Anne Harrington is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, where she specializes in the history of psychiatry, neuroscience, and the other mind sciences. She is currently Co-Director of the Harvard University Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative, and is a consultant for the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mind-Body Interactions. She is the author of Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain, and Reenchanted Science: Holism and German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler.
Walter Kohn, Institute for Theoretical Physics,
UC Santa Barbara
Professor Kohn received his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Harvard University.
He has been a faculty member at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon University, and the
University of California at San Diego and at Santa Barbara. He was the founding
director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the National Science Foundation.
At Bell Laboratories, he collaborated with William Shockley, the leader of the
group that invented the transistor. He is currently a member of the Board of
Governors of the Weizmann Institute in Israel and a member of the Advisory Committee
on Basic Energy Sciences of the Department of Energy. He has received numerous
awards including the Niels Bohr/Unesco Gold Medal, the National Medal of Science
and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is the recipient of 9 honorary degrees
from universities in North America and elsewhere. His current research deals
with the electronic structure of solids and large molecules.
Bruno Latour, École Nationale Supérieuredes
Mines de Paris
Bruno Latour, born in 1947 in Beaune, Burgundy, from a wine grower family, was
trained first as a philosopher and then an anthropologist. After field studies
in Africa and California he specialized in the analysis of scientists and engineers
at work. In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology and anthropology
of science, he has collaborated into many studies in science policy and research
management. He has written Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific
Facts (Princeton University Press), Science in Action, and The
Pasteurization of France (both at Harvard University Press). He also published
a field study on an automatic subway system Aramis, or the Love of Technology
and an essay on symmetric anthropology We Have Never Been Modern (both
with Harvard and now translated in 15 languages). With the same publisher, he
also published a series of essays, Pandora's Hope: Essays in the Reality
of Science Studies. In a series of new books in French he is exploring
the consequences of science studies on different traditional topics of the social
sciences (Sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches), and Paris:
ville invisible, a photographic essay on the technical & social aspects
of the city of Paris. He recently published a book on the political philosophy
of the environment, Politiques de la nature (being translated at Harvard).
He is presently doing field work on one of the French supreme Courts, which
is soon to be published in a book called Dire le droit-une ethnographie
du Conseil d'Etat. He is professor at the Centre de sociologie de l'Innovation
at the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and visiting professor
at the London School of Economics.
Daniel Matt, Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem
Daniel C. Matt served as Professor of Jewish Spirituality at the Graduate Theological
Union in Berkeley, California from 1979-2000. He received his Ph.D. from Brandeis
University and has also taught at Stanford University and the Hebrew University
in Jerusalem. He has published six books, including: Zohar: The Book of
Enlightenment; The Essential Kabbalah; and God and the Big
Bang. He is currently living in Jerusalem and working on the first annotated
English translation of Sefer ha-Zohar, the masterpiece of Kabbalah, the Jewish
mystical tradition.
Ronald Numbers, University of Wisconsin
Ronald L. Numbers is Hilldale and William Coleman Professor of the History of
Science and Medicine and chair of the department of medical history and bioethics
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has taught for over a quarter-century.
He has written or edited more than two dozen books, including, most recently,
The Creationists (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), Darwinism Comes to America
(Harvard University Press, 1998), and Disseminating Darwinism: The Role
of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 1999),
coedited with John Stenhouse. For five years (1989-1993) he edited Isis,
the flagship journal of the history of science. He is writing a history of science
in America (for Cambridge University Press), editing a series of monographs
on the history of medicine, science, and religion for the Johns Hopkins University
Press, and coediting, with David Lindberg, the eight-volume Cambridge History
of Science. He is a past president of both the History of Science Society and
the American Society of Church History. A former Guggenheim Foundation Fellow,
he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of
the International Academy of the History of Science.
Harold Oliver, Boston University
Dr. Oliver is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy of Religion at Boston University.
He holds a Th.M. degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. degree
from Emory University, and engaged in post-doctoral studies in theology and
philosophy at Tübingen University and Basel University. In 1971-72 he was
Visiting Fellow at The Institute of Theoretical Astronomy and for many years
was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (London). His books that are
most relevant for his lecture are A Relational Metaphysic and Relatedness:
Essays in Metaphysics and Theology.
Jim Proctor, University of California, Santa
Barbara
Jim Proctor is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at UC Santa
Barbara, and Program Director for Science, Religion, and the Human Experience.
His research addresses science and religion as domains of social authority,
and the role of science and religion in contemporary American environmentalism.
Dr. Proctor has published in a wide variety of academic journals, and co-edited
Geography and Ethics: Journeys in a Moral Terrain.
Hilary Putnam, Harvard University
Hilary Putnam is Cogan University Professor (Emeritus) at Harvard University,
where he taught for 35 years. Before joining the faculty of Harvard, he was
Professor of the Philosophy of Science at M.I.T. He has also taught at Northwestern
University and Princeton University. He is a past President of the American
Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), the Philosophy of Science Association,
and the Association for Symbolic Logic. He is a Fellow of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and holds
a number of honorary degrees, including degrees from the University of Pennsylvania,
the University of Athens, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Putnam has
written extensively on issues in many areas of philosophy - metaphysics and
epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind,
the theory of value, and American Pragmatism. In recent years Putnam has also
written on Jewish philosophy and philosophy of religion, including articles
on the Negative Theology of Maimonides, an introduction to a volume by Rosenzweig
and an essay on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.
Michael Ruse, Florida State University
Michael Ruse is Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at the Florida
State University. A graduate of Bristol University in England, he taught for
thirty five years at the University of Guelph in Canada. He is the author of
several books, including Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary
Biology, Taking Darwin Seriously, and recently Can a Darwinian
be a Christian? He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Jeffrey Burton Russell, UC Santa Barbara
Jeffrey Burton Russell’s five-volume history detailing the concept of
the Devil is recognized by scholars as the definitive text on this subject.
His more recent writings include The Flat Earth which explores the
falsehoods that served as the basis of thought in the nineteenth-century and
A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence which analyzes the meaning
of heaven from the beginnings of time through the fourteenth century. Dr. Russell
graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley and completed
his Ph.D. at Emory University. He also studied at the Université de Liege
in Belgium as a Fulbright Fellow. In 1985 he was elected a Fellow of the Medieval
Academy. His numerous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National
Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellow award. He has taught history and
religious studies at Berkeley, Riverside, Harvard, New Mexico and Notre Dame.
He is currently Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of California,
Santa Barbara.
Evan Thompson, York University, Toronto
Evan Thompson is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and a member
of the Center for Vision Research at York University in Toronto. He received
his B.A. in Asian Studies from Amherst College (1983), and his M.A. (1985) and
Ph.D. (1990) in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. He is the author
of numerous articles in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, and has
written two published books, Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science
and the Philosophy of Perception (Routledge Press, 1995), and (with Francisco
Varela and Eleanor Rosch) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human
Experience (MIT Press, 1991). This book explored the relationship between
cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology, and was one of the first
works to put forward the “embodied/enactive” perspective in cognitive
science. Currently, Evan Thompson is finishing a new book, co-authored with
the late Francisco Varela, called Why the Mind Isn’t in the Head
(Harvard University Press, forthcoming). The theme of this book is that the
individual human mind is immanent in the living body, the natural environment,
and the interpersonal social world, rather than being limited to brain processes
inside the head. The book advances this view by using material drawn from a
wide variety of sources—biology, psychology, and neuroscience; the “analytic”
philosophies of mind and science; phenomenological psychology and philosophy;
and the contemplative or “wisdom tradition” of Buddhist psychology
and philosophy. Its aim is to demonstrate how the contemporary sciences of mind
and life can be brought into harmony with studies of human experience as it
is lived and verbally articulated in the first person.
Bruce Tiffney, UC Santa Barbara
Born in Massachusetts, Dr. Tiffney earned his bachelor's degree in Geology from
Boston University and his Ph.D. in Botany from Harvard University. He taught
at Yale University and was a curator in the Peabody Museum of Natural History
before moving to UCSB in 1986, where he joined the Department of Geological
Sciences. His research has focused on the evolution of land plants, particularly
in the last 65 million years, and particularly with emphasis on their reproductive
structures. Dr. Tiffney has won campus teaching awards both at Yale University
and UCSB for his style of presentation, and for his emphasis on an interdisciplinary
approach to knowledge.
Alan Wallace, UC Santa Barbara
Trained for ten years in Buddhist monasteries in India and Switzerland, Alan
Wallace has taught Buddhist theory and practice in Europe and America since
1976; and he has served as interpreter for numerous Tibetan scholars and contemplatives,
including H. H. the Dalai Lama. After graduating summa cum laude from Amherst
College, where he studied physics and the philosophy of science, he earned a
doctorate in religious studies at Stanford University, where he pursued interdisciplinary
research into ways of exploring the nature of consciousness. He has edited,
translated, authored, or contributed to more than thirty books on Tibetan Buddhism,
medicine, language, and culture, as well as the interface between religion and
science. He currently teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has been teaching courses
in the field of Tibetan Buddhist studies as well as science and religion. His
published works include The Bridge of Quiescence: Experiencing Buddhist
Meditation, Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind,
and The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness.