What Are We? Human Persons After Neuroscience | Dr. Daniel De Haan

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2019

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given at the University of Texas at Austin on November 19, 2019.

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Dr. Daniel De Haan is a Research Fellow of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford. He is working on the Renewal of Natural Theology Project directed by Professor Alister McGrath. Before coming to Oxford, De Haan was a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge working on the neuroscience strand of the Templeton World Charity Foundation Fellowships in Theology, Philosophy of Religion, and the Sciences Project, directed by Sarah Coakley. During this postdoctoral fellowship, he conducted research on the intersections of theology, philosophy, and neuroscience in Lisa Saksida’s Translational Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you very much for having me.
0:05.0	I'm still recovering a little bit from jet lag, so I hope that I pay more attention than all of you,
0:11.0	but I'll do my best.
0:13.0	Tonight we're going to talk a little bit about what are human persons in the relationship to neuroscience,
0:18.0	what kind of relationship the two have to each other, and while the talk is going to be somewhat adversarial to certain positions to neuroscience, what kind of relationship the two have to each other.
0:21.3	And while the talk is going to be somewhat adversarial
0:23.7	to certain positions in neuroscience,
0:25.6	it shouldn't be taken as being generally adversarial
0:27.9	to neuroscience.
0:28.5	It should be seen as something really quite good.
0:32.0	I'm going to talk briefly, just go over my thesis
0:34.2	and some of the things I'm going to be arguing
0:35.9	about human persons with respect to neuroscience. Discuss discussing some questions about what we are in the relationship
0:41.5	to neuroscience. And then I'm going to take up two challenges to a certain conception of the
0:46.7	human person that come from neuroscience. And then if there's time, because I haven't quite
0:51.0	timed this, but if there is time, I'm going to talk about some heuristics, ways of asking questions when you confront various popular or, you know, properly
1:00.2	scientific papers in neuroscience, because there's never going to be an end of these inquiries,
1:04.3	there's never going to be an end of these studies, and so some helpful kind of heuristics
1:08.3	or tools for thinking about future things you read.
1:15.3	Questions that you can always ask whenever you read some new neuroscientific study.
1:23.3	So, theses are, I mean, I want to start with a very, I mean, I'm very excited about neuroscience.
1:26.5	I really like neuroscience. I think it's obviously a very good thing.
	...

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