Pascal Boyer, Washington University in St. Louis
Pascal Boyer studied philosophy in Paris and anthropology in Cambridge before teaching anthropology at King's College, Cambridge University. He has also held positions in Lyons and San Diego and was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Stanford. He is now the Henry Luce Professor of Individual and Collective Memory at Washington University in St. Louis. His work combines anthropological fieldwork and psychological experiments, and aims to describe the psychological foundations of culture. His published works include Tradition as Truth and Communication (Cambridge, 1990), The Naturalness of Religious Ideas (Berkeley, 1994) and Religion Explained (Basic Books, 2001).

 

John Hedley Brooke, Oxford University
John Hedley Brooke is the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion and Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre at the University of Oxford, where he is also a Fellow of Harris Manchester College. A former editor of The British Journal for the History of Science, he has been President of the British Society for the History of Science and of the Historical Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1995, jointly with Geoffrey Cantor, he gave the Gifford Lectures at Glasgow University, subsequently published as Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (T & T Clark 1998; Oxford University Press 2000). He is also well known for his earlier book Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge 1991). He has lectured extensively in many countries and in November 2001 is due to give the "Distinguished Lecture" of the American History of Science Society at its meeting in Denver.

 

Thomas A. Carlson, UC Santa Barbara
Thomas A. Carlson, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1995, is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches courses treating philosophy and religion, contemporary theory, and the history of Christian thought and culture. He is the author of Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and of numerous articles treating deconstruction, phenomenology, and the traditions of apophatic and mystical theology. He is also translator of several works by French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, including God without Being (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Reduction and Donation: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology (Northwestern University Press, 1998), and The Idol and Distance (Fordham University Press, 2001).

 

Freeman Dyson, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
Freeman Dyson is a man whose intellectual vitality infects his work, his life and his world. His inquisitive nature thrived in a household bustling with conversation and questions on subjects as diverse as the guests who came to tea. After serving in the Royal Air Force during WWII, he returned to his studies at Cambridge University and received a B.A. in mathematics. 17 honorary degrees from Oxford, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yeshiva and other prestigious universities have followed along with numerous awards. Last year, Freeman Dyson was honored with The Templeton Prize for Progress In Religion. A prolific writer, his books include the award winning Disturbing the Universe, Infinite In All Directions, Origins of Life, Weapons and Hope, From Eros To Gaia, Imagined Worlds and The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet. A former professor of physics at Cornell and Princeton, he is currently Professor Emeritus at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study.

 

Anne Harrington, Harvard University
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.