Date/Time
Date(s) - March 13, 2019
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location
Mathematics Building, Room 100 (UBC)
Categories No Categories
Abstract
Three quarters of a century after the publication of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, proponents of naturalism still dominate the public square. Their reductionist (even nihilist) approach to morality and other things that give meaning to human life also continues to shape what our children are taught in school. In the face of this ongoing dominance, it’s imperative that we reassert a case for moral realism and offer a critique that exposes naturalism’s devastating implications for ethics.
Biography
Dennis Danielson (PhD Stanford) is Professor Emeritus and former Head of English at the University of British Columbia. His interests have ranged across literature, religion, the history of science, and ethics. He is a past recipient of UBC’s Killam Prize for research in the humanities, and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s Konrad Adenauer Research Award.
His articles have appeared in Mind, Milton Studies, Nature, American Journal of Physics, Journal for the History of Astronomy, and Scientific American.
His books include Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy(1982), The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclitus to Hawking(2000), The First Copernican: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution(2006), Paradise Lost and the Cosmological Revolution(2014), and, most recently, The Tao of Right and Wrong: Rediscovering Humanity’s Moral Foundations(2018).