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Past Lecture Abstracts and Recommended Reading

2007

2006

2005

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2003

2002

 

Abstracts 2007

Module VI | Darwin's Influence on the Modern World & the Ethos of Medicine

John Patrick: Darwin as Science

In order to include macro-evolution in science, the scientific arena had to be significantly enlarged. Many cite the damage Darwin did to matters of faith, but his followers also cite the the damage to science itself. One of the problems is the absence of any agreed definition of science in its modern usage. The options will be presented and critiqued.

We will look at the data that convinced Darwin, who did not know the mechanisms of inheritance, and show the data's limitations for his project. Changes in gene frequency (Galapagos) are not evolution for his purposes - new genes are needed. Ontology recapitulated phylogeny which has been quietly side-lined. We will discuss why. The basis for the theory and the data will be presented.

Finally we will discuss how Darwin's views influenced things important to the health of individuals and society: things like love, fidelity, justice and truth, which have no measurable, material existence and are not open to scientific discussion. Logically, attitudes and behaviors toward others are altered by these influences, thus affecting the way we care for patients.

Objectives

Physicians will:

1. Understand the intellectual journey that Darwin took.
2. Know the pros and cons of the Darwin's main argument.
3. Know the philosophical changes associated with Darwinism.
4. Understand the particular difficulties that have emerged in the medical domain.

Reading

1. James Beilby ed. Naturalism Defeated: Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, (Cornell U.P., 2002)
2. David Stove: Darwinian Fairytales (Ashgate, 1995)

Ed Bloedow: Darwin's Influence on the World: Politics and Healthcare

To say that Darwin and Darwinism affected politics would be a major understatement. This did not, however, come about precipitously, over-night. The chief route through which Darwinism influenced culture and healthcare was through education. We shall therefore trace this route, and then examine how Darwinism ultimately became a pervasive leaven in our world, specifically healthcare..

Objectives

Physicians will:

1. Understand the impact of Darwinism on education.
2. Understand the impact of Darwinism on politics.
3. Be able to recognize the series of assumptions underlying so many decisions about health policy and patient care.

Reading

1. Philip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL, IVP, 1993)
2. Philip E. Johnson, The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism
(Downers Grove, IL, IVP, 2000)

Greg Bloomquist: Influence of 19th Century Scientific Thought on Established Culture

It is widely held that Darwin's thought must have had a significant impact on thought, culture and healthcare. This session will explore whether that was so, and if so, what the impact was. It will also consider the argument that culture and healthcare were already in the process of being transformed before Darwin, and that this process contributed to the change.

Objectives

Physicians will:

1. Understand the changes in thought which preceded Darwin and made his thinking possible.
2. Understand how these processes have affected comtemporary culture.
3. Be better able to distinguish how this influences the way physicians relate to patients of differing views.
4. Develop logical, sensitive ways of helping each group through their medical crises.

Reading

1. S. Neill and N. T. Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament: 1861-1986 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
2. J. W. Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London: SPCK, 1984).

Edward Tingley: Who Is Nietzsche and How did his Philosophy Influence Healthcare?

Given his critique, many find Friedrich Nietzsche's views (1844-1900) disturbing and counter-productive to healthcare Yet in some of situations Nietzsche is an ally. By evaluating Nietzsche, we might shore up the ruins of modern thinking and its application to healthcare

Objectives

Physicians will:

1. Be better able to understand what is involved in 'values' language.
2. Be better able to see why our understanding of the faith of our patients is critical to healthcare.
3. Be better able to explain, understand and interpret how the patient's view of life influences their health.

Graeme Hunter: Naturalisms Influence on Healthcare

Theories of the development of the universe are not new. They were old even when the French Catholic philosopher Descartes presented his view in 1641. He presented it not as the truth about the world yet as an indispensable scientific explanation. I would like to explore the meaning of that distinction between what is scientifically explanatory and what is true, anchoring it in the writings of the nineteenth century thinker Newman and ancient philosopher Plato. We will discuss how patients and physicians are influenced by these things, even if unknown to them; How they form their image of self and their expectations of healthcare.

Objectives

Physicians will:

1. Understand how past views provide a legitimate challenge to ideas of design that were traditionally taken for granted.
2. Be able to make the important distinction between a scientific explanation and truth.
3. See the limitations of the ability of past views to challenge traditional thought.
4. Understand how these views influence patients' and physicians' perspectives and the delivery of care.

Reading

Descartes: Discourse on Method, Part 5
John Henry Cardinal Newman: "Christianity and Scientific Investigation" in The Idea of the University.
Plato: Phaedo, esp. 97a-99d

Grame Hunter: The Challenge of Darwinism in Healthcare

Views of our origins have altered our scientific approach and how we view one another. In my talk I shall show why some theories pose a challenge to healthcare.

Objectives

Physicians will:

1. See theories of origin in historical development.
2. See how the language of science and the language of religion can be complementary.
3. Cultivate a "double vision" in which the language of science is integrated with, but not confused with, the language of everyday life in which we must live our own lives and counsel our patients.

Reading

1. James Beilby ed. Naturalism Defeated: Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism, (Cornell U.P., 2002)
2. David Stove: Darwinian Fairytales (Ashgate, 1995)

Dominic Manganiello: 'What's a Heaven for?'
The Myth of Evolutionism in C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy

Both in his critical writing and in his fiction C.S. Lewis distinguished sharply between Evolution as "a genuine scientific hypothesis" and "Evolutionism" as a quasi-religious belief. The central idea of this popular myth -"improvement" or "progress"- derived, in Lewis's view, from a misapplication of Darwin's biological theorem to the metaphysical sphere. Proponents of the evolutionary philosophy envisaged humans changing into a new species of gods that would rule the universe. Lewis dubbed this troubling cosmic vision "Wellsianity" after the writer (H.G. Wells) generally credited with introducing Darwinian thought to fiction. Our sessions will accordingly examine Lewis's literary critique of Evolutionism in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. We will focus on how Ransom, the interplanetary traveler and hero of the novels, responds to the "nightmare…engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science."

Reading

1) C.S. Lewis, "The Funeral of a Great Myth" (in Christian Reflections)
2) C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
3) C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

Edward Tingley: Who Is Nietzsche?

Given the rabid critique of Christianity spewed by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Christians can hardly count Nietzsche an ally. Or can they? - In some of our battles Nietzsche is an ally, and to demonize him is only to deprive ourselves of the aid of a supremely powerful critic of modern life and modern thinking. It would be a surprise to many post-modernists (who claim Nietzsche as a hero) that he has some of the views that he has.

By attacking Nietzsche wholesale we often back ourselves into the role of shoring up the ruins of modern thinking, ruins that we should help Nietzsche pull down. Nietzsche advocated the "transvaluation of all values"? In reaction, Christians often rush to reassert 'the permanence of values' - but are we missing an opportunity to join Nietzsche in exposing the bankruptcy of the very conception of 'values' that the Enlightenment forced upon us, as a replacement for the moral outlook we inherited from the ancient world?

Historically, we have three views of ethics:

1. the ancient view - whose keywords are 'good/bad' and 'purpose';
2. the modern view - whose keywords are 'values' and 'reason'; and
3. the Nietzschean view - with keyword 'will', (the historical root of postmodern thinking)

By thinking of Nietzsche 3 as an attack upon us 1, we simply ignore the way in which Nietzschean ethics is a devastating assault upon modernity 2.

Who is Nietzsche? The impending disaster that Nietzsche saw looming on the horizon - the legacy of modernity - is in many ways upon us today. Nietzsche is a herald of the barbarism promised by the modern outlook, a figure whose arguments we would do well to credit. The new myth of passionate irrationality that Nietzsche fostered is equally bankrupt, another evasion of what we all must recognize - but Nietzsche was right to say that the Enlightenment story of rational values is hollow, and must be abandoned. He is our ally against a modern thinking that is far from dead.

Reading

1. Damon Linker, "Nietzsche's Truth," First Things 125 (August/September 2002), 50-60; online here
2. For a look at Nietzsche's life and writings, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article here
3. And if you would like to read some Nietzsche, try the excerpts from On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), online here

Edward Tingley: The Triumph of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Art

Art is a field in which we can see, perfectly, the error into which we are often lured by objective evil - in this case the evil constituted by the excesses of art in our day. Outrageous works by contemporary artists repel us … and then we embrace the art to which that art was a reaction, the art that the contemporary artist calls bankrupt. But we do not ask if the art that we are embracing is good. We do not ask, 'What is good?' We merely assume that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. - But when modern art condemned the popular art of the nineteenth century, was it not right to do so?

In many ways the art of the nineteenth century - Romantic art, Impressionism, Realism, academic art, the Pre-Raphaelites - is the art of the modern world: it shows us modern man living the life that modern man scripted for himself, having shaken off the 'shackles' (as he saw them) represented by the Judeo-Christian understanding of the world. Yet that art - which is in fact a tribute to the modern outlook - is precisely the art to which Christians so often gravitate, reacting against the assaults of modern abstraction and postmodern ugliness. According to Psalm 19 "the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork," but according to the nineteenth-century artist that is all just material for subjective experience and self expression.

Just as by attacking Nietzsche we often back ourselves into the role of shoring up the ruins of modern thinking, by attacking contemporary art we often back ourselves into the role of defending the art that represents modernity triumphant. Would we not do better to look at the art of the century of evolution and utilitarianism and the death of God with a more critical eye - as if that art were more in harmony with the culture that produced it?

And should we consider whether the reason that we are so comfortable with nineteenth-century art is, perhaps, that despite our Christianity we are really still very much at home in the modern world, which rather suits us? ('Suiting us' is after all a major impetus behind that art.) Does our taste in art not show us, in some way, what change in our hearts God is still awaiting?

Reading

Because Christians writing about art often seem to want to count all 'high art' as a part of "the treasured intellectual traditions of the West," there does not seem to be much in tune with the above to which I can direct you. But the following are a useful preparation:

1. Thomas Storck, "Ars Gratis Artis or Ars Gratis Hominis?," Caelum et Terra 3:4 (fall 1993); online at http://www.caelumetterra.com/cet_backissues/article.cfm?ID=18
2. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Read this story (starting with the Preface) and look out for what is said in it about art. You can find it online at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext94/dgray10h.htm
3. Hilton Kramer, "What Can We Reasonably Hope For?," A Millennium Symposium, First Things 99 (January 2000): 25-26; online at http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0001/articles/kramer.html

John Patrick: Ethics and Medicine 2007

This session will be concerned with aspects of medicine where the moral dimensions loom large and changes are happening without sufficient discussion. These include:
- Antenatal diagnosis
- The use of embryonic stem cells
- Influence of sexual preferences on healthcare policy
We will present the ethical and compassionate management of patients who want eugenic abortions, lesbian parenting, or those seeking benefit from embryonic and other stem cell therapies.

Objectives

Physicians will:

1. Understand the ethical problem involved in the use of antenatal diagnosis.
2. Appreciate the problems of multi-parenting.
3. Explore the consequences to the medical system and the management of patients with different forms of sexual expression.

Reading

1. Leon R. Kass and James Q. Wilson, The Ethics of Human Cloning Reprint. New Delhi, Scientia, 2002, xxi, 101 p., $11 (pbk). ISBN 81-88155-02-0.
2. Lee Harris, The Future of Tradition: http://www.policyreview.org/jun05/harris.html
3. Maureen Condic, What we know about embryonic stem cells: http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5420

 

 

Abstracts 2006

Module V | The Strange History of the Word Fact

Conference Abstract

The history and consequences of the changing understanding of the idea of a fact and its impact on medicine.

The first inklings of the modern scientific era were not without anxiety within the church. Could these new ideas undermine traditional faith? Many perhaps rightly thought they would. Ockham and Descartes were concerned to defend the faith but paradoxically eroded its authority. Ockham's idea of limiting knowledge to what could be perceived by the senses and Bacon's injunction to simply collect facts ultimately led, especially with the Protestants, to a privatised and subjective knowledge of God. Science proceeded to dominate the public square, with some of its advocates claiming that scientific knowledge was the only legitimate knowledge and that applied science would lead to utopia. That hope has faded in the twentieth century but faith remains marginal to public policy.

For a long while the medical school has operated with a tacit assumption that medicine is about scientific facts and the patient is to be seen as a disordered machine which needs fixing. Until very recently attempts to "humanise" medicine were dismissed by the students as "touchy, feely" sessions, often with considerable justification because the attempts to humanise though well intentioned where without philosophical substance. However the increasing public discomfort with the reductionistic approaches has started to have effects, displayed in such diverse areas as official curriculae and the discussion of alternative forms of medicine.

Underneath and foundational to these procedural changes in curriculae is a little discussed change in the aetiology of disease. In the last 50 years there has been a major change in the significance of behaviour in disease causation. Most older physicians would remember their early patients in medicine as being afflicted by God or Nature with a disease for which they did not feel guilty (even smoking was not definitely established as dangerous to one's health) thus the element of guilt was minimal. Now that has all changed but the practice of medicine is lagging behind. It is obviously very difficult for those who have spent their lives working on a pathophysiological approach to patients to seriously consider their spiritual needs. There are no effective medicines for guilt; only remorse, confession, repentance, atonement, restitution, reconciliation, justification and grace have worked historically.

Part of the process for reconnecting theology with medicine must involve a rationale that makes sense to those who do not believe and this course sets out to provide that basis by describing the evolution of a reductionist practice of medicine which, powerful though it is, is not proving sufficient for the present situation.

Program

1. Some medical history illustrating the changes in the physicians understanding of the patient during the modern era.
2. The history of scientific reductionism
3. The fact/value and is/ought distinctions in philosophy
4. The problem of reductionism as it appears in the novels of C.S. Lewis.
5. The privatisation of faith in medicine
6. The impact on medicine
7. The impact on public policy especially as it relates to medicine.
8. The impact on modern ethical dilemmas.

Individual Abstracts

Greg Bloomquist - "The tyranny of facts & the demise of truth in modern theological reflection: The future of Christian belief"

A scientific approach to reality, though probably having arisen from a Christian perspective (at least in part), has dominated modern thinking. An important pillar of the scientific approach is the authority given to "facts" or "evidence". This pillar has now become so dominant that "facts" alone are viewed as important and in fact as able to make a case themselves. This "tyranny of facts" ignores the issue that facts do not speak for themselves and are only assembled by an author, or scientist, or lawyer, etc. as part of a larger picture. Modern Christian theology has succumbed to this tyranny and has surrendered with it the Christian story and with it Christian truth. A biblical Christian alternative to the modern tyranny of facts is one in which faith establishes the picture and enables one to see that what is observed in the picture is true. The truth, then, may or may not fit the "facts" as the modern world sees them and may thus see our "truth" as nonsensical.

Objectives

1. Physicians will obtain a philosophically and theologically correct understanding of facts, values, and faith.
2. Physicians will participate in a dialogue on the place of Christian faith in relation to science and health.
3. Physicians will consider the place of Christian faith as a contribution to knowledge (vs. the exclusion of faith from any consideration as to its contribution to knowledge).

Reading

1. Bloomquist, L. Gregory. The Role of Theology on the Campus: Does the Academy Need the Study of Theology? Currents in Biblical and Theological Dialogue (forthcoming -- in the interim available from the author electronically).
2. Louth, Andrew. Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology. Oxford [England]: Clarendon Press, 1983.

 

Graeme Hunter - "Morals and Objectivity"

It is normally bad to puncture someone's belly with a sharp instrument. But it may be good, if it is done by a qualified surgeon in the course of a needed operation. Conversely, it may be evil not to slice someone open with a sharp instrument, if you are a surgeon withholding a service you are legally bound to provide. Thus to know only that Mr. Jones is not cutting up Mr. Smith does not make you certain that he is doing the right thing. Nor does knowing that he is slicing up Smith prove that he is doing the wrong thing.

My example is hardly news. We have all noticed that moral judgements often depend on more than just a bare description of the facts. But it took a philosopher of the first rank, the great thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume, to see that the gap between what is and what ought to be was philosophically significant. "As this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation [going beyond ‘is' and ‘is not'], Hume wrote, "'tis necessary that it should be observed and explained." Moral philosophy ever since has been trying to "observe and explain" where this mysterious "ought" comes from, if not from the facts.

In later philosophers the observed gap between "is" and "ought" gave rise to the dogma that "ought" cannot be derived from "is", in other words, that our moral judgements are always independent of the facts. That disturbing thought was later popularized and degraded into the so- called "fact-value" distinction, loved by the social sciences, according to which the facts never force us to adopt any particular moral attitude toward them. From there a widespread and often unshakeable conviction has grown up that moral judgements are merely subjective.

In my talks at Augustine College I shall try to show three things: 1) That the fact-value distinction is worthless. 2) That the is-ought distinction is a valuable one, if properly understood. 3) That even allowing for the is-ought distinction, it is still possible to make well-founded, objective moral judgements.

Good preparatory reading:

 

John Patrick - "Is and Ought, Facts and Values"

The modern medical school teaches with patients in mind, at least most of the time. The glaring exception is in the teaching of ethics. Some of the best known ethicists are openly atheistic. They try to teach as though beliefs are private and play no part in their activities. There are at least two problems with this approach.

No-one partakes in any intellectual activity without beliefs. If nothing can be assumed, nothing can be proved. Ours is a society with a diminishing area of shared beliefs in the realm of morality, in what is deemed right and what is deemed wrong. Even in this statement, older philosophers and theologians would disdain the word, 'deemed'.

The second problem is that most ethicists talk about facts which they presume are rationally understood without beliefs. Such an idea is, in itself, a belief system which we might term 'tacit atheism'.

This year's summer programme at Augustine College will look at the evolution of the meaning of the word, 'fact'. We will start from the point where 'facts' included moral facts and discuss how we arrived at the point where 'facts' are only used to describe what can be understood with the senses or their extensions in measurement instruments.

So deeply engrained is this idea that the modern tacit atheist will treat those who disagree as irrational. Ad hominem arguments apparently win the day, but do they? Such ideas can be found first in philosophy and theology, as in Ockham, and later in science and the arts.

Recommended Reading

 

Dominic Manganiello - "Beyond Belief: 'Seeing the Truth' in the Fiction of C.S. Lewis"

In his classic little book, The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis argued famously that modern educational systems tend to produce what he called "men without chests," that is, "value-free" skeptics with heads but no hearts. These heartless new men imbibe the poison of subjectivism, reject all values, and accept only physically verifiable facts. Their ultimate aim is to exercise their will to power by conquering human and non-human nature alike. In spite of their intellectual training, however, these 'trousered apes' end up following their basest impulses with disastrous consequences. The reality of an objective moral order, Lewis maintains in Kierkegaardian fashion, should confront the individual instead with two options: either he conforms the truth to his desires or he conforms his desires to the truth. Our sessions will focus on how the drama of the individual's choice unfolds in two of Lewis's best-known novels: That Hideous Strength and Till We Have Faces. We will probe in particular the profound implications of the pivotal statement made by one of Lewis's central characters: "In your heart you must see the truth."

Recommended Reading:

1) C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943).
2) C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1945).
3) C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (1956).
4) C.S. Kilby, The Christian World of C.S. Lewis (1964).

 

Ed Bloedow - "A Political History of the Idea of the Sanctity of Life in a Post-Christian Age"

This lecture will give an overview of the ultimate origins of 'the facts' and reductionism in the Greeks and the Romans. There will be a brief look at Hippocrates and how he fits into the picture. Then we will fast forward to the French Revolution, with its antecedents and consequences, followed by the Bolshevik Revolution and its ramifications and then the contemporary scene.

Recommended Reading:

1) Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain (London rev. ed. 2000) (Quartet Books).

 

Edward Tingley - "Why Did the Ancients Have No Word for Values?"

The Canadian philosopher George Grant once said that values language is "an obscuring language for morality used when the idea of purpose has been destroyed … and that is why it is so widespread in North America." This lecture provides a brief and critical look at the history of a concept we now seem unable to do without (given that ethics itself is now called "the philosophical study of moral values").

Can one have an ethics without the notion of 'values'? How did Socrates, the founder of ethical thinking, get by without it? Does it appear at all in the works of Aristotle? How and when did we come by it? Could we have an ethics today that does not rest upon 'values'?

This lecture will outline the view of morality widespread in the ancient world and extant until its disintegration in modern times - an ethics based not on values but on the concepts of good and true.

We will consider the purpose behind the use of 'values' language and practical ways of response to it.

The lecture will draw upon Alasdair MacIntyre's later work (following After Virtue, 1980), which offers an important (and Christian) caution to those eager to maintain, in accord with the ancient world, that what is good and is not a matter of opinion.

Required reading

Iain T. Benson. "Are 'Values' the Same as 'Virtues'?" Centrepoints 2:2 (fall 1996).

Chris McGillion. "Values without Virtues Leaves Us Hooked on Gratification." Sydney Morning Herald (22 December 2004).

Thomas D. Williams. "Values, Virtues, and John Paul II." First Things 72 (April 1997), 29-32.

Alasdair MacIntyre. "How Virtues Become Vices: Values, Medicine, and Social Context." In Evaluation and Explanation in the Biomedical Sciences: 97-111. Ed. H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. and Stuart F. Spicker. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975.

This review in a Moslem journal provides a very good brief summary of MacIntyre's more recent thought: Muhammad Legenhausen, "Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by Alasdair MacIntyre," al Tawhid Islamic Journal 14:2.
Of this review, please read sections 1 (Introduction) through 4 (Religion).

Further reading

For a 'Grantean' approach to the dangers of 'values language' see Iain T. Benson. S.v. "Values" and "Virtues" in The Complete Book of Everyday Christianity. Ed. Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens. Downer's Grove: I.V.P., 1997.

 

Ian Shugart - "Finding the Policy Path across the Moor of Pluralism"

Western society is far from being homogenous, philosophically or culturally, yet many issues of social policy, including health policy, contain features that necessarily touch on these dimensions. How is policy made in the present context? How can professionals and policy makers be well rounded in their understanding of competing perspectives? And how can they contribute their expertise to help society find satisfactory answers amid the uncertainty of pluralism?

As Senior Assistant Deputy Minister in the Department of Health & Welfare, Ian Shugart is very familiar with the problems of writing guidelines for ethical practice in a society without a moral consensus. He was personally involved in the discussions on cloning and embryonic stem cell research.

Objectives

1. The physician will understand the philosophical background in health policy development as a framework for approaching ethical dilemmas in a pluralistic society.
2. The physician will be able to discuss cultural issues in health policy and be aware of the limitations of "multiculturalism".
3. The physician will see the way competing perspectives and political agendas are resolved in policy making.
4. The physician will recognize the contribution physicians can make to health policy decisions.

 

Abstracts 2005

Module IV | The Roots of Modern Medicine from the Renaissance to the 18th Century

Dominic Manganiello – "To Travel Hopefully..." Remedies For Madness In An Age Of Reason

Our sessions will focus on two famous literary travellers of the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century. The first appears in John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress" (1678, 1684), a novel that can be described as "a tale of two cities" (before Dickens) since the journey begins in the City of Destruction and ends in the Celestial City. The pilgrim, who dreams of an impending universal catastrophe, is diagnosed as being a victim of "frenzy distemper", a malady causing madness. We will examine the "medicine" the sick man takes in order to keep his sanity and confront formidable adversaries such as the giant Despair. The second traveller is a ship's physician who embarks on four separate voyages to different imaginary lands during which he observes the follies of humankind. "Gulliver's Travels" (1726, 1735) prompts some central questions: what is a human being? are we proud insects or lords of creation? beasts or reasonable creatures? Jonathan Swift probes further how reason---a great gift---can be used and abused in the art of making "a modest proposal" (1729).

Recommended Reading:

* John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678, 1684) [novel]
* Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726, 1735) [novel]
* Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729) [essay]
* Sharrock, Roger, ed. The Pilgrim's Progress: A Casebook (1976)
* Arthur Case, Four Essays on Gulliver's Travels (1958)

Edward Tingley – William Law: The Call to Perfection

William Law was an 18th-century Anglican priest who heavily influenced the theology of John and Charles Wesley. Of him the historian Edward Gibbon remarked, “If Mr. Law finds a spark of piety in a reader’s mind, he will soon kindle it into a flame.” It has been said that Law’s “chief contribution lies in his delineation of the Christian ethical ideal for human life.” This lecture looks a that contribution against the backdrop of the history of Christian ethics.

Required Reading:

* William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), Spiritual Classics (Vintage 2002). ISBN: 0375725636
* This work is also available online at http://www.ccel.org/l/law/serious_call/htm/ii.htm

Mark Whittall – Copernicus to Newton: The Machine Metaphor

How did it come about that devout Christian men who pursued science as a religious quest managed to create a conceptual framework for science that did not easily lend itself to the expression of religious ideas. This session will explore the history of the ideas of the scientific revolution from Copernicus to Newton and lay out the conceptual framework of Newtonian science. Then we will examine how the Newtonian scientific model engendered a more comprehensive worldview, sometimes referred to as the "post-Enlightenment" worldview, and assess its strengths and weaknesses.

Recommended Reading:

* Stephen Hawking, On The Shoulders of Giants: The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy. Philadelphia, Running Press, 2002.
* Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, Cambridge, Harvard, 1957

John Patrick - Thomas Sydenham

Sydenham is, after Hippocrates, the father of modern clinical medicine and as such we all owe him respect and honour, yet he is largely unknown. Hippocrates took patient histories seriously. Sydenham also did so but then took the next step and collated them so that he began to see how infectious diseases spread and to practice clinical research with “outcome” measurements.

John Patrick - William Harvey

Harvey is better known. His description of the circulation was easily understood mechanically and gave a tremendous impetus to the conception of disease as disordered mechanics. This approach leads to the dramatic explosion of understanding and ultimately to effective treatment. Only now in the 21st century are its limitations becoming clear.

John Patrick - The Tyranny of the Measurable

This year’s review of current medical ethical problems will concentrate on the difficulties of agreement within the profession when the necessary moral consensus is eroding. This will be discussed in relation to the use of genetic data and to issues of the nature of human life. It will be demonstrated that the differences are not between “rational” and “faith based” ethics but on two differing conceptions of rationality.

Recommended Reading:

* Leslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks

Graeme Hunter - Bishop Butler: Medicine and the Nature of Charity

Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752) was an Anglican divine who combined remarkable personal piety with unusual clarity of mind. Both these admirable traits come to vivid expression in a sermon on charity, which he preached before the president and governors of the London Infirmary in 1748. That sermon will be our text for this class, but it will be read against the background of Butler’s larger ambitions as a preacher and a philosopher. He dedicated his life to combating the attraction felt by many educated people during the Enlightenment toward the morally undemanding and intellectually pretentious religious outlook we call Deism. To reveal this background more fully I shall summarize the argument of Butler’s greatest work, the Analogy of Religion, in which the Bishop may plausibly be said to have destroyed deism’s claim to religious and even to philosophical integrity.

Wesley Warren - The Story of Bach

TBA

David D. Stewart -- The Very Present Past of the Renaissance

The backdrop for the Reformation’s radical call to return to the Word alone (“sola scriptura” etc.), is an emerging Italian Renaissance culture whose signature is an explosive proliferation of the visual image through painting, sculpture, ceremony and imposing architecture. To a degree unheard-of at any other point in the history of the “Christian West” the Papacy had become the focus of cultural enterprise, ambitious building programmes (e.g. St. Peter’s Basilica ), conspicuous wealth, intertwining dynastic and ecclesiastical interests, and control of the whole gamut of artistic expression (notably in the work of Raphael and Michelangelo). The Church of Rome and centered in Rome was possessed by the need to mobilize all of the resources of the arts in an overwhelming display of papal power. This visual aspect is pivotal; the Renaissance in Italy is sustained and “visually legitimized” in its art, ranging across subjects drawn from OT, Apocrypha, NT and the teeming ocean of pious legend, frequently stressing miracles or doctrines calculated to dispose of Protestant attacks (e.g. on the teaching concerning the Virgin Mary ). This is all fairly familiar ground. But against this background we are arrested by a curious parallel development—the sudden and dramatic Return of the Gods.

For roughly 1000 years the culture of the so-called Christian West had “deleted” the pre-Christian pagan gods from its scope. Whenever one of them “surfaced” again, notably Apollo, it was “under an assumed name,” i.e. with features typical for Apollo but applied to the figure of Jesus. But then, suddenly, around 1450 we see the nominally Christian culture of the West ripe for a revisiting/revalidating of that pagan world of pre-Christian imagery and mythology, from a philosophical platform which sought to enable a syncretistic convergence of Platonic thought and Christian revelation. These ancient sources are full of accounts of gods shown in wanton use of their power over mortals, and most specifically in the amours of Zeus with an impressive array of nubile young women, whom he takes advantage of in a variety of guises, each more inventive than the other. So: boundless power linked with boundless sexual appetite directed at earthlings unable to deflect those attentions. The issue of these encounters is the birth of a divine or semi-divine offspring, e.g. Dionysus/Bacchus or Helen [of Troy]. The allusiveness to the biblical account of the divine visitation leading to the birth of the Son of God cannot be overlooked, however oblique it may seem in isolation. Sobering is the role played by other gods such as Apollo, whose power is shown in certain preferred sadistic roles, e.g. in the flaying of his rival Marsyas, hauntingly suggestive of the latter-day S/M world, and, most suggestively, by the prominent role played in the art of the period by the figure of Dionysus [the Romans’ Bacchus] who as a god of the underworld and of irrational and violent forces in nature, is also the god whose dying and annual rising is celebrated in bloody ceremonies hauntingly suggestive of the sacrifice of Christ.

Our discussion forces us to explore pivotal issues of meaning and consequences. What, if anything, does this or that love affair of Zeus mean for the conduct of our lives; what does it ask of us, what does it give? The attrition of moral significance as we move from Redemptive History to Myth in the specifically Renaissance context will suggest its own path for our probing approach to the challenges of the Renaissance. Why bother? All of the strands of the period sketched here suggest a socio-religious setting strikingly similar to our own post-Christian and postmodern world, where traditional values linked with the ‘Christian Story’ see themselves subtly relativized and thus devalued by cultural syncretism. Our exploration of the artistic works of the period, will include audiovisual resources and conclude with a teaching session in the National Gallery, Ottawa using works of the period.


Abstracts 2004

Module III | The Roots of Modern Medicine in the Renaissance

Dr. John Patrick: "Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton and the Beginnings of Modern Science"

This module will discuss the fundamental change in our understanding of the universe and ourselves which was the result of the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton. The remarkable result was that four theists gave us the beginnings of the reductionism and tacit atheism which dominates the modern university. We will then discuss how this influences modern medical ethics.

Recommended Reading:

Professor Graeme Hunter: "Descartes: Theorist of Body and Soul"

René Descartes is often acknowledged as the father of modern philosophy and as one of the fathers of modern science, including modern medicine. His contribution to the latter subject centres on his new conception of the human body exclusively according to the analogy of a machine. Cartesian ideas continue to shape our thinking on many subjects down to the present day.

Strange, then, that in a number of circles Descartes is no longer much admired. He is religiously suspect because of the subjectivism he is supposed to have brought into theology. Scientists criticize him for having given insufficient attention to the evidence of the senses. Holistic trends in medicine lead some to scoff at Descartes' idea of the body as a mere machine. Yet even his fiercest critics agree that he shed a wide and intense light on every discipline he touched, such that few before him or since can equal it.

In my lecture I shall look at the historical, philosophical and religious context to which Descartes was responding. I will argue that just as his ideas made very good sense in his own time, so there is still much to learn from them today, and not least in medicine.

Recommended Reading:

Professor Dominic Manganiello: "When God Sends a Tempest...: Suffering as Medicine in Renaissance Literature"

"The Tempest" (1611) begins with a storm and peril at sea, and ends on a note of serenity and joy as "auspicious gales" ensure smooth sailing on the journey homeward. Shakespeare's mature reflection on the vicissitudes of life and their meaning dramatizes a shipwreck that functions as a metaphor for the uses of adversity: punishment, test or trial, and moral education. The Elizabethan play, like much of Greek tragedy, revolves around the perennial theme of revenge, but, unlike the ancient drama, proposes that character "suffers a sea-change" when justice is tempered by mercy. If, as the classical world believed, vice causes mental sickness, then, as Prospero affirms many centuries later, "the rarer action" that lies "in virtue than in vengeance" restores the person to health.

"A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation" (1535) also probes the issue of purposive suffering. The foundational starting point for this fictional dialogue between a young man and his wise yet dying uncle is the consolation of faith.

Taking his cue from Boethius, Thomas More develops a key idea from "The Consolation of Philosophy": God is "the ruler and physician of men's minds." Since philosophers are unable to cure disease by themselves, they are not to be qualified as physicians in More's view. They nevertheless should be allowed to operate as "pharmacists" provided the drugs they offer patients "are not concocted by their own brains, but according to the formulas drawn up by the great Physician." This divine Doctor brings true comfort to the sick, paradoxically, through his own suffering. He turns every tribulation they face into medicine, and even into something better than medicine.

Recommended Reading:

Professor Edmond Bloedow: "The Renaissance, the Emergence of a New-Old Era"

Under this title we shall embark on a historical survey, an overview of the main political, social, ethical, and economic features that characterized this era and are still be seen today, with particular emphasis on some of the chief personalities involved.  The rise of humanism will be addressed.

Recommended Reading:

 

Abstracts 2003

Module I: The Roots of Modern Medicine in the Graeco-Roman Period

Dr John Patrick: "Hippocrates"

The questions asked by ancient physicians are not out of date; what is the nature of ethical practice? What is the nature of disease? How do spiritual and physical factors interact in disease? Should medicine be purely a problem solving empirical activity or should it seek more patho-physiological knowledge? How far do animals and humans share the same structure and function? Is human dissection ethical? (For a short period in Alexandria , physicians apparently did vivisection of prisoners). The names associated with these questions are Hippocrates and his followers, Herophilus and Erasistratus, Plato, Aristotle and Galen. Their ethics would be described by some modern Christian doctors as ahead of ours and their progress towards understanding was remarkable even when it was wrong. Reading about these ancients can illuminate our thought today.

Recommended Reading:

Professor Ed Bloedow: "Alcibiades the Athenian: When Politics and Philosophy Meet"

The Greeks have made some of the most enduring contributions to the development of Western culture -- contributions which persist down to this very day. Among these, none has been more enduring than in the realm of government and philosophy. But what happens when politics and philosophy meet, especially within the framework of a major intellectual revolution? This is graphically illustrated by the career if Alcibiades, one of the most 'brilliant' individuals in the Athens of his day. In this lecture we shall explore how Alcibiades, as 'child of his time,' harnessed the latest trends in philosophy, and the consequences which followed therefrom -- for both his native Athens in particular and for Greece as a whole. This will be highlighted by examining the personal relationship between Alcibiades, the consummate politician, and Socrates, the great philosopher. A major aspect of the lecture will also be to trace direct continuity between ancient Athens and our own culture today, and how Alcibiades would fit perfectly into the current Western (North American) environment.

Recommended Reading:

Professor Graeme Hunter: "Why every Illness is a Musical Problem: Plato on Health and the Well-Tuned Soul"

Plato's Republic is without doubt the most significant account of political theory ever written. It has also been called the greatest treatise on education. Its influence on Western history, including Christianity, is incalculable. We should therefore be in no hurry to dismiss what Plato has to say about the place of medicine in society. We read with amazement his undeniable analysis of the social origins of many of our illnesses, which sounds as if it had been written by some contemporary of extraordinary insight. But we also encounter with horror the more prophetic passages in which Plato outlines the culture of death by which, paradoxically, pagan society will attempt to preserve its life.

Recommended Reading:

Professor Edith Humphrey: "Biblical Foundations for Healing"

Biblical Foundations for Healing I: the Integrity of the Person in the Bible

A common misapprehension of the biblical tradition is that it splits apart the material and the spiritual, showing concern for the soul but not for the body. The saying "soma sema' ("the body is a tomb") is not compatible with the biblical view of humanity, since our Creator shows delight in the material ("it is good") and his Incarnation has explicitly dignified the human body. We will trace the Old Testament and New Testament texts which insist upon the integrity of the whole person and compare these to non-biblical texts (e.g. Babylonian and Gnostic) where this unity is not recognised. A faithful and practical anthropology for those involved in the healing profession is provided in many of the biblical texts: this perspective is not marginal to the Scriptures, but readily found in the biblical texts of various genres, since it is related integrally to God's purposes for humankind.

Biblical Foundations for Healing II: the Salvation of the Whole Person in the Scriptures and the Early Church

The themes of creation, God's visitation and re-creation in the Scriptures and writings of the early church demonstrate a concern for wholeness, or salvation. Salvation, as announced by the prophets, Jesus, St. Paul and the Apocalypse of John, transforms the whole person. The healing miracles of Jesus, visionary passages about the renewal of the whole cosmos, and explicit teaching on the resurrection, show the material world and the body to be of utter importance to God. Salvation, then, is not to be conceived as simply "spiritual" but as relating to the whole person, body, mind and soul. In the sermons of the early Church, biblical narratives of physical healing are sometimes used metaphorically to refer to spiritual renewal: this tendency does not mean that the Church was unconcerned for the whole person, as is seen in other exegetical passages of the Church fathers.

Recommended Reading:

Professor Dominic Manganielo: "The Whole World is our Hospital: The Greek View of Suffering"

No paradox inspired the classical Greek tragedians more than the connection that existed between "pathos" and "mathos", suffering and its significance. Both Aeschylus and Sophocles dramatized the social repercussions of a family disease that spread over several generations and threatened the health of the whole community. This "miasma" was so contagious that it seemed to compel sons to repeat the crimes committed by their fathers. The universal fear of pollution generated a concomitant desire for ritual purification. A series of overwhelming questions, however, continued to haunt the protagonists of "The Oresteia" and "The Oedipus Cycle": does divine justice operate with the same ruthless indifference to human motive as a typhoid germ? is man, in other words, a mere plaything of the gods? These plays highlight the tremendous capacity of man to endure hereditary guilt and thorny ethical conflicts in his search for wisdom. The lectures will examine this ancient view of suffering in the Greek cultural context and will also consider its implications for a Christian understanding of the relationship between physical and spiritual healing.

Recommended Reading:

Post-conference Reading:

 

Module II | The Roots of Modern Medicine in the Middle Ages (2003)

Dr John Patrick: "Galen's Immense Impact on the Development of Western Medicine Today"

The following points will be discussed:

Recommended Reading:

Professor Ed Bloedow: "Athanasius: Theology and Politics in the Time of Constantine"

Athanasius was one of the most important Church Fathers, active at a crucial point in history, and of great significance in respect of what we would call the 'public square.'

Professor Graeme Hunter: "Boethius and the Care of the Soul"

It has always fascinated readers that when the Christian writer and thinker, Boethius, was obliged to face torture and death, his last work concerned not the consolation derived from faith, but that which comes from philosophy. Many different accounts have been given of this last surprising turn in Boethius' thought. Had he perhaps never been a Christian? Had he lost his faith? Should the reader be delving beneath the philosophical surface looking for a hidden expression of faith? I shall argue that the medical metaphor running through "The Consolation of Philosophy" gives us a clue about the author's intent. What Boethius was proposing was a manual for the cure of souls(psychiatry), analogous to the physical treatments with which he was familiar in 6th Century Rome . Boethius' own wretched end was to be a test of the efficacy of the medicine he proposed.

Recommended Reading:

Professor Dominic Manganielo: "Recovering 'the good of the intellect': Mental Health in the Divine Comedy"

When Dante the pilgrim visits the region of the dead in "The Divine Comedy", he encounters at first a vast multitude of souls who have lost "the good of the intellect". In hell a mind diseased can no longer be ministered to, since its capacity to know truth has been irreparably damaged by evil disposition of body and soul. This chilling vision of the damned, thronged in an outsized psychiatric ward, anticipated by centuries Nietzsche's famous prophecy that once mankind would discover it had lost God, "universal madness" would break out.

The medieval emphasis on sin as the root cause of willful mental illness, moreover, would lead Horace Walpole, in the eighteenth century, to describe Dante as "a Methodist parson in Bedlam". Dante, however, does not tarry in the infernal asylum; he finds the antidote to insanity in purgatory. There, through a process of penance and purification, the unsound mind is restored to health.

The pilgrim embarks on a new quest that St. Bonaventura called the mind's "road" or "journey" to God (Intinerarium mentis in Deum). The mind ascends towards the ultimate Truth in three ways, seeing God through the external body ("extra nos"), seeing Him within itself ("intra nos"), and seeing Him above itself ("super nos").

The last stage of the mental itinerary reaches its climax in the repose of contemplation. With the help of divine grace and of several guides (notably his beloved Beatrice and St. Bernard), Dante "imparadises" his mind. The impulse present in the pilgrim's seeking goes out beyond the seeker. The mind in love is restless until it rests in the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Recommended Reading:

Post-conference Reading:

Professor David Stewart: "Art and the Pursuit of Well-being from the Early Church to the End of the Middle Ages"

"Life in a Look?" Christendom seems to have forever oscillated between the idolatry of the Golden Calf (Ex 32) and the "salvation" of the Brazen Serpent (Num 21). Art has been both a means of access to God and a distraction from Him, either a drawing to God or a mirror showing us what we desire or dread. The redemptive, saving aspect of Christianity in the Early Church was revolutionary and resulted in communities that cared for one another; a phenomenon that took the Ancient World by surprise. The Church radically redefined God as personal, compassionate and totally engaged in the whole of life and death. Art shows us these developments as a mixture of Semitic and Gentile cultures, distilled into a ‘new thing'. In the Early Church Jewish ambivalence towards the visual representation of holy things responded to certain Gentile concerns about art as a servant of idolatry. After the immediate expectation of Christ's return had wavered, art came to be a way of expressing God's presence in everyday life. A fascinating consequence of these ideas is found in the rise of monastic orders dedicated to providing care for the poor and those afflicted with loathsome diseases. Jesus stands amongst the broken bodies as a source of healing and mercy. This is seen most poignantly in Grünewald's "Isenheim Altar", one of the towering accomplishments of Western Art in which art becomes both witness and prayer.

Recommended Reading:

 

Abstracts 2002

Module I: The Roots of Modern Medicine in the Graeco-Roman Period

Dr. John Patrick: Hippocrates

The questions asked by ancient physicians are not out of date; what is the nature of ethical practice? What is the nature of disease? How do spiritual and physical factors interact in disease? Should medicine be purely a problem solving empirical activity or should it seek more pathophysiological knowledge? How far do animals and humans share the same structure and function? Is human dissection ethical? (For a short period in Alexandria, physicians apparently did vivisection of prisoners). The names associated with these questions are Hippocrates and his followers, Herophilus and Erasistratus, Plato, Aristotle and Galen. Their ethics would be described by some modern Christian doctors as ahead of ours and their progress towards understanding was remarkable even when it was wrong. Reading about these ancients can illuminate our thought today.

Professor Edmund F. Bloedow: Alcibiades the Athenian: when Politics and Philosophy meet

The Greeks have made some of the most enduring contributions to the development of Western culture -- contributions which persist down to this very day. Among these, none has been more enduring than in the realm of government and philosophy. But what happens when politics and philosophy meet, especially within the framework of a major intellectual revolution? This is graphically illustrated by the career if Alcibiades, one of the most 'brilliant' individuals in the Athens of his day. In this lecture we shall explore how Alcibiades, as 'child of his time,' harnessed the latest trends in philosophy, and the consequences which followed therefrom -- for both his native Athens in particular and for Greece as a whole. This will be highlighted by examining the personal relationship between Alcibiades, the consummate politician, and Socrates, the great philosopher. A major aspect of the lecture will also be to trace direct continuity between ancient Athens and our own culture today, and how Alcibiades would fit perfectly into the current Western (North American) environment.

Professor Graeme Hunter: Why Every Illness is a Musical Problem: Plato on Health and the Well-Tuned Soul

Plato's Republic is without doubt the most significant account of political theory ever written. It has also been called the greatest treatise on education. Its influence on Western history, including Christianity, is incalculable. We should therefore be in no hurry to dismiss what Plato has to say about the place of medicine in society. We read with amazement his undeniable analysis of the social origins of many of our illnesses, which sounds as if it had been written by some contemporary of extraordinary insight. But we also encounter with horror the more prophetic passages in which Plato outlines the culture of death by which, paradoxically, pagan society will attempt to preserve its life.

Professor Edith Humphrey: Biblical Foundations for Healing

Biblical Foundations for Healing I: the Integrity of the Person in the Old and New Testament

A common misapprehension of the biblical tradition is that it splits apart the material and the spiritual, showing concern for the soul but not for the body. The saying "soma sema" ("the body is a tomb") is not compatible with the biblical view of humanity, since our Creator shows delight in the material ("it is good") and his Incarnation has explicitly dignified the human body. We will trace the Old Testament and New Testament texts which insist upon the integrity of the whole person and compare these to non-biblical texts (e.g. Babylonian and Gnostic) where this unity is not recognised. A faithful and practical anthropology for those involved in the healing profession is provided in many of the biblical texts: this perspective is not marginal to the Scriptures, but readily found in the biblical texts of various genres, since it is related integrally to God's purposes for humankind.

Biblical Foundations II: the Salvation of the Whole Person in the Scriptures and the Early Church

The themes of creation, God's visitation and re-creation in the Scriptures and writings of the early church demonstrate a concern for wholeness, or salvation. Salvation, as announced by the prophets, Jesus, St. Paul and the Apocalypse of John, transforms the whole person. The healing miracles of Jesus, visionary passages about the renewal of the whole cosmos, and explicit teaching on the resurrection, show the material world and the body to be of utter importance to God. Salvation, then, is not to be conceived as simply "spiritual" but as relating to the whole person, body, mind and soul. In the sermons of the early Church, biblical narratives of physical healing are sometimes used metaphorically to refer to spiritual renewal: this tendency does not mean that the Church was unconcerned for the whole person, as is seen in other exegetical passages of the Church fathers.

Professor Dominic Manganiello: 'The Whole World is our Hospital': The Greek View of Suffering

No paradox inspired the classical Greek tragedians more than the connection that existed between "pathos" and "mathos", suffering and its significance. Both Aeschylus and Sophocles dramatized the social repercussions of a family disease that spread over several generations and threatened the health of the whole community. This "miasma" was so contagious that it seemed to compel sons to repeat the crimes committed by their fathers. The universal fear of pollution generated a concomitant desire for ritual purification. A series of overwhelming questions, however, continued to haunt the protagonists of "The Oresteia" and "The Oedipus Cycle": Does divine justice operate with the same ruthless indifference to human motive as a typhoid germ? Is man, in other words, a mere plaything of the gods? These plays highlight the tremendous capacity of man to endure hereditary guilt and thorny ethical conflicts in his search for wisdom. The lectures will examine this ancient view of suffering in the Greek cultural context and will also consider its implications for a Christian understanding of the relationship between physical and spiritual healing.


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