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
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).
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.