Back Transdisciplinarity and the Unity of Knowledge: Beyond the Science and Religion Dialogue

Skip Navigation Links
Home
Agenda
Participants
Information
Culture
Prado
Toledo
Photos
Contact
   
William Grassie
Entangled Narratives: Competing Visions of the Good Life


Abstract

Humanity is caught up in a web of entangled narratives. We wage culture wars within and between our civilizations based on these narratives.

We need new intellectual tools to mediate between these competing stories.

This essay uses insights from philosophical hermeneutics, drawing on the work of Paul Ricouer and others, to develop a method of adjudicating between the diverse metanarratives that structure thought, values, and norms. I advocate intellectual nonviolence, an inter-textual hermeneutics, and the possibility of using the new scientific evolutionary cosmology as a framework for understanding our entangled narratives of self, society, and cosmos.



Biography
William "Billy" Grassie is the founder of the Metanexus Institute and a senior contributing editor of the Institute's online publication, the Global Spiral. He has taught in a variety of positions at Temple University, Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania. Grassie received his doctorate in religion from Temple University in 1994 and his BA from Middlebury College in 1979.

Prior to graduate school, Grassie worked for ten years in religiously-based social service and advocacy organizations in Washington, D.C; Jerusalem, Israel; Berlin, Germany; and Philadelphia, PA. He is the recipient of a number of academic awards and grants from the American Friends Service Committee, the Roothbert Fellowship, and the John Templeton Foundation. Grassie is a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).

For more information about William Grassie visit www.grassie.net.


 

1616 Walnut Street, Suite 1112, Philadelphia, PA 19103 USA  |  Voice: + 1 484.592.0304 Fax: +1 484.592.0313   |   Email  |  Privacy Policy