Public Lecture
The Ambiguity of Natural Science: Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Bernard Lonergan on God and Causation
Monday, February 10 | 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm | Sobey 255
For the “classical ideal of science,” God’s significance for the cosmos is straightforward: that necessary cause to which all contingent causes are reduced. With the advent of the modern, empirical ideal of science, the significance of God suffers an ambiguity. On the one hand, modern science does not engage in reduction to the universal and necessary, but aims at complete explanation. Thus, it should raise the question of God. On the other, there are no data on God, so there can be no empirical science of God. How, then, should we characterize the relationship of God to modern scientific knowledge?
Teaching and Learning Workshop
What Writing’s Like: Intra- and Inter-Personal Reflections After the Chatbots
Tuesday, February 11 | 10:00 am to 11:30 am | Atrium 216
AI chatbots can produce documents, but do they write? This workshop provides a phenomenology of the human writing process highlighting how writing is primarily a process (and only secondarily a product) and primarily for communication rather than documentation. This workshop focuses on the intra-personal communication occurring in the writer’s embodied consciousness. Analogies will be drawn from contemplative spiritualities to help both students and teachers of writing develop the quality of this intra-personal communication at the heart of the writing process. Finally, some attention will be paid to how this intra-personal communication is, as both personal and intelligent, always already interpersonal.
