plessner and Max Scheler Voegelin proposes a philosophical anthropology able to consider the different levels by which the human being is constituted without making one of these layers the measure and the explanatory basis for the others. Philosophical anthropology becomes for Voegelin the instrument to understand political ideas as originated by the experience of man as a corporeal-psychic unity. The aim of the paper consists in proposing a critical view of Voegelin’s anthropology and his critique on scientism, testing its validity within contemporary debate.

Philip Goodchild - Meaningless Suffering

Abstract: The remarkable coincidence of the fine-tuning of the constants and initial conditions of the universe so that it is capable of supporting life is so improbable as to demand an explanation. Two prominent explanations are normally discussed: a ‘multiverse’ hypothesis, according to which all possible universes exist, and we naturally observe the one capable of supporting us, draws on principles of random variation and selection that are familiar from natural selection; an ‘intelligent design’ hypothesis, according to which the laws and conditions of the universe are planned to support life, draws on principles of technological production. In these cosmologies, the battle between kinds of explanation that remove or conserve purpose is writ large. In both cases, a mode of behaviour encountered within the universe is used to explain the whole. Yet both involve differing assumptions about what it means to think, to explain, and to affirm.

In this paper, I propose the following: (a) that the relationship between scientific laws does not take the form of the kinds of explanation with which we are familiar; (b) that fine-tuning is correlated not simply with life or human existence, but with something that makes experience possible; (c) that this surplus element in the fine-tuning of the universe beyond current understanding is not simply a cosmological puzzle, but is involved in the way in which the laws of the universe impact upon and generate experience beyond understanding on a daily basis; Page 31 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Philip Goodchild, continued) (d) that this surplus is encountered primarily in meaningless suffering. The paper will therefore focus on exploring the significance of order, disorder, explanation, suffering and cosmodicy.

Harm Goris - Aquinas’ interpretation of the ternary ‘being-living-understanding’

Abstract: The ternary (esse, vivere, intelligere) found its way from being a taxonomic classification device for spiritual beings in neo-Platonic philosophy to medieval scholastics. Its interpretation underwent a specific modification as it started to function within a specifically Christian context of creation ex nihilo. In this paper, I want to discuss how Aquinas understood the tripartition. I shall argue that for him it no longer represents an ascending order from inferior to superior beings, but rather an intensification of being (esse) itself. “Being” becomes more intense, dense, richer as the relation between self and other becomes more intimate. While inanimate things are nothing but themselves and have no intrinsic relation to other things, living things have an inner connection to what is outside of them, and intelligent beings incorporate the alterity of other beings within themselves through their intentional activity of knowing and loving. Aquinas develops this reinterpretation of the neo-Platonic ternary by integrating it with two Aristotelian principles, viz. ‘to live is for living things to be’ (vivere viventibus est esse) and ‘the true is in the intellect while the good is in the external object’.

Elisa Grimi - The Rediscovery of Practical Syllogism in G.E.M. Anscombe’s Philosophy

Abstract : “Our present situation is unique in philosophical history: our period is one of the intense philosophical activity, and also we are now in a position to read Aristotle critically and at the same time with sympathy – without either servility or hostility”. - G.E.M. Anscombe, Aristotle: the Search for Substance, in. G.E.M. Anscombe and P.T. Geach, Three Philosophers, Oxford 1961, p. 63.

The aim of the present essay is to analyze the role of Aristotle’s model of practical syllogism in G.E.M. Anscombe’s theory of action. First I will analyze the model of practical syllogism in Aristotle, emphasizing the structure and the role that it plays in the Aristotelian argument with particular attention to Nicomachean Ethics, and critical points that are subjects of the current debate. Then I will argue about the rediscovery of Aristotle’s practical syllogism used by Anscombe, as a preferred tool to understand and describe intentional action. I will refer in particular to the book Intention written in 1957. The teleological perspective supported by Anscombe becomes a reflection on a subject in action: it is from action that it is possible to understand the action itself. If the invitation with Husserl’s phenomenology was to ‘zurück zu den Sachen selbst,’ we might venture that it is necessary to come back to the action in order to understand the subject himself. In fact, the practical reasoning arises as favored model for understanding the connection between intention and action, far from the obscurantism often offered by mentalism. Page 32 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

Nur Yeliz Gülcan - Ethics as the Centre of Human Life

Abstract: Ethics is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality and it is the very important subject for all people. The roots of the ethics go back to Ancient Greek. Although the original meaning of the term 'ethics' is character, custom; today ethics means the principles of conduct. The subject of ethics is related to our action and our experience in everyday life. It can be said that ethics is about I and thou relationship. We can never deny the importance of ethics in our life. Almost all people want to live in a good society, so people worry about ethics. Ethical behavior includes some moral principles and values. There are two levels of ethics; theoretical and applied ethics. Many ethical areas appeared under the name of Applied Ethics. Applied ethics examines the particular ethical issues of private and public life. In this study I will discuss some ethical dilemmas arising in people’s everyday life. In doing this, I will also discuss business ethics. Without ethics, life is meaningless. Therefore, we can say that ethics is the art of living well. Key Words: Ethics, life, applied ethics, business ethics.

Chris Hackett - Anthropomorphism and the Meaning of Life

Abstract: Life, as a philosophical question, is the philosophical question par excellence. How could it be otherwise? As Michel Henry suggests, life used to be a sub-category of being. One had to be in order to be living. No more. The philosophical consequences of the West's metaphysical nihilism provides the renewal of philosophy as a fundamental choice between life or death (and only as a result, being or nothing). But what is the meaning of life for the practice of philosophy itself, for the way philosophy goes about its fundamental task of, as Nietzsche put it, “hearing the echoes of the world symphony and re-projecting it by means of concepts”? What does it mean that we ought no longer to correlate being and thought but rather, more fundamentally, life and thought? The path of thinking explored in this paper is one aspect of this revolution for thought: philosophy is no longer the celebration of the liberation of a rarefied logos from the chains of myth where the “symbol gives rise to thought.” Philosophy is rather the startled response of reason to the discovery that the “symbol sanctifies thought.”

Ralph Hancock - Epochē, Agency, Responsibility: Political Dimensions of the Meaning of Life

Abstract: A certain materialism has defined modern philosophy from its beginnings: to be modern has always meant to look at what is other than humanity as an obstacle to be overcome and thus, at the limit, as a “standing reserve,” a sheer field in which human technological power projects itself. The question of the purpose of such power is suppressed in advance, along with that of the very meaning of our humanity – with disastrous results. Phenomenology attempted to overcome materialism by bracketing the human encounter with the world so as to isolate what is irreducible in “intentionality.” But the very possibility of such an “ēpochē” must still be accounted for; this bracketing must be assumed in relation to our humanity. More recent work in the phenomenological tradition (Levinas, Marion) interprets this possibility as a response to some instance “higher” than the self or subject, but the meaning of this “higher” still needs to Page 33 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Ralph Hancock, continued) be thought in relation to t he world in which all human beings act, but not all equally. This essential task can be advanced by engaging phenomenology from the direction of political thinkers such as Tocqueville and Leo Strauss.

Jeffrey Hanson - Being In and Not of the World: In What Sense is Life Absolute?

Abstract: One of the founding tensions of the phenomenological enterprise, and one that is certainly at the heart of any phenomenology of life, is the strain between the irreducible or absolute and the means by which it is attained. Phenomenology has always been about the things themselves, what is “right there” so to speak. And yet it is also about access to what is already “right there,” an access that is by no means secure and obvious. To take the inaugural example, Husserl has often been criticized for presenting the mode of access to the absolutely given in terms that are too speculative, too rarefied and abstract. The price paid for this abstraction according to a worry voiced by Levinas is that the real object has then slipped away, that the rarefaction of the gaze that is turned on the immediately given causes the thing itself to flee, leaving in its place a changeling, the intellectualized “object.” That concern is radicalized by Henry, who criticizes Husserl in exactly these terms, for supplanting the given with a theoretical falsification. Instead Henry argues that the absolute is already inhabited by natural consciousness, and no special means of access thereunto is required. For Henry this state of affairs is that which obtains in what he calls life and it obtains in life alone. Henry is right to try to recover the spontaneity and urgency of life, the brute means by which it presents itself to our experience. But from this phenomenological observation about the absolutely given condition of our life he draws a speculatively metaphysical conclusion: that life is absolute in the classic sense of being ab-solved of all relation, particularly for Henry any relation to the world, which remains utterly foreign to life. Yet this conclusion is supportable only a certain understanding of what it means to be absolute in the first place, an understanding that is open to challenge. If the absolute is instead also gratuitously in relation (and here I borrow from D. C. Schindler's magisterial interpretation of Plato's Republic) then the sheer givenness of life to itself can only be properly understood by relation to what is relative to life—for Henry, the world. This is a possible avenue of interpretation recognized neither by Husserl nor Henry. The promise of such an interpretation is that it preserves the relation between the reduced and the irreducible, anticipating and blunting in advance the criticism that the reduction delivers something other than life; and it is able to situate the reductive act (which need not be construed along overly intellectualist lines) as itself a function of life itself, not a flight from life. Such a revised understanding of the absolute can give depth to what is meant by being “in and not of the world” in either the Husserlian or Henryan phenomenological schema. To inhabit the absolute is thus to inhabit the world more deeply while living life more abundantly where there is no necessary contradiction between the two.

Michael Heller - Cosmic Environment of Life

Abstract: Even if life exists only on a single planet in the Universe, it has a cosmic dimension. For the process of biological evolution to be possible (even on a single planet) some conditions Page 34 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Michael Heller, continued) of a global character must be satisfied. It was Schrödinger who was the first to notice that life feeds with negative entropy. It takes in energy in a low-entropy form and discards it in a high-entropy form. The low-entropy energy is produced by stars (by our Sun) via a combination of nuclear reactions and gravitational contraction. The high- entropy energy is discarded by living organism into space in the form of heat. Space, the sink of disorder, must be enormously vast to enable the simple-to-complex transition, always connected with the entropy production. This is the price the Universe must pay to the universal law of entropy increase for the possibility of its local decreasing in living organisms. Various scenarios of this general scheme will be presented with the special emphasis on the role of chance and random events in these ‘life strategies’.

Johannes Hoff - Life in Fullness: Christoph Schlingensief's Deconstruction of (Post-)Modernity

Abstract: This paper will build on an essay written for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2011 dedicated to the German performance artist and director Christoph Schlingensief. The modern Kunstreligion (art-as-religion) shares with modern philosophy and theology a preoccupation with ‘possible worlds’, whether in the form of the Christian ‘heaven’, or the illusionary salvation of Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). In contrast, the most characteristic feature of Schlingensief’s art is captured by the leitmotif of his late works: “So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein (So beautiful as here can’t be in heaven)”. Schliengesief’s art was profoundly ‘trashy’, but this enabled him to embody, as the Nobel Prize writer Elfriede Jelinek has put it, ‘life itself’ - even during his mortal illness. Schlingenseifs's art marks both the culmination and end of the ‘virtual realities’ of (Post- )Modernity. In his Fluxusoratorium “The Church of Fear” he expressed this feature of his art through a fictional obituary about himself: “He was, who he was, nothing more, but nevertheless, who could really say that about themselves?” Against this background, the paper will reject the interpretation of the German-Russian art theorist Borys Groys, according to whom Schlingensief transformed even his own decay into the props of an avant-garde Gesamtkunstwerk. This interpretation builds on a long Western tradition, which elevates ‘possibility’ over ‘actuality’. However, as the paper will demonstrate, everything Schlingensief did was designed to reclaim art as an intrinsic aspect of everyday life. Thus his art provides a stage for the return of the suppressed pre-modern roots of Western aesthetics and ontology: The ‘here and now’ of our actual life is, despite its trashy features, always more beautiful than every ‘possible world’.

Wayne Hudson - Bloch, Speculative Materialisms and Hypostasis

Abstract: This paper argues that the relationship between theology and materialism needs to be rethought. Part one of the paper revisits the speculative materialism of Ernst Bloch, especially as found in his Das Materialismusproblem and Experimentum Mundi, both texts which have received little attention in English. Part two of the paper argues that the new speculative materialism needs to learn from Bloch’s earlier speculative materialism, but that neither form Page 35 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Wayne Hudson, continued) of speculative materialism can provide an adequate metaphysics. Part three of the paper suggests that a dialectical theology can redeploy the notion of hypostasis in ways which promote crucial clarifications between ontology and metaphysics and between materialism and naturalism, matters which speculative materialisms tend to conflate. The paper is based on detailed work on Bloch and Schelling, but it has implications for debates about the recent work of John Milbank as well.

Courtney Innes - An Organizational History of Building Bridges for Peace: Finding Meaning in Life

Thesis: Founder of the American-based organization Building Bridges for Peace (BBfP), Melodye Feldman, was inspired to establish an entity that empowers the leaders for tomorrow, and teaches them conflict resolution skills in relation to the Palestinian/Israeli and inter-faith dialogue. An assessment of the organizational revision process, organizational history, over the last 16 years, demonstrates how Feldman's goals have been met and has consequently allowed BBfP to uniquely evolve into a successful organization, where Muslims, Jews, and Christian achieve cooperation and find meanings for their lives.

Abstract: Melodye Feldman, the founder of BBfP, knows how important it is that the rising generation realizes their future role in their nation's political agendas in regards to peace- building policies and inter-faith religion. She feels this can be achieved through various ways, but she was inspired to let young people know that they need not limit their role for the future, they can become involved in their peace-building pursuits and finding meaning for their lives now. BBfP, a program that brings Palestinian, Israeli, and American (Muslim, Jews, Christian) youth together for intensive programming in conflict resolution, leadership development, inter-faith relations, and youth empowerment, provides that opportunity for young people in both the Middle East and other countries. Consequently, the participants become not only informed, but determined to make a positive difference in their nations, their personal meanings for their lives, and in a broader sense, the religious world. C learly, Feldman’s ideology and goals affiliated with BBfP are continuously being met, and are granting the framework for the leaders of tomorrow. Research has been conducted through obtaining primary documents of the BBfP organization. These documents will demonstrate how such an organization has revised their goals throughout the years, appealed to participants, successfully carried out programs, and how it influenced their interpretation of life.

Grégori Jean - Michel Henry et le « vitalisme phénoménologique »

Abstract: M. Henry désigne souvent sa pensée comme une « philosophie de la vie » ; une telle expres-sion reste cependant ambiguë, et c'est cette ambiguïté que notre communication se propose de lever en posant frontalement une double question : 1/ Qu'ajoute le concept henryen de « vie » à celui, husserlien, de « subjectivité transcendantale », et quelle dimension de la phénoménali-té justifie-t-elle une telle substitution ? 2/ Dans quelle mesure cette « philosophie de la vie » mérite-t-elle le nom de « vitalisme » ? Prenant en compte la relecture henryenne de l'histoire de la phénoménologie, les très rares analyses qu'il consacre au concept Page 36 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Grégori Jean, continued) même de « vitalisme », mais aussi la double lignée philosophique dans laquelle il s'insère explicitement — la lignée biranienne qui devait donner naissance au « vitalisme spiritualiste », et la lignée nietzchéenne qui, pour sa part, et justement en connexion avec la première, donnera à son tour naissanc e à un « vitalisme matérialiste » comme celui de G. Deleuze — nous tenterons d'extraire de l'œuvre henryenne certains traits caractéristiques de ce que nous tenterons de nommer un « vitalisme phénoménologique », qu'il s'agira alors de distinguer d'autres tentatives philosophiques contemporaines en apparence similaires — celle, notamment, de Renaud Barbaras.

Julio Jensen - The Author of Life and the Modern Notion of Author

Abstract: God is the author of life because he created the world with his word. God as the author of the Book of Nature has a modern development in the notion of the poet as the creator of a microcosm. This analogy appeared with Renaissance Neoplatonism and has developed throughout Modernity in a variety of ways. By means of the analogy God-poet it is possible to observe the prolongation of the essential Biblical analogy God-man in a paradigm otherwise characterised by its radical anthropocentrism. The intention underlying this paper is to explore, through a series of examples, how a, so to speak, unconscious theocentrism accompanies modern thought.

Joseph M. Keating - Personal Life: A Reading of Homer’s Odyssey in Light of Robert Spaemann's Philosophical Anthropology

Abstract: After years of adversity and exile, Homer’s Odysseus finally has an opportunity to return home. Just before he embarks on the homeward ship he thanks Nausikaa, the Phaeakian Princess who saved him, “For my life, maiden, was your gift.” This paper aims to show that what was given to Odysseus was not the preservation of his natural life but a re-humanized life; or to barrow some vocabulary from Robert Spaemann: Nausikaa gave Odysseus a personal life, a life ordered in community and towards divinity. Spaemann’s reflections on human nature will serve to assist Homer’s remarkable insight into human life. When Odysseus washes up on the shores of the island of Phaeakia, he appears dreadful; naked, filthy, ferocious, and alone. Nausikaa awakens Odysseus out of this brutishness to wonder by her surpassing, in fact divine, beauty. She cleanses him, clothes him, nourishes him, and shows him the way to the city. Odysseus offers the maiden princess a prayer to the gods on her behalf. She personalizes him by civilizing him. Once he is inside the city, Odysseus, the sacker of cities, recreates in sport and is re-created in poetic song. A personal life is necessary for homecoming.

Michael Kelly - A Life of Envy, not Ressentiment, Rots the Bones: Some Phenomenological Differences between Envy and Ressentiment

Abstract: “A heart at peace gives life to the body but envy rots the bones.” – Proverbs, 14: 30. If consensus in philosophical matters is rare, the topic of envy is one exception. Philosophers Page 37 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Michael Kelly, continued) almost universally agree that envy is always bad in its hostile regard of the other. To capture the badness of envy obscured in philosophical accounts since Aristotle, one must turn to the Christian tradition. The effective badness of this impotent emotion lies, as Proverbs notes, in how envy 'rots the bones', the life, of the envier. Critically developing Max Scheler's Christian phenomenology of envy in Ressentiment, this paper explains the badness peculiar to the sibling emotions of envy and ressentiment in order to defend two perhaps surprising claims. First, if envy is always bad, its badness rests in its affliction of the envier rather than the envied – as philosophy would have it. Second, if envy is always bad, it is not all bad, for it does not distort value itself; this debased achievement we reserve for ressentiment alone, which creates a perverse repose in the agent. While Scheler's Christian inspired phenomenology of life endorses the second claim, I hope to explain why he overlooked but should accept the first in order to provide a clearer account of the effects of envy and ressentiment on life.

Samuel Kimbriel - Knowing from within: Cognitive science of religion and the Thomistic notion of affinity

Abstract: It has grown fashionable within the burgeoning field of cognitive science of religion (CSR) to claim that religion involves the extension of the human capacities for 'agency detection' beyond their standard remit. This position often carries with it a judgement (implicit or explicit) that such an extension is illegitimate--what one takes to be whispers in the night are rather lifeless laws playing their old games with the wind and the trees. My purpose in this paper is to argue that this judgement of illegitimacy is rather shakier than it first appears. An important aspect of the CSR hypothesis is that religion misapplies concepts known in the first place through reflection upon one's own agency to the world more broadly. I shall argue, drawing upon Norris Clarke (and upon Aquinas behind him) that such perceived affinity is a facet not only of religious thought, but of many other kinds of human thought besides. Without such 'enchanted' thinking central bulwarks of contemporary knowledge would collapse for, as Clarke argues, it is the “experience of the life of the self as grasped from within,” that allows one to recognize that which is without for what it is.

Kimbell Kornu - The Aesthetics of Medicine: Life, Beauty, and the Other

Abstract: In this paper I argue that embedded within medicine is an aesthetic that points to the transcendent Life. As Jeffrey Bishop argues in his forthcoming book, The Anticipatory Corpse, the metaphysical ground of modern medicine is death, not life. As such, death is the precondition of possibility for modern medicine, which is ultimately nihilistic, and thus no medicine at all. Instead, life must be the metaphysical ground of medicine since healing is its telos. Christ, who is the Life, is the precondition of possibility for medicine because He is both the Healer and the healed, the Great Physician and the suffering patient. All healing ultimately participates in the archetypal healing of Christ. At the heart of medicine is the physician- patient relationship, where the former engages the Levinasian Other of the latter in a Gadamerian dialogical, interpretive meeting with the goal of healing. Within this healing relationship is the aesthetics of medicine, which comprises the beauty of the joys of healing Page 38 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Kimbell Kornu, continued) and the depths of suffering. By embracing the Henryian affectivity of life in the medical moment, the physician encounters the wonder of this beauty which points beyond itself to the true Life, Christ Himself.

Eric Austin Lee - Who is Life?: Human and Divine Persons in Aquinas, Yannaras, and Balthasar

Abstract: In the wake of the recent work of Michel René Barnes and Kristin Hennessy, Theodore de Régnon's “paradigm” no longer holds as an east vs. west concept of divine persons ‘versus’ divine substance approaches; rather, both are needed and point to the mystery of the Triune God who is both one and three, three and one. In this paper I will briefly survey what is said about human and divine personhood in the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Christos Yannaras, John Zizioulas, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Fully human and fully divine describe the one person of Christ, but these four thinkers have expressed the relationship between nature and grace on the one hand, or nature and personhood on the other, in various and differing ways in light of the Creedal confessions about the person of Christ and the divine persons of the Trinity. Representing the Eastern/‘Cappadocian’ approach, the work of Yannaras and Zizioulas stand out in the twentieth century for providing a very person- prioritized approach. While more English-speaking theologians are familiar with the works of Zizioulas, I will focus more primarily on the programmatic and philosophical-theological work of Yannaras on personhood. Yet in the Western/‘Latin’ tradition, both Aquinas and Balthasar, who themselves offer very different accounts of personhood between each other (although not to be taken in opposition with one another), both offer very complex and nuanced positions on divine and human personhood. For while Aquinas is so often lumped in with later Neo-Scholastics as only focusing on the Deo Uno at the ‘expense’ of the three, Aquinas’ own arguments (as Gilles Emery OP amongst others have shown) reveal that he engages in a kind of ‘redoublement’ of both the one and the three. Moreover, there is a sense that Aquinas may be even emphasizing the divine persons to an extent more than the ‘one God’, if one were, for example, to look just at the sheer number of questions devoted to the problem in the Summa Theologiae. Lastly, Balthasar’s approach to divine personhood as truth and as analogy rightly bring a Christ-centric focus to the fore of all talk on personhood but also push discussions in a direction of speaking about the relationship between nature and grace in an analogical way that sums up the analogy of being as an analogy of Christ.

Jarrod Longbons - ‘The Chief End of All Life ’

Abstract: What is the purpose of life? This is a haunting and elusive question, often not even asked by those shaped by modern thought. Why is this so? One reason is that modern thought has been shaped by nature/culture dualism. This dualism distorts the appropriate relationship between humankind and the non-human world. The Christian tradition is certainly able to ask and answer this question, but a contemporary version must consider the nature/culture divide. The Westminster Shorter Catechism addresses our question by asking (and answering) “what is the chief end of man.” Going further, Stanley Hauerwas and John Berkman in “The Chief End of all Flesh” have asked about the ends of human and non-humans together. These are Page 39 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Jarrod Longbons, continued) good questions indeed, but they do not go far enough to supplant nature/culture dualism. The necessary contemporary theological approach must seek the telos of all life, like the one found in Schmemann's “For the Life of the World.” His arguments subvert nature/culture dualism by seeing the whole world - nature and culture - as part of one reality: creation. Schmemann’s work also develops a particular role for humanity that collapses the dualism and answers the question, “what is the purpose of life?”

Marcelo López - Life (Memory and Hope) as a Privileged Perspective for Understanding

Abstract: G. E. Lessing’s “fable of the three rings” from Nathan der Weise presents a modern conception of reason and life in striking contrast to that proposed by the Christian tradition. This paper will explore these issues through Nicholas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei and the works of José Ortega y Gasset, arguing that specific historical circumstances provide us with a “given” and “privileged” access to truth, thus offering a perspective that updates the Christian tradition.

Michał Łuczewski - The Demons and (social) Life

Abstract: In this paper I claim that a sustained analysis of (social) life was made possible not with the expulsion of God, but with the expulsion of the demonic. To support my argument, I adapt and extend two cybernetic notions: black-box (Latour) and binary code (Luhmann). While the former frames the process of repressing the demons, which was a necessary condition for scientific progress, the latter serves to reconstruct a theory of Christian theology, which operates a divine/demonic code to describe, explain and change the social world. I then go on to show five strategies of neutralization of the demonic: silencing, anesthesia, metaphorization, negation and subversion, which render theology unfunctional and prone to instrumentalization. With the help of these concepts, I sketch transformations of theology starting with neo-Platonism through scholasticism and Hermetic tradition, to Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes and Hobbes. I hereby stress that these thinkers did not question the existence of God but – each in their own way – neutralized the demonic. As a result, Machiavelli freed explorations of the social world from scholastic teleology (level of epistemology), Bacon and Descartes grounded scientific method (level of methodology), and Hobbes defined object of science (level of ontology). In the course of these, and the following transformations of Christian theology, the demons were forced into the box, and then the box became truly black.

Giulio Maspero - Life as Relation: Classical Metaphysics and Trinitarian Ontology

Abstract: Life is a theological and metaphysical problem, because it constitutes the top of the realm of being. The Aristotelian Unmoved Mover was identified with Life as the act of thinking. Christian doctrine affirms that God is triune just as Life, but here identified both with Logos and Love. The ontology of the First Principle is different in Classical metaphysics and in Trinitarian theology. The question discussed in the paper is how this difference affects the understanding of the relationship between God and the world. Having recourse to the Page 40 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Giulio Maspero, continued) theological framework developed by the Cappadocian Fathers in the discussions that lead to the formulation of the Trinitarian dogma in the 4th century, free and mutual relation is presented as the key concept that was used in theology to overcome the limitations of the metaphysics of the time and to extend it in order to develop a new ontology that is an ontology of life. Trinitarian ontology may also aid our understanding of created life, because it is not simply a meta-physics, i.e. a description of man and God according to the category of necessity, but is an ana-physics: life is understood from above with suitable categories for free beings.

John McCarthy - Life as Transparent: Fore-thinking Life at the Intersection of Science, Philosophy and Theology

Abstract: Contemporary biological, biochemical, philosophical and theological discussions of life typically begin with a sharp distinction between scientific and non-scientific understandings of “life.” The distinction serves to mark and preserve the differing discourses, methods, and questions that these broad fields bring to the issue of “life.” At the same time such distinctions can preclude any sense in which scientific and non-scientific disciplines might intersect. This paper explores one topic which offers promise for a discussion between science and non-science on life, namely the character of life as “transparent.” The recent work of the cognitive scientist/philosopher, Thomas Metzinger (Der Ego-Tunnel - Eine neue Philosophie des Selbst: Von der Hirnforschung zur Bewusstseinsethik), as well as the early work of Paul Ricoeur (Le Voluntaire et l’involuntarie) and the work of Michel Henry (e.g. “Phénoménologie de la vie”) agree that the character of “transparency” is crucial in grasping the way in which life, especially conscious life, is present for investigation in either scientific or non-scientific discourse. This paper explores 1) how the topic of “transparency” might be articulated as the fore-thought to discourse on “life,” and 2) the implications this has for permitting discussion among cognitive scientific, philosophical and theological discourse on “life.”

James Mensch - Religious Intolerance: Hating Your Neighbor as Yourself

Abstract: Religion has been a constant throughout human history. Evidence of it dates from the earliest times. Religious practice is also universal, appearing in every region of the globe. To judge from recorded history and contemporary accounts, religious intolerance is equally widespread. Yet all the major faiths proclaim the golden rule, namely, to “love your neighbor as yourself.” When Jesus was asked by a lawyer, “Who is my neighbor?” he replied with the story of the good Samaritan—the man who bound up the wounds and looked after the Israelite who was neither his co-religionist nor a member of his race. Jesus' example has been rarely followed. What is it in religion—and not just in the Christian religion—that leads its members to limit their conception of their neighbor? How is it that, in preaching the universal brotherhood of mankind, religions so often practice the opposite? In my paper, I suggest some answers by focusing on the notions of faith, ethics and finitude.

John Milbank - The Life of the Imagination Page 41 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

Adam Miller - Resistance, Availability, Life: Bruno Latour on the Difference between Science and Religion

Abstract: Bruno Latour’s ‘experimental’ approach to metaphysics is shaped by his principle of irreduction. On my account, the principle makes two distinguishable but soldered claims: (1) no object (or being) can be entirely reduced without remainder to any other object or set of objects, and (2) no object is a priori exempt from being reducible in part to any other object or set of objects. All objects are both resistant to and available for reduction and exaptation. Here, every object both composes and is composed of uncountable, overlapping, and not entirely commensurable sets of other objects. The provisional unity of a life depends on this double- bind of resistant availability. Further, the ‘visibility’ of life depends on the varying degrees of resistance and availability that characterize it relative to a given line of sight. Objects that are either too resistant or too available fail to appear. For Latour, science and religion differ in their approach to life because they address two different kinds of invisibility. Where science illuminates resistant but insufficiently available objects (like cells), religion illuminates available but insufficiently resistant phenomena (like breathing). Science is a third-person exposition of the unavailable. Religion is a first-person phenomenology of the obvious.

Gary Mills - Dealing with life and death in the History classroom: How do beginning history teachers deal with historical and moral issues when teaching about the Holocaust and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide?

Abstract: This paper reports on a British Council funded project that links beginning teachers in the UK and Rwanda enabling them to explore pedagogical issues around teaching sensitive and controversial topics – in particular the Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda. Against a broad background of curriculum opportunities and restraints there is a particular focus on how teachers plan for the teaching of such topics and how they develop their use of language in classroom settings to ensure that pupils have opportunities to explore historical and moral dimensions. Through consideration of classroom practice the paper goes on to explore how these aspects can be used to develop positive outcomes in relation to better community relations and cohesion rather than divisionism, tensions and indeed potential violence.

Sebastián Montiel - The Heroism of Reason and the Reason of Sanctity: Alain Badiou and Pope Benedict

Abstract: In his famous 1935 Vienna lecture, Edmund Husserl made the claim for “a heroism of reason” in order to end the crisis of European existence which was clearly turning into what he called “the seeming collapse of rationalism”. Today, while other philosophers want to abandon philosophy, want to dissolve any notion of truth, and want to give up on history, etc., Alain Badiou makes a radical and brilliant defense of philosophy and the Enlightenment spirit. On the other hand, in the Regensburg lecture, Benedict XVI said that “critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age”. Are both Badiou and Pope Benedict two Husserlian heroes of reason? Page 42 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

Michel Morange - Recent Transformations in the Answers to the Question “What is life?”

Abstract: At the end of the 1960s, the question of life partially disappeared from the writings of biologists. The question had been solved by the progresses accomplished in molecular biology, by the discovery of the genetic information present in all organisms. Forty years later, the question has reemerged, in part from the evidence that knowledge of genetic information is not sufficient to understand « What is life ? ». Nevertheless, the question has changed. Most biologists consider that the basic principles of life have been discovered. What remains to be explained is the complex path which led to the emergence of the first organisms. The question of life has become a historical question. In addition the question of life is now clearly distinguished from the question of the emergence of cognitive abilities and consciousness.

Matthew Moser - Being-Toward-Life: Resurrection and the Ontological Transvaluation of Death

Abstract: This paper offers a survey and a proposal concerning the philosophical and theological difficulty that death poses to the concept of life, most especially focusing on death’s role in the creation of life’s telos. This paper will survey the work of two intellectual giants of the twentieth century, philosopher Martin Heidegger and Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar precisely on this question of the meaning of death. Both figures take death to be uniquely constitutive for human existence but develop this core conviction in decidedly different ways. For Heidegger, death becomes the very possibility of life, of being (Dasein). Such a view ends up granting an ontological priority to death, making it the arbitrator of being, granting to death the power to determine meaning of life. By contrast, Balthasar’s account of Christ’s passion fundamentally transvalues death, making the resurrection the arbitrator of death’s meaning and rendering death itself fruitful for life. It is argued that Christ's resurrection constitutes an ontological transvaluation of death itself, making life--not death--the telos of human, indeed even cosmic, existence. Being, therefore, receives its meaning not by being directed toward death but rather by being toward life.

Lenny Moss - Nature Explores Greater Levels of Detachment: A Theory/Philosophy of Nature, Life and Humanity

Abstract: From the merely stochastic presence of subatomic particles as described by a wave equation to the anthropogenesis of cosmopolitan socio-cultural “lifeworlds”, “nature” can be seen to explore new and greater levels of “detachment”. Detachment, so defined, entails a capacity to sustain an internal regime against the challenges of environmental perturbation but detachment also requires compensation at a level that scales with the degree of detachment. Life, as we perceive it, corresponds to that level of detachment that begins with organizational closure (and the associated metabolism required to sustain it). If Immanuel Kant’s Copernican Turn in philosophy constituted a new level of reflection on the epistemology of cognitive detachment it was his renegade student Gottfied Herder who had already laid the groundwork for a reflective philosophical anthropology of organismic detachment and compensation. If Page 43 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Lenny Moss, continued) we are to take levels of natural detachment as indeed con stitutive of forms of material existence, including forms of life, and the ostensible “purposiveness” of which Kant famously spoke as necessary and correlative compensation, then the terms of both science and philosophy must and can be radically reconfigured. I will consider both the consequences of this view for thinking about mechanism and teleology in contemporary philosophy of biology as well its implications for a “soft naturalism” that allows for the dialectical reconciliation of empirical inquiry with that which issues from within the horizon of reflectively grasped, historically contingent “compensatory” self-understandings.

Ryan Nash - Human Dignity and Vitalism: An Exploration of Transcendent Dignity

Abstract: The concept of human dignity has been central to the consideration of when medical technologies should be utilized in the setting of severe or terminal illness. However, the concept of dignity varies. As the concept differs so does the practical conclusion offered ranging from antinomian to vitalistic. At least three basic perspectives of human dignity have been widely considered in bioethics: attributed, intrinsic, and inflorescent. These concepts have been used in secular and Christian discussion. However, the meaning of these concepts in secular discussion has denigrated dignity to the realm of the immanent. This paper will consider transcendent dignity using Vladimir Lossky’s work on human anthropology as understood through Trinitarian theology, Christology, and Ecclesiology. Remembrance of this necessary dimension of dignity will demonstrate that consistent vitalism should be foreign to the life in Christ. Page 44 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

Kenneth Oakes - Praising “the Lord the Giver of Life”: Life as a Doxological Problem

Abstract: In this paper I argue that life enters systematic theology primarily as a doxological problem: how can we confess and praise the Lord, the Giver of Life, without considering the life given over to us? I will first present the three implicit themes within the Nicene Creed's description of the Holy Spirit - (1) the Giver of Life, (2) the life we are given, and (3) the recipients of life. I will then focus on (2) and (3), but with a constant emphasis upon how considering “life” in systematic theology requires that the doxological encounter the biological, while at the same time it moves beyond (and criticizes) scientific descriptions of "life." I will argue that Life will remain a problem as such for systematic theologies unconcerned with other disciplines (particularly ethics and the natural sciences), and that systematic theology, both for the sake of other disciplines and for its own subject matter, must approach the issue of life doxologically, so that it may praise th e work of the Lord and the Giver of Life within the world.

Simon Oliver - Teleology and Life

Abstract: In his essay ‘Life, Death, and the Body in the Theory of Being’, Hans Jonas argues that, in pre-modernity, the end of all things - including the inanimate - is life. Modernity eradicates this teleology in such a way that the inert and lifeless is considered primordial. There is no longer a cosmological thrust towards life. Instead, life appears as a grossly unlikely fluke in a tiny corner of an essentially lifeless cosmos. As such, modern biology presumes the inert and the dead; life is the wild exception which must be explained in terms of the lifeless. While rejecting the modern notion of ‘design’, this paper will examine the teleological character of the pre-modern priority of life with particular reference to Aristotle and Aquinas. For the latter, life is proper to God and this is the fundamental ontological reality. In so far as God is the end of all creatures (animate and inanimate), all things have, by participation, a basic orientation towards life itself. Without a theological teleology which, crucially, also has an account of dynamic substantial form, life will always appear to be an aberration.

Guncel Onkal - The Value of Life in Paley's Natural Theology

Abstract: The basis and purpose of life is considered as main evidence of teleological arguments of Deity. The natural function of nature which is deliberately mean to supporting life-forms is the focus of the debate between ID followers and neo-Darwinians. William Paley, a bishop and biologist of the 19th century of Anglican intellectual circle, devoted his works to explain the benevolence of God in terms of life. His masterpiece Natural Theology or Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the appearances of nature (1802) still resists its significance regarding the design arguments. For Paley the meaning of life is very equal to the meaning of world. Thus life on its own is the sample of His benevolence. Furthermore, he investigates in his work that the responsibility of life is clearly observable in nature and shows us the foundational elements of diversified enjoyments of natural world. These elements of life make the subject a matter of ethics. The Designer does Page 45 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Guncel Onkal, continued) not prefer ending life in the world. He gives numerous chances to living organisms. In this presentation I aim to follow Paleyan traces in order to discuss the philosophical and theological aspects of value of life comparing to Christian argument from design and Islamic natural theology.

David Opderbeck - Law, Neurobiology, and the Soul

Abstract: This paper summarizes the challenges neurobiology presents to theological anthropology and Christian theories of positive law. It begins by summarizing the Christian tradition’s tight linkage between human agency, Divine justice, and positive law. It next discusses the growing movement in “sociobiology and law” – a movement that seeks to replace “justice” with “adjustment.” Next, the paper discusses the contemporary Christian theological engagement with neurobiology, which is surprisingly diverse, and which suggest both points of convergence and divergence between Christian and neurobiological accounts of law and personhood. The paper concludes with some reflections on how theological anthropology and the neurobiological sciences might converge on a “theological jurisprudence.”

James Orr - The Fullness of Life: Edith Stein's Neglected Critique of Heidegger's Thanatological Eschatology

Abstract: This paper offers a critical examination of an unjustly neglected work by Edith Stein, the phenomenologist and Carmelite spiritual writer whose life came to an end a short distance from Kraków. It argues that in this work Stein fruitfully interrogates the Early Heidegger’s ambivalent appropriation of the life-philosophical tradition to found his claim that it is death which is constitutive of authentic life. It shows for the first time that by drawing on her early phenomenological work on empathy and her own exposure to life-philosophy, she plausibly counters Heidegger's thanatological eschatology with a more rigorous phenomenology of death rooted in her own life-philosophical inheritance, particularly the notions of ‘life-power’ (‘Lebenskraft’) and ‘life-fullness’ (‘Lebensfuelle’). It claims that through locating the source of life in divine being by means of (i) a phenomenological reading of Aquinas’ analysis of contingency in ‘De Ente et Essentia’ and (ii) an ‘analogia mei’ adapted from her mentor, Erich Przywara, Stein overcomes the charge of conceptual vagueness which had motivated Heidegger’s partial rejection of life-philosophy. Finally, it contends that this critique sets up her constructive attempt explicitly to re-situate Dasein within a framework which emphasises its teleological openness to eschatological participation in the life-giving being of God.

Marcia Pally - The Market Economy in an Ethics of Life: Theology and Practice among America's “New Evangelicals”

Abstract: Since the collapse of the Soviet system appeared to leave neo-liberal capitalism as the only man left standing, globally we seem to have these options: neoliberalism, which yields too much market and the likes of the 2008 financial crises; socialist planning, which yields not Page 46 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Marcia Pally, continued) enough market and the tattered economies of the Soviet bloc, and Western Europe's social-market combinations, which yield slow economic growth. An alternative--one that embeds the market in an ethics of life--is suggested by America's “new evangelicals,” those who distinguish themselves from the religious right and are developing an anti-consumerist, anti-militarist activism emphasizing economic justice and environmental protection. “New evangelicals” embrace unencumbered market entrepreneurialism, which they harness not for themselves but for the benefit of others. In short, they employ market means for the a-market ends of Christian teaching. This paper describes the motives, doctrine and activism of this increasingly influential group—what an ethics of life means and how it may be implemented--and demonstrates the significant affects of their practice on the global movement of money, resources and people. The material is taken from field research done between 2005 and 2011.

Michele Paolini Paoletti - Human Agency: Three E. J. Lowe's Arguments against Physicalism

Abstract: In one of his latest books (Personal Agency), E. J. Lowe provides a philosophical foundation to human free agency and tries to refute physicalist reductionism. The author examines and discusses three E. J. Lowe's arguments against physicalism. Lowe provides answers to three main questions: are mental causes and events reducible to physical causes and events, in respect to which all human subjects are merely passive? Volitions and actions are reducible to physical events? Are human selves relatively or absolutely free from physical nature or are they reducible to their bodies or to some parts of their bodies? Lowe argues that human self is free, simple and he seems to be really distinct from his body, but he can interacts with physical nature, as well as with other bodies. According to the author, Lowe's solution is acceptable, but it needs be complemented with other arguments.

Steven L. Peck - Life as Emergent Agential Systems: Purpose without Teleology

Abstract: Life is a relationship among various kinds of agents interacting at different scales in ways that are multifarious, complex, and emergent. Life is always part of an ecological embedding in communities of interaction, which in turn structure and influence how life evolves. Evolution is essential for understanding life and biodiversity. All life is subject to three attributes necessary and sufficient for evolution to operate: variation, inheritance, and differential reproduction.

Henri Bergson’s early work Creative Evolution suggests a way of examining ‘purpose’ without ‘teleology.’ In this paper I reexamine that work in light of recent concepts in evolutionary ecology, and explore how agential aspects of life are essential for understanding how emergence provides a basis for a process-based metaphysics of life.

In support of this project, I will draw on the work of Godfry-Smith on Darwinian populations to explore how the major transitions of life on Earth have proceeded through increasing levels Page 47 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Steven L. Peck, continued) of cooperation among agents (e.g., mitochondria in animals cells forming a mutualistic relationship), which have allowed further emergences and complexity to evolve.

In the last 3.5 billion years on Earth, life has gone from simple single celled organisms, to motile collections of cells, to the emergence of neurology, phenomenal consciousness, and to self-awareness. This complexity always, however, emerges in a context of ecological relationships and non-teleological evolutionary process. Yet, while non-teleological, the progression of life thus far on this planet seems to hold promise that seems inherent in life itself, not as an élan vital, but as part of the way the universe is structured. This opens questions that have implications for both theological and scientific views on what life is and what its future might be.

Ivana Pločicová and Anikó Kláriková - Finding the Value of Human Life in the Face of a Speciesism Theory Today

Abstract: In discussions about the value and the beginning of human life there are many attitudes often influenced by different philosophical streams and thoughts in Slovakia. Recently the graduating influence of Peter Singer’s thoughts have contributed to this situation by influencing Slovak philosophers. In this paper we are offering some reactions and opinions concerning Singer’s theory about speciesism close to the Anglo-Saxon thinking and some other his opinions from the view of philosophical and theological ethics. Mainly we will consider the views of authors from German-speaking area, who review different aspects of the Singer’s theory of speciesism. Because, Germany is still struggling with the consequences of Nazism, the nightmare of 20th century. The aim of our work is not to refute the Singer’s theory by logic but to point out its limitations and to underline the reasons why it is impossible to accept it from the ethical viewpoint. In the final part we try to turn the argumentation towards those who prefer the research on human embryos and human embryonic stem-cells. And the experts of this area should engage themselves in proving clearly that human embryo “is not a human being, a person” and therefore can be freely used and killed for a research…

Massimiliano Pollini - The Communional Rhythm of Life. The Personalistic Meditation on Human Life according to Karol Wojtyła

Abstract: In my paper I attempt to answer the crucial question ‘What is Life?’ within the meditation of Karol Wojtyła on the mystery of man. The theoretical kernel of Wojtyła's philosophy of man is represented by the intrinsic nexus «nature-person», deep-rooted in the hearth of Christian theology (and Christological meditation): the human person has a nature, but it is irreducible to its nature; therefore a person can integrate nature, 'personalizing' it through conscious operativity. With regard to this consciousness is an ontologically constitutive actualization of the person. Accordingly, a peculiar dramatic vital tension springs up between the person and its nature: human experience and human act constitute the specific Page 48 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Massimiliano Pollini, continued) field of this drama. The transformation of the personal life on the basis of self-determination would be incomprehensible without a reference of actions to the transcendent truth, embodied in the Person of Christ. In the personal relation with the embodied Logos, man becomes «more man», he comes out of himself in order to «become greater than himself». This is the specific dynamism of the new life in Christ, the ek- static rhythm of communio personarum, paradigm of being.

Adrian J. Reimers - Antinomies of Freedom

Abstract: Even 230 years after Kant's first critique, the notion of personal freedom, of the free choice of the will, remains paradoxical. Van Inwagen maintains that any theory of freedom must maintain some proposition that is self-evidently false. Others find the notion downright ‘mysterious’. To a great extent these difficulties result from a flawed conception of freedom. The great anthropological error concerning freedom is twofold: 1) the person is regarded as possessed of a mysterious non-material power of consciousness, which is the seat of the feeling of freedom, and 2) freedom is regarded as a power in principle independent of the causal order of nature, as an autonomous power to initiate change. Karol Wojtyła, however, characterized freedom as self-determination, as the power to direct oneself. Charles S. Peirce characterized freedom similarly in terms of the capacity to form habits logically. Ordinary human experience, as well as the formation and use of language, suggests that such an approach, based on habit-formation correctly addresses the issue. Freedom is exercised not as an autonomous inner power but as the adaptation of habits according to the dictates of the rational power, whose canons are not those of the physical order but of logic. Freedom is thus a direct consequence of reason.

Aaron Riches - Humanism, Cyborgs and Christology

Abstract: At this cultural junction we see more starkly that the issue of the ‘human’ concerns a fundamental option: either ‘the death of man’ or ‘the God-Man’. This paper will explore the collapse of ‘exclusive humanism’ in terms of key themes of anti-humanism and the need for a reinvigorated Christocentric humanism along the lines of Henri de Lubac and Pope John Paul II.

Joseph Rivera - Individuation, Temporality and Life: A Critique of Michel Henry

Abstract: A central thesis of the work of Michel Henry is that my auto-affection as this particular “me” is made possible and carried along by the ongoing givenness of Life's generative power. In this later work on Christianity, Henry links Life with God's absolute auto- affection. There is a profound structural problem, however, with Henry's theory of the self—namely the collapsing of the singularity of the self into a universal monistic divine substance which endangers the very possibility of individuation. To explore this problem I focus mainly on his book, Incarnation: une philosophie de la chair (2000). I divide the paper in two parts. Page 49 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Joseph Rivera, continued) First, I suggest that Henry implies that my singularity as one who feels myself crush against myself in pure non-intentional feeling (i.e. auto-affection) without recourse to anything outside myself is nothing other than a relative moment in God’s absolute auto-affection. The result is that my auto-affection is singularized according to the same process that singularizes every other living person—Christ's eternal Incarnation. Yet, how is it that I am uniquely “myself ” as a singular living self distinct from each other living self when each self acquires its ipseity in ongoing immediacy from the selfsame eternal Christological source?

In the second half of the paper I address this problem of individuation internal to Henry’s phenomenology of Life by integrating his conception of Life with temporality. The only way to resolve Henry’s paradox (my ipseity that distinguishes me from every other ipseity is given to all of us by one and the same givenness of Life) is to demonstrate the need for an ontological gap or the temporal distance between myself and divine Life and thus between myself each other human self that opens up possibilities to realize my life as unique. In the sphere of the temporal world I individualize my life as one who is both temporal and non-temporal. I make suggestive critiques throughout with reference to the recent work of Renaud Barbaras as well as St. Augustine.

Ben Schewel - Naturalizing Phenomenology, Phenomenologizing Nature

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to synthetically engage the concept of ‘inwardness’ as it structures both phenomenologist Michel Henry and physicist David Bohm’s thought. According to Bohm, reality is an infinite sea of energy, in which life, consciousness, and matter are grounded. The sea of energy is implicate, inconceivable in terms of space and time, and possessed of potencies that structures the spatiotemporal world upon their unfolding. Though reality flows constantly from implicate to explicate order, generating therein numerous semi- autonomous and relatively stable systems, such as matter, biological life, and consciousness, reality's inwardness is never exhausted. Though Bohm admits his ignorance of conscious life’s “inward depths,” its reality within the implicit order, he is certain that its energy is not separate from the reality’s infinite and inward dynamism. I contend that Henry’s concept of auto- affectivity provides a remarkable amplification for Bohm’s characterization of consciousness in the implicate order, centered as it is on non-ekstatic inwardness. Likewise, Bohm’s scientific worldview remedies Henry’s anti-scientific bent. For though Henry describes what he calls the “spiritual cosmos,” he clearly refers thereby to the world’s aesthetic transfiguration, not a renewed scientific vision. By synthesizing Bohm’s implicate order and Henry’s auto-affection, we obtain a much more potent account of the cosmos’ spirituality. Page 50 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

David C. Schindler - Analogia Naturae: Mechanism and the Philosophy of Life

Abstract: Through a “speculative” interpretation of Aristotle's Physics II, this paper would attempt to develop a genuinely analogous notion of nature that can accommodate the mechanistic features of the natural world foregrounded by early modern science, but only by reinterpreting those features in a way that preserves the living organism as the paradigm of the natural. This analogy will be developed as an alternative to Schelling’s organismic philosophy of nature, which has (rightly) been criticized for ultimately dissolving physics into biology.

David L. Schindler - Love as the Order of Things: Creation and the Generous Integrity of Creatures

Abstract: “To put the matter in language not easy for moderns, . . . Christianity [is at its] center concerned with grace--if that word is given its literal meaning. Grace simply means that the great things of our existing are given us, not made by us and finally not to be understood as arbitrary accidents. Our making takes place within an ultimate givenness. However difficult it is for all of us to affirm that life is a gift, it is an assertion primal to Christianity. Through the vicissitudes of life , . . . to be a Christian is the attempt to learn the substance of that assertion” (George Grant, “Two Theological Languages,” Addendum [1988], in Collected Works of George Grant, Vol. 2 1951-1959, edited by Arthur Davis [University of Toronto Press, 2002], p. 60).

“In the long run all that is not done through Love and for Love must invariably end by being done against Love. The human being who denies his nature as a created being ends up by claiming for himself attributes which are a sort of caricature of those that belong to the Uncreated.” (Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Humanity [London: Harvill Press, 1952], 55-56).

These statements capture the burden of my argument: any act or order not formed in the logic of love—any act which is forgetful of being and its Source—must invariably end up, by implication, subverting the nature and destiny of things. Love consists in this, “not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son . . .” (1 Jn 4:10). The love characteristic of the being of the cosmos, in which the cosmos participates by virtue of its creation, is not a love that is first produced by the cosmos, but one that is always first given to the cosmos. As such it is a love that must first be received, through the power that is most basically that of the giver become effective in the gift, a power in which the creature is therefore always properly a filial participant. My proposal is that the mostly implicit ontology of modern Western culture–and I have in mind here especially America's “exceptional” form of modernity–is one essentially of technology. Such an ontology abstracts from the logic of love proper to created being, and in so doing assumes a version of power that can only become in the end a caricature of the power of God, a power not of love but of a technical manipulation tending ultimately toward tyranny.

The paper proposes a reading of America with respect to the foundations of the dignity of human life and of the inherent truth, goodness, and beauty of all creaturely life. The terms of the argument are framed within two historical contexts: On the one hand, Benedict's XVI's call for a renewed reflection on the true meaning of laïcitè, or secularity, as well as his statement that the monastic quaerere Deum–the search for God and the readiness to listen to him–“remains today the basis of any culture.” On the other hand, the reading of America offered in the mid-twentieth century (through Vatican II) by John Courtney Murray (d. 1967), whose arguments regarding religion, secularity, and freedom/human dignity are widely acknowledged to be among the most sophisticated in the history of American Catholicism. Page 51 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

Joeri Schrijvers - Life as Strong as Death? The Primacy of Life in J-Y Lacoste's Etre en Danger

Abstract: The recent publication of Lacoste's Ëtre en danger (April 2011) will no doubt stir up quite some debate. This paper offers an assessment of the book in relation to Lacoste’s earlier publications, notably Experience and the Absolute (1994) up to La phénoménalité de Dieu (2008). Whereas this early work tried to establish, next to the sole eschatology that postmodern man still seems to be aware of, namely death, the eschatology proclaimed by theology in the margins of Heideggerian Dasein, Être en danger ventures further into this logic of life which unsettles all exclusive binaries between life and death. In short, if Lacoste's earlier works showed that the human being has, in fact, more possibilities allotted to him or her than just those possibilities given to Dasein, that, in fact, ‘the human being exceeds Dasein’, Être en danger will attempt to show that life, in fact, triumps over death. This paper will show that Lacoste’s latest entails considerable chang es in the topology of the liturgical experience conceived of in Experience and the Absolute: the liturgical no longer merely insinuates itself in the margins of Heideggerian existence, but the dialectics between enstasis—peace, art, God—and ecstasis—Sorge and anxiety—will override Heidegger's analytic of Dasein, as the fundamental fact of life precisely.

Mark Shiffman - Utrum Vita et Gaudium Convertantur

Abstract: We speak of someone being truly alive when truly joyful. This paper will argue that this intuition provides a comprehensive theological and metaphysical insight into the character of life. If we understand “life” as an intensive term, with the life of God as ultimate referent, and if we define “joy” as delight in the good inasmuch as it is good, we obtain three results. 1. We can understand “joy” as a name of God based in the Trinitarian relations. 2. We can articulate a criterion for fullness of human life, consonant with Christian tradition, that takes receptivity to the good as its evaluative criterion. 3. We can show how lower forms of life, by enjoying the enactment of the good that is their nature, exist in a hierarchy ordered by their participation in degrees of joy. On this basis the paper will address the following three topics: 1. How sorrow presupposes joy, while nihilism (or Gnosticism) negates it; 2. How we can extend the notion of joy to non-hu man life forms without being guilty of the “pathetic fallacy”; 3. How this interpretation of life does justice to what is valuable in Nietzsche's interpretation of life as will-to-power, but also encompasses what his interpretation fails to account for in life- affirming love of God and the good.

Christopher Ben Simpson - Theologia corporum and the Cappadocian Fathers

Abstract: In view of the Nietzchean charge that Christianity entails a hatred of earthly life, this paper examines the contribution of the Cappadocian Fathers—Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa—toward a theologia corporum—a theology of bodies. This project is that of the theological reflection upon and affirmation of bodies corporeal (the material), corporal (human bodies), and corporate (social bodies, their languages, practices and histories). Page 52 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

Elizabeth Smith - Religion ‘Versus’ Science: Past Issues and Possible Conversation Partners

Abstract: A ‘religion versus science’ mentality obscures the ways that the two methods of inquiry mutually benefit each other. This paper explores one metaphysical system in which science and theology are seen as partners in the quest for truth: Whiteheadian process metaphysics. In it, God can work through and not instead of science. This paper calls into question some outdated theological categories and some premature scientific claims. To do so, this paper explores the compatibility of process thought with modern science as well as the compatibility of process theology with modern theological categories. After a brief articulation of some of the basic tenants of process thought, drawing especially on Alfred North Whitehead and John B. Cobb Jr., it explores categories in science and religion that seem to be at odds with one another, drawing mainly on Ian Barbour. Especially pertinent are: Western cosmological and logical paradigms, beliefs about causation, and approaches to revelation, and chronological shifts in method. Finally, it highlights the ways in which a process cosmology negates those problems, along with an assessment of these viewpoints--coherence and agreement with scientific data and religious doctrines. The paper concludes by articulating the implications of said discoveries.

Joseph Spencer - Immortality or Eternal Life: The Religious Significance of Atheist Living

Abstract: Martin Hägglund, in his aptly titled Radical Atheism, has offered—in the name, significantly, of Jacques Derrida—a crucial critique of “traditional” atheism for its failure to recognize that the atheist’s existential refusal of immortality must be doubled with a philosophical denial of the very possibility to desire immortality. Hägglund thus offers a vision of life as “survivance,” an incessantly renewed desire for the corruptible, for the mortal.

Alain Badiou has also presented his philosophical project as a call to radical atheism. Badiou, however, has suggested that radical atheism is to be achieved not through a more consistent embrace of, but rather a profound rejection of, mortality. Outlining a philosophical definition of life that outstrips that of survival—of what he calls “living without ideas”—Badiou proposes a revived Platonism that would put the task of living “like an immortal” again at the center of philosophy.

What is the specifically religious significance of the emergence of these two opposed, radically atheist conceptualizations of “life”? Can a Derrida stripped of his interest in transcendence be of theological use to the believer? Can a Badiouian “Platonism of the multiple,” serve to clarify the life or the afterlife of the believer?

Marco Stango - Human Conduct and Values: Anthropological Relativism and Standards of Action in John Dewey and in Some Contemporary Pragmatists

Abstract: The aim of my paper is to present a pragmatistic approach to philosophical anthropology, as it is exemplified by the theories of character and standards of action Page 53 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Marco Stango, continued) developed by John Dewey. In particular, I intend to analyze and criticize his pragmatistic negation of the stability of a universal ‘human nature’, according to which there is a theoretical incompatibility between the notion of ‘human nature’ (general inclinations to some universal goods) and the different systems of practices and values (from the synchronic and diachronic point of view) that human beings embody. My strategy is to reflect on the nature of human conduct and to show that it is possible and convenient to state a connection between the stability of some universal basic goods and the variability of historical and contextual values. In so doing, it will be useful to confront with the philosophical positions of some recent authors who refer in different ways to the pragmatistic tradition, namely S. Pihlstrom, T. Lekan, J. R. Koons and N. Rescher.

Scott Stephens - A Politics of Life: Against the Idolatry of the Body

Abstract: The West is currently defined by three momentous shifts: the withering and virtual disappearance of civil society (in the strong Hegelian sense of those institutions that shape a kind of voluntary mutual coercion - or “love” - and an orientation toward a shared ethico- political vision of the Good); the emergence of an idolatrous conception of the “Body” (whose health, safety and pleasure have displaced any vision of the Good - much less the democratic ideals of liberty, equality and solidarity - and to which the market endlessly whores its wares); and, the devolution of politics itself into a craven appeal to individuated bodies (of which the collapse of the Left/Right ideological divide is but a symptom). No theological document anticipated and analysed these shifts, and the catastrophic effect they would have on the notion of “Life” itself, more acutely than John Paul II's encyclical Evangelium Vitae: “Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. Thus society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds. Each one wishes to assert himself independently of the other and in fact intends to make his own interests prevail.” In this paper, I want to oppose the politico-theological vision of John Paul II's encyclical against predominant idolatry of what Herve Juvin has called “l'avenement du corps.” In so far as the servicing and protection of this well-nigh eschatological "Body" is the primary function of the State and the Market, the “Body” is both the fundamental datum of our times, and represents the very incarnation of what John Paul II famously described as “our culture of death.” As such, the centrality of divine and ecclesial “love” in John Paul II's encyclical - and as developed by Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est and Caritas in Veritate - stands as the only true alternative to the political decrepitude of the West.

Nathan Strunk - A Reinterpretation of Aristotle's “In Living Things to Live is to Be”: The Metaphysics of Act and Life in Thomas Aquinas

Abstract: The transcendentals are universal first principles of the intellect and reality. For medieval thinkers, Being, Goodness, Truth, and Unity were traditionally identified as transcendentals with some dispute about Beauty (pulchrum), “thing” (res), and “other” (aliquid). To my knowledge, no medieval thinker considers life to be a transcendental since it lacks the proper universality to be one. However, Olivia Blanchette has persuasively argued for act as a transcendental, and this has some insightful consequences for understanding the nature of life. Page 54 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Nathan Strunk, continued) In the following presentation, I briefly explicate Aquinas' concept of life in Summa theologiae Q. 1, 18. In this text, it is evident that Aquinas' definition of life as a perfection of being (“In living things to live is to be”) is narrowly ascribed to motile agents only. However, his theological reflection on life broadens to include all things insofar as they are. The purpose of this presentation is to have Aquinas' broader theological conception of life more directly inform his narrow natural account of life by integrating them with his metaphysics of act. Blanchette's analysis of act as a transcendental is especially informative at this point for understanding how life is ingredient in all things. He offers a metaphysical basis for a broader definition of life that applies universally to inanimate objects; that is, insofar as things are in act they have a natural proclivity for realizing life. In this sense, life coincides with every act. “Coincides” is intended technically here. In De Veritate 1,2 Aquinas describes how truth and good are relational, “…good expresses a relation to appetite, and true a relation to intellect.” Appetite and intellect coincide with the transcendentals good and truth, respectively. Applying this to act and life, one can say that life is a necessary, inherent “coincidental” of act as a transcendental just as desire and the intellect coincide with good and truth in Aquinas. Life coincides with being in act. And if things are, they have a relation to life. In a way, this revises Aristotle's axiom to read, “To be is to be life toward living things.”

Mátyás Szalay - Life as Gift: From a Mere Datum to a Full Donum

Abstract: In a hollow age, how can we speak of life as gift? My response is a phenomenological analysis of life as an intellectual journey from the mere datum to a full donum of life. I argue that the first and immediate givenness of the fugitive phenomenon of life is ‘vivencia’ or ‘Erlebnis’. Further, I analyse three dimensions of its appearance: a) Life-world as the reality-dimension of life, b) the inner life of the soul, and finally c) the event itself by which life is disclosed. In the third part I trace back how the rich content of the original 'Erlebnis' gets reduced to what is properly called ‘experience’. I describe this process in the case of the experiences that allow for an insight into the essence of life: a) birth of a human person, i.e. beginning of life; b) death, the end of life and c) encounter, the fullness of life.

I argue that the particular ‘Erlebnis’ of encountering Jesus Christ reveals life in its fullness, beyond its beginning and end. Further, it radically illuminates the reality of the life-world and of the life of the soul, as it also reveals how life is given as an event. Therefore this is the archetype of understanding any experience for it demonstrates how the donum (gift character) that characterizes the ‘Erlebnis’ resists any attempt to reduce it to the mere datum. Moreover, thegivenness as a specific meaning-unit (experience) is intelligible only when traced back to its origin: the ‘Erlebnis’, i.e. the process by which it is received as a gift.

Matthew Tan - We Proclaim a Cyborgified Christ: the Church and the Salvation of Life on the Internet

Abstract: Many have turned to cyberspace as a source of life, whether through online media channels, virtual economies and communities in games and social networking sites. The expansion of the internet as a lifeform has compelled the church to engage cyberspace as a new mission territory, using the tools created by cyberspace. But can the Body of Christ evangelically succeed as a cybernetic lifeform? This presentation begins its answer on the understanding that both Christ Page 55 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Matthew Tan, continued) and Cyberspace are two different sites of salvation with competing theologies. On the one hand, there exists important parallels that will provide inroads for the Church’s salvific mission online, such as the de-centring of the Modern individual to a more participatory anthropology in which submission to authority becomes essential. On the other hand, the sacramentality of the Church will also expose critical divergences with cyberculture, such as the advocacy of an anti-sacramentality which threatens to gnosticise, falsely universalise and textualise the Body of Christ. An uncritical ecclesial engagement of cyberspace will eventually distort the Church's mission and expunge truly human lifeforms. This presentation will conclude by briefly considering how sacramental practice will affirm those parallels whilst redeeming the divergences in both lifeforms.

Mary Taylor - Environmental Solidarity and Life: Overcoming Anthropocentrism, Biocentrism, and Postmodern Ambiguity

Abstract: “First Trajectory” environmentalism is based on the presuppositions of modernity, including mechanism and dualism. But its anthropocentrism, privileging “conscious things” over natural “extended things,” actually ends by “losing” people; natural entities become mere machines, but so do humans. A “Second Trajectory” rejects modernity's narrative, but its holistic biocentrism/ecocentrism, in refusing to privilege people – claiming they have the same value as other natural things – ends by “losing” people AND animals and other entities, for when substantiality is dissolved, they are reduced to temporary nodes in an energy field. Other Second Trajectory postmodern ecologists reject holism and instead call for holding multiple irreducible dualisms in tension against, in D. C. Schindler’s felicitous phrase, a “murky night of ambiguity,” in which humans are deconstructed. Benedict XVI has called for a “new trajectory of thinking.…[that] requires a deeper critical evaluation of the category of relation…. if man’s transcendent dignity is to be properly understood.” A “Third Trajectory” of solidarity includes Spaemann's analogical anthropomorphism (not anthropocentrism) and rediscovery of Life, shared by all creation, in a trinity with Being and Thought. It saves both persons – not “people” – and natural entities, not against the darkness of ambiguous night, but in the unfathomable light of God’s generous love.

Michael Thomas - The Economic Crisis and the Crisis in Economics

Abstract: My talk will be drawn from a series of lectures delivered to Nottingham University Business School on the recent financial crisis. The talk examines why the crisis happened, why no one predicted it and assesses the challenges it poses to economics as a discipline. The assessment will cover the confusions at the heart of neo-classical economics and financial risk management theory but rejects much of the criticism levelled by writers such as Nassim Taleb and Nouriel Roubini. Instead economists should be applying the ideas of John Maynard Keynes to financial markets and reject spurious appeals to neoclassical concepts such as 'moral hazard' as an excuse for non-intervention in financial crises. The talk argues that disequilibrium or sub-optimal equilibrium in financial markets can be and should be avoided through active central bank and government intervention. Finally the talk examines the philosophical foundations of economic theory, including its roots in utilitarianism and the prospects for the recent vogue in economics for the discipline to focus on maximisation of happiness rather than output. Page 56 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

Huseyin Taha Topaloglu – “Dar al-Shahadah” (the Abode of Testimony to the Islamic Message): The Possibility of Living in Liberal Societies for Muslims

Abstract: After having established government agencies of the Islamic State throughout the late first Hijri century, one of the most discussed issues was the identification of non-Muslim states with regard to international affairs and Muslim minorities who were the residents of such states. A binary division of the world into Dar al-Islam (the abode of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (the abode of war) was introduced by Al-Imam (the legislator and scholar) Abu Hanifa, the founder of Fiqh Hanafi. He would refer to any non-Muslim domain as Dar Al-Kufr (Abode of Unbelief) or Dar Al- Harb (Domain of War) which is the territory under the hegemony of unbelievers, which is on terms of active or potential belligerency with the Domain of Islam, and presumably hostile to the Muslims living in its domain. According to the classification, the concept of Dar al-Harb has provided the outlook which is based on the protection of belief to Muslim citizens of non-Muslim states. This means that the fundamental aim of the Muslim society is to survive as ‘the Muslim minority’ in the un-Islamic society without any participation and contribution. Although the description had been adequate for a long time through the history of Islam; the social, economic, and environmental circumstances of present time entirely differ from the past and Dar al-Harb cannot meet the needs of the Muslim community of non-Muslim territory. The share of information by the improving mass communication devices, the increase power of international companies against to domestic companies and the globalism makes impossible to identify the world as bipolar world. Also this concept avoids integration of the Muslims and their contribution to the societies which they live and incarcerates them in their ghettos. The aim of this paper to introduce the concept of dar al-shahadah by Tariq Ramadan as a contemporary approach to the problem of living in a liberal societies for Muslims.

Beáta Tóth - Life as an Analogical Concept: Earthly and Eternal

Abstract: For Christian theology the fullness of life is God’s life and since God is eternal, the life of God is eternal life. By contrast, earthly life is primarily experienced as ephemeral, as subject to change and decay, and so from our earthly perspective the inanimate world paradoxically appears as more lasting than living beings. Moreover, earthly life itself is not a homogeneous phenomenon since plants, animals and human beings manifest life in significantly different ways. Can one meaningfully apply the term to such disparate forms of earthly life and equally to God? What makes eternal life living? In what sense can one call the vision of God or eternal beatitude life? Can the essence of earthly life be better understood from a theological perspective and, conversely, might our experience of the operation of the animate world shed some light on the nature of God’s eternal life? The paper seeks answers to these questions by visiting key formulations of the theological tradition and also by trying to spot eventual lacune concerning the notion of (eternal) life in theological thought.

Neil Turnbull - Albert says that E=MC2: Romantic Positivism and the Philosophy of Energy

Abstract: In Ernst Jünger’s philosophy of modernity, we can discern an exemplary version of philosophical modernism that conceived of 20th century modernity as a ‘cult of energy’ (and its phenomenological corollary, ‘movement’). Overall, Jünger powerfully rearticulates 20th century modernity as a ‘thermodynamic phenomeno’, where heat becomes modernity’s main ontological product and primary social, political and economic value. In this paper, I will assess the extent to which 20th century vitalism represents a romantic reaction to this thermodynamic modernity and a philosophical position that accepts much of thermodynamic image of modern reality. More generally, I will assess the extent to which vitalism might be usefully viewed, somewhat paradoxically, as a romantic scientism and, as such, simply a minor variation on the scientistic metaphysics that dominated the intellectual landscape of the last century. With specific reference to the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, Wilfred Sellars and Alfred North Whitehead, the paper will go to examine the way in which a new generation of post-positivist, but pro-science, philosophers attempted to ground an understanding of science in a process philosophy of life as energy; a project that that effectively amounted to a call for a speculative metaphysics of energy and a tacit ‘theologisation’ of the modern scientific project. The implications of this analysis for the re- emergence of contemporary vitalism will also be discussed. Page 57 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Neil Turnbull, continued) modernity as a ‘thermodynamic phenomeno’, where heat becomes modernity’s main ontological product and primary social, political and economic value. In this paper, I will assess the extent to which 20th century vitalism represents a romantic reaction to this thermodynamic modernity and a philosophical position that accepts much of thermodynamic image of modern reality. More generally, I will assess the extent to which vitalism might be usefully viewed, somewhat paradoxically, as a romantic scientism and, as such, simply a minor variation on the scientistic metaphysics that dominated the intellectual landscape of the last century. With specific reference to the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, Wilfred Sellars and Alfred North Whitehead, the paper will go to examine the way in which a new generation of post-positivist, but pro-science, philosophers attempted to ground an understanding of science in a process philosophy of life as energy; a project that that effectively amounted to a call for a speculative metaphysics of energy and a tacit ‘theologisation’ of the modern scientific project. The implications of this analysis for the re- emergence of contemporary vitalism will also be discussed.

Paul Tyson - Cunningham's Pious Idea: A Promising and Problematic Understanding of the Relationship between Theology and Science

Abstract: This paper explores a few different understandings of the relationship between theology and science and then focuses in on Conor Cunningham’s somewhat Thomistic synthesis of sophisticated orthodox Christian theology and carefully understood contemporary science. Cunningham’s approach will be shown to be superior to the other stances examined. However, there seems to be a certain inner tension in Cunningham’s work which I will characterise as a tension between his polemic argument for the compatibility of Christian theology and modern science, and his deep theological and metaphysical arguments against the nihilism of modern non-theologically framed notions of knowledge itself. This tension will be tentatively explored and I will favour the depth stance of Cunnigham’s work over its polemic stance.

Dennis Vanden Auweele – Wisdom and Love: Nietzsche’s Noble Lie

Abstract: The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche is taken to be one of the major influences on, especially early, 20th century philosophy. I claim to detect in Nietzsche’s philosophy on the one hand an avowal to the Modern desire for autonomy and on the other hand the frank acknowledgment that this will inevitably lead to nihilism and pessimism. My paper explores this paradox in terms of the tension between Amor Fati (an unconditional love of life) and will to power (an attempt to re-create everything in one's own image) in the six songs sung by Zarathustra in, ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’.. Some scholars (i.e. Alexander Nehamas, Gilles Deleuze and, to some extent, J. W. Von Müller-Lauter) read the succession and arguments of these songs as a gradual avowal to perspectivism and individualism. I would rather take these songs as the portrayal of a fundamental tension between two ways of dealing with the thought of eternal recurrence (nihilism): Wisdom and Life. Wisdom is connected to a ‘determinate or temporal willing’, ‘Apollo’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘noble willing’. Life is connected to ‘Amor fati’, ‘will’ and ‘Dionysos’. I believe that Nietzsche does not overcome the tension between creation and love, but manifests and celebrates it within the Übermensch and his ‘tragic’ will. Page 58 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

Matthew Vest - Challenging Nature in Modernity: Technology and Sacramentum

Abstract: After outlining Heidegger's critique of technology following metaphysics as ontotheology, I focus on the implications of this critique for how we view the natural world. In place of modernity's appropriation of nature as nihilistic Bestand, I argue that the natural world is inherently sacramental. Hugh of St. Victor offers such a sacramental view that places man in relationship with and not against the natural world. Moreover, I argue that Hugh's sacramental model furthers Heidegger's understanding of revealing nature such that nature not only reveals itself as entity but is a liturgical creation that represents, signifies and even contains transcendence.

Ilaria Vigorelli - Life as Significant

Abstract: In Yannaras’ latest work, Freedom from necessity: ontology of relation, appears an interesting view of death that could be read in comparison with Derrida’s Donner la mort. And vice versa. Even though they have different intentions and the two works seem to be very distant from each other, both authors had to deal with Heidegger and Lacan; this communication would try an insight questioning on the possibility of relation to be meaningful as a maker of a significant that takes the place of the other, whereas life has a meaning because of death: as source of uniqueness, in fact, death (taken as ‘my own death’) is operating —for both authors—at the level of the production of the significant, i.e. in the production of relation as significant. How the loss (mortality) of what is appointed as the other of a relation would be meaningful? Is a life of Whom is in Himself freedom from necessity, strictly spoken, a meaningful life?

Joseph Vnuk - The Bread of Life: John 6 and a Life-Giving Economy

Abstract: In Genesis 3 the man is told that by the sweat of his brow he would eat his bread until he returned to the earth from which he came; in John 6 we are invited to work for the food that endures to eternal life. At the beginning of the chapter Jesus is confronted by people captivated by the passing things of this world, but he takes their desires and slowly transforms them to lead them into a new economy, a new set of values, a new rationale for human endeavour. The centre of this economy is Jesus himself, the bread of life, who through the Eucharist supplants and relativises our desire for ordinary bread and its equivalents. This reading of John 6 is given a foundation in the tradition through the commentary of Thomas Aquinas.

Adrian J. Walker - By Nature Undivided: Reflections on the Unity of the Living Being

Abstract: This paper aims looks at the title question of the conference--What is life?--through the prism of the unity of the (embodied) living being, understood as a kind of “caused uncausedness.” This consideration of the unity of the living being unfolds in three interconnected stages. (abstract continued on next page) Page 59 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Adrian J. Walker, continued) (1) First, the paper seeks to display the unity of the living being as a form of the ens ut indivisum in which (according to Aquinas) the transcendental unum consists. In this context, section one constrasts the unity of the living being with that of artificial entities, many of which are best understood as “imitation animals.” Vivere is not assembled; it is not the object of a making; it is an originality that, in a sense, “goes all the way down.”

(2) The next section of the paper begins by underscoring that the indivision of the living being- --at least when it is embodied---does not lie in not sheer simplicity, but consists in dualities of distinct, but non-separate aspects. The second section then goes on to consider one such duality, existing between vital operations that are entrusted to individual self-care and vital operations that aren’t, which at first sight seems incompatible with the original unity of the vivens. In this context, we tackle the following question: In what sense can the latter operations be ascribed to the individual as their supposit? The second section then briefly sketches an answer to this question: Such vital operations, while not entrusted to individual agency, nonetheless have their source within the individual, which is the beneficiary of an originality that truly belongs to it, yet that it does not give itself. The original unity of the life of the living thing is seen precisely in t he fact that, as soon as it begins to be, it is given to itself as something that already was, all-at-once, as the one, irreducible reference-point of the totality of its vital operations.

(3) Third, the paper will conclude by drawing out two important implications of the foregoing discussion. (a) After briefly suggesting the anti-mechanist value of section two’s account of the invididual’s being supposit of the vital operations not entrusted to its individual self-care, (b) the third section will end with the suggestion that this anti-mechanist thrust is just the negative side of the positive rediscovery of the theological saturation of the biological to which the whole of the foregoing discussion is meant to point. The dual unity of the living being bespeaks its participation in God. The unity of the embodied living being is a “caused uncausedness,” in which God shines forth as the “life of life” from the very inmost heart of biological nature. This is a natural prefigurement of the eschatological grace of incorruption.

Graham Ward - Trauma and Affect: Revisiting Religious Experience

Abstract: This paper will explore the ways in which the turn to affect theory, investigations in to trauma, and the findings of neuro-science over the past fifteen years, can help us to rethink religious experience. Examining, in particular, a phenomenology of prayer developed by the likes of Jean-Luc Chrétien and others and the theological anthropologies of Karl Rahner and David Kelsey, in the light of work of the work on emotions and emotional intelligence – this paper points to both the errors and shortcomings of earlier accounts of religious experience (as different as Schleiermacher, Otto and Rahner) in order to develop a more theological account of sensation and somatic experience. It will also reflect back upon what is yet under- developed and theologically inadequate within neuro-scientific accounts of emotion and trauma and affect theory. Page 60 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

K Jason Wardley - Être-en-danger: Spiritual life and the phenomenology of the Surnaturel

Abstract: The ongoing work of the French phenomenologist and theologian Jean-Yves Lacoste shows an acute sensitivity to the threat that boredom and fatigue pose to our intellectual and spiritual activities and to the simple fact that our life is one filled with risk, a life in which prayer is perhaps often little more than a pragmatic activity, or a continual ascetic exercise in spiritual discipline. This fusion of embodiment-in-the-world and subjectivity which offers a challenge to the myth of Cartesian modernity can be characterised as “être-en-danger” - literally “being at risk” - (as distinct from the non-worldly interior “life” of the material phenomenology advocated by Michel Henry) and represents an important development of the Heideggerian analytic. This paper looks at Lacoste’s most recent explorations of the life of risk, along with selected insights from Henry and Giorgio Agamben (who in particular has sought to offer his own revision of Heidegger and to throw a spanner in the works of the (post)modern anthropological machine). Finally, it examines the indebtedness of Lacoste to Henri de Lubac’s notion of “surnature” and the consequences of this “supernatural” for the living of the spiritual life.

Ian Warlick - Live and Love in Irigaray and Henry

Abstract: This paper uses Jean Luc Marion and Luce Irigaray’s writings on Love to extend the analysis of absolute Life in Michel Henry’s I am the Truth. Beginning with an exploration of the love between the Father and Son in Henry's work it goes on to use the images of masculine and feminine love to distinguish between that love and the human love described by Marion. The goal of this distinction, however, is not to separate these loves but rather to position the divine, transcendent love/life as foundational for all human experiences of loving and living.

Justin White - A Plurality of Existential Worlds and Translatability

Abstract: For Paul Ricoeur, biblical texts are productive through the interaction between the world of the reader and the world of the text. Biblical texts reveal a world of existential possibilities, and the believer comes to see the biblical world as one she can inhabit. But since different texts reveal quite different worlds, the relationship among these different worlds is complex. Are the worlds—or the existential possibilities revealed in the different worlds—reducible to one another? Is there some underlying world or structure of which the different worlds are specific manifestations? Claims that “I can live morally just as the religious person without having religious beliefs” and projects like Bultmann's scripture demythologization share this assumption that all worlds are in principle translatable or reducible to each other. And this is a contestable assumption. Some claim that this reducibility thesis and the resulting translation approach are either fundamentally misguided or insufficiently hermeneutically sophisticated. Underlying my discussion will be an exploration of Heidegger's and Hegel's views on art and the assertion that their differing opinions about the (im)possibility of art in modernity result from a similar disagreement about the status of the plurality of existential worlds and the lives they make possible. Page 61 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

Rowena Wilding - The Inspired Word of God: Masculine Translation versus Feminist Hermeneutic

Abstract: This paper explores the impact that feminist interpretations of the Bible have had in the post-modern world. We must be honest in acknowledging that biblical interpretation has stood in the annals of patriarchal history as a tool for subjugating women. Read in isolation, passages exist which objectify women in pornographic and unacceptable ways or appear to condone terrible abuse and violence towards women. Biblical scholarship of the twentieth century was dominated by the male voice and modernist assumptions. The patriarchal context of scripture became an apology for an attitude of male domination and female subjugation within the church. In the remit of this paper I will look specifically at the way in which masculine language and imagery and androcentric portrayals of the divine within biblical translations has had a negative effect on the spiritual growth of women, both individually in the church and as a gender. I will then move on the explore the impact of The Women's Bible (which appeared in 1895 and 1898) and the ways in which the surrounding debate has helped to highlight both the political conditions and the hermeneutical implications of feminist biblical interpretation and the radical critical impact of feminist theology for the interpretive task.

David Wilmington - Why Theodor Can't Swing: A Jazz Critique of Adorno's “Culture Industry”

Abstract: Underlying any attempt to give a critical account of culture is a constellation of assumptions about what constitutes human life. Although Theodor Adorno’s description of the “culture industry,” perhaps the most influential 20th century polemic against western capitalist culture, never involves a thorough explanation of his anthropological assumptions, his nightmare critique of culture reveals (even if only negatively) his assumptions about what properly constitutes human life. In this paper, I provide first an overview and a critique of those aspects of Adorno’s account of the “culture industry” – in Dialectic of Enlightenment, in a chapter originally written for “DE,” and in a later essay – which help us to see his functional anthropology. Since he identifies jazz as one of two paradigmatic manifestations of the insidious tactics and goals of the “culture industry,” I focus secondly on his sustained, and famous, attack against jazz as a means of revealing his specific assumptions about freedom and the relationship between individual and community. My contention is that Adorno’s tin-eared account of jazz is closely related to the anthropological assumptions underlying his critique of the “culture industry.” In conclusion, I suggest a more accurate understanding of human life and culture based on a “jazz anthropology.”

Michael Wladika - Vita beata, vitalis motus, vita mea, fons vitae: Life on Many Levels in St. Augustine

Abstract: Life, vita, is a keynote in St. Augustine. This goes back, to Holy Scripture, but also to the philosophical tradition St. Augustine is a part of: Platonism. Vita is a multi-facetted notion in St. Augustine. Looking for orientation in these immense fields of philosophical and theological traditions and of ‘vita’ in St. Augustine’s work, I take some word-combinations and Page 62 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Michael Wladika, continued) their corresponding concepts: happy life (vita beata), living motion (vitalis motus), my own life (vita mea), source of life (fons vitae). Combined, but also properly distinguished, they lead us beyond verbalism: the use of the word ‘life’ is capable of philosophical explanation, even if this grasps only part of its contents which is so in the case of vita as describing God’s inner and triune life. And they address ethical, ontological, psychological and theological issues, but not at random: what I want to show is life in St. Augustine as not only within itself rationally understandable, but as structuring principle as well. Life holds together the ontological whole of the universe in itself and the universe with what transcends it.

Aaron Yom - The Spirit as the Life-Force: Towards Reconstructing the Pneumatological Theology of Life

Abstract: The reliance on the materialistic metaphysics that dominated from the Enlightment to the present, and hence that affected Christian thinkers since the Age of Reason, created an unbridgeable disjunction between Spirit and life in particular, and spirit and nature in general. The consequence of this dualistic tendency gave rise to a devastating theo-scientific mindset centered on the understanding that the spiritual realm is nothing less than a figment of mythological imagination that has no bearing on the life and make-up of the natural world. Against this background, this paper argues that spirit-nature duality is a false proposition that can be remedied by restoring the Spirit’s rightful place as the eschatological force that nurtures, sustains, and affirms life. This paper proceeds to engage critically the ills of modernistic theology (e.g., dualism) that deconstructs or restricts pneumatological categories as mere “religious” functionality unrelated to the secular rationalism and worldview. Following the constructive engagement with modern theology, this paper in dialogue with Amos Yong, Jürgen Moltmann, and Denis Edwards, reconstructs the pneumatological theology of life in an attempt to envision a non-reductionistic, comprehensive view of life that connects the secular to the sacred as well as science to theology.

Nigel Zimmermann - On human life and the Eucharist: A Consideration of John Paul II's Eucharistic- Anthropology of the Gift

Abstract: This paper will argue that John Paul II’s (Karol Wojtyła) Eucharistic contribution to contemporary Catholic thought is profoundly related to his development of theological anthropology. In his understanding of personhood, the Eucharist serves as a point of disclosure and the numinous possibilities found in the mundane and the ordinary of ecclesial life. In his encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia, John Paul II referred to the ‘Eucharistic face’ of Christ and said that from it, ‘The Church draws her life’ (Part 7). Furthermore, in his papal writings he concretises Henri de Lubac’s announcement that ‘The Eucharist makes the Church and the Church makes the Eucharist’ (Part 26). Yet the ongoing theme of John Paul’s entire intellectual project is the inviolable dignity of the human person. As a young philosopher, his ethical understanding of human life was shaped profoundly by a critical reading of Max Scheler, in which personhood is radically open to sociality and the transcendent. John Paul’s Page 63 Paper Abstracts (Listed Alphabetically by Last Name)

(Nigel Zimmermann, continued) early phenomenological interests served his poetic and dramatic explorations of what it meant to live as a person – and to live well. For him, the Eucharist is a radical disclosure of the meaning of human live, precisely in the form of the God-man Jesus, who gives himself as the person-for-others. Because of the Christ of Eucharistic presence, the phenomenon of human personhood can never be understood apart from a) its concrete embodied context and b) the lived communities in which it is situated. These themes become particularly clear when reading Ecclesia de Eucharistia in light of earlier works such as The Acting Person, the Lublin lectures (collected as Person and Community) and his central anthropological text Redemptor Hominis.

Addendum:

Valentin Krassilov & Sophia Barinova - Theological Roots of Evolutionary Theory

Evolutionary theories have their origin with theological teachings of Pelagius and Saint Augustine. Early evolutionary theories are based upon the Pelagian perfectionist philosophy transformed into the evolutionary progressivism culminating in the work of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck. The reaction against progressivism was based on the Augustinian total depravity theory adopted by the Reformed theology, in particular the Calvinist election version of it. With Hobbes, Malthus and Charles Darwin this developed into the selection paradigm denying general progress of life as well as free will (the evolutionary significance of acquired traits). The modern “synthetic” theory emphasizes stochastic aspects of evolutionary processes that are thus explained away rather than explained. True or false, this theory is a technical model of very limited utility and of questionable social impact to be replaced by a more comprehensive synthesis. Page 64 Forthcoming

An exciting new series entitled KALOS, published by the Centre of Theology and Philosophy and Wipf & Stock, and edited by Aaron Riches, Conor Cunningham, and Simon Oliver...

The next international Centre of Theology and Philosophy conference, entitled:

‘Nihilism, Materialism, and Faith: Who Stands at the Door?’

Venue and date to be announced...

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