Tom Carlson

Modernity and the Mystical: Science, Technology, and the Task of Human Self- Creation
Friday April 12 2002, 7:00- 9:00PM

McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Science Building

Discussant: Harold Oliver
Discussant: Matthew Turk, Computer Science

AbstractBioEventVideoText
Abstract

While many major theorists from the early- and mid-twentieth century could understand the rationality of modern science and technology to be one through which we seek to comprehend, manipulate, and master the world in which we live--thereby excluding from that world any meaningful sense of the "mystical," more recent thinkers are beginning to re-interpret the scientific and technological networks that now define our world in terms of a mystical or quasi-mystical logic that would remain, in fact, fundamental to those networks. This lecture will argue that the mystical logic one might indeed see operative in today's scientific and technological networks is tied intimately to the ongoing process of human self-creation that takes place in and through those networks.

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).

 

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Event
Tom Carlson delivered his lecture on Friday evening in the McCune Conference Room. His address was followed by comments from two discussants, a question-and-answer session, and a general reception. Below are some pictures from the evening.

Jim Proctor, Director of UCSB Templeton Lectures Series, welcomes the crowd, and then introduces Tom Carlson.
Tom Carlson delivers his lecture on modernity and the mystical sense.
For a second consecutive evening, the McCune Conference Room was filled with those interested in the relationship between science and religion.

Matthew Turk (UCSB Department of Computer Science) comments on Tom Carlson's lecture.

Harold Oliver (lecturer the previous evening) comments on the Carlson lecture.
Tom Carlson responds to a question from the audience, while the other discussants look on.

 

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