Agora Speaker Series 2020 - Prof John Haldane

The School of Liberal Arts is delighted to welcome Professor John Haldane (University of St Andrews) to deliver two talks as part of the Agora Speaker Series.

Undergraduate Talk: The complexities of culture.

The tendency of philosophy is to abstract from context and history, viewing themes, topics, issues and ideas as located in timeless, logical space. Applied philosophy may seem an exception but it too tends to revert to general timeless theories. Associated with this is a view of the relationship between ideas and action which sees the latter sees following from the former. I will suggest that this get things the wrong way round. I will also consider certain tendencies in current political and cultural thinking that indicate the shallowness of thought about these matters.

Research Talk: Aquinas and analytical Thomism – a short history.

Within two decades of Bertrand Russell writing that “There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas” (1945) interest in Thomas’s ideas had begun to develop among philosophers in the “analytic” or “analytical” tradition of which Russell had been one of the founders. The causes of this were several, but prominent included a reaction against a strong reductive and scientistic strand in that tradition (logical positivism), a reorientation of philosophy away from epistemology, and recovery of the idea of non-logical non-contingency. Three-quarters of a century after Russell’s dismissal of Aquinas, the active engagement with Thomas’s ideas has grown and blossomed within contemporary analytic philosophy, some of it under the description “Analytical Thomism.” I will discuss aspects of this history and illustrate the interest of Aquinian ideas in several area of philosoph