Science and Religion Project Lecture Series
Tuesday, February 8, 2022 – Tuesday, May 10, 2022The Science and Religion Project at Bard College Berlin provides interested students with an opportunity to expand their knowledge of the history of science, the history of religions, and the issues that arise when the two are considered together. At the core of the project is a fellowship program for select students who have committed to participating in a series of text seminars over the course of the academic year. Led by world-renowned experts, these seminars focus on the careful study of works from antiquity to the present and from across the globe.
The project is under the direction of Professor of Political Thought Ewa Atanassow and BCB faculty Dr. Ross Shields. The BCB Science & Religion Project, is a part of the Oxford-led project "New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe" with support from the Templeton Foundation.
Stefani Engelstein – The Wisdom behind Flowers and Bees: The Creation of Ecology in 1793
Tuesday, February 8, 2022 7:30 pm CET
In 1793, Christian Konrad Sprengel first proved that many plants cannot reproduce without insects, and that the structure of the flowers lures, entices, and even coerces insects into their role as pollinators. While many theologians had argued from design to intelligent designer, Sprengel’s flowers introduced the fundamentally new idea of designed cooperation between species. The word ecology wouldn’t be coined for another 75 years, but nature suddenly seemed a lot more integrated. Not all naturalists were enthusiastic: Goethe, in particular, was horrified by the idea that the purpose of a living being could lie outside itself. We will think together about Sprengel’s methods and concept of science, about his conclusions about the Creator and final purposes, and about why his idea was so shocking and disturbing to some thinkers.
Stefani Engelstein is Professor of German Studies and of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her work focuses on literature and science, aesthetics, gender, and political theory. She is the author of Sibling Action: The Genealogical Structure of Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2017) and Anxious Anatomy: The Conception of the Human Form in Literary and Naturalist Discourse (SUNY Press, 2008), and co-editor of Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture (Rodopi Press, 2011) She is currently working on two book projects as a Visiting Scholar at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin: German Idealism and the Making of the Opposite Sex and Reflections from Germany on Diversity and Violent Pasts: An Essay in Six Cemeteries.
Aaron Tugendhaft – Heavenly Reason in the Medieval Islamic World
Thursday, February 17, 2022 7:30 pm – 9:30 pm
In 1194, the Egyptian philosopher and rabbinical authority Musa ibn Maymun (aka Maimonides, Rambam) responded to a series of queries by the Jewish community of southern France concerning the efficacy of astrology. This lecture will explore the religious and political dimensions of ibn Maymun's response within the context of how the astral sciences---both astronomy and astrology---were conceptualized in the medieval Islamic world.
Aaron Tugendhaft teaches history and philosophy at the Ramaz School in New York City. From 2018-2021, he taught in the core at Bard College Berlin, where he also served as inaugural director of the Science and Religion Project. He is the author of The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet (Chicago, 2020) among other books.
This event is cohosted by the Science and Religion Project and the Early Modern Science core, and supported by the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS).
Georg Toepfer — Unity or Diversity? Christian Origins of and Resistance to Valuing Diversity
Tuesday, April 5, 2022 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
The current discourse on diversity and its evaluation has not one root, but many. It ties together developments in the fields of biology and bioethics, aesthetics and economy, law and global justice. Somehow the concept ‘diversity’ has managed, in particular in the arena of politics, to bring the heterogenous problems associated with these diverse fields under one heading. An important background for this success story is the rich cultural history of ‘diversity’. It comprises ancient narratives about divine creation, paradise and Noah’s ark as well as political ideas of cultural pluralism, egalitarianism and non-hierarchical representation of individuals. In his talk, Toepfer will focus on the Christian elements in this long history. They refer, among other things, to a more respectful attitude toward animals than the Romans had in ancient times, to debates about the emergence of a “diversity” of ecclesiastical orders, each with different rules (diversitas statutorum), in Medieval times, and the “diversity images” in the physico-theological context of Early Modern times that put the logic of diversity into the visual sphere by showing an egalitarian, non-hierarchical representation of diverse living things.
Georg Toepfer is co-director of the research area “Lebenswissen” at the Leibniz-Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin. He studied biology and philosophy and received his diploma in biology from the University of Würzburg, his PhD in philosophy from the University of Hamburg and a post-doctoral degree (habilitation) in philosophy from the University of Bamberg. His principal area of research is the history and philosophy of the life sciences, with a special focus on the the transfer of concepts between biology and other fields. Major publication: Historisches Wörterbuch der Biologie. Geschichte und Theorie der biologischen Grundbegriffe (3 vols., Metzler 2011).
Ross Shields – Mephisto on Method: Goethe the Scientist, Goethe the Poet
Tuesday, April 26, 2022 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm CEST
A Science and Religion Talk
The most celebrated author in the history of German letters, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, considered the investigation of nature to be his true calling. And while some aspects of his scientific project can easily be dismissed as romantic (his polemic against Newton’s theory of light), others were obviously ahead of their time (his work on comparative anatomy, of which Darwin took notice). But is there a meaningful connection between Goethe’s poetic talent and his approach to nature? What role can intuition play in a discourse dominated by well-defined concepts? What was Goethe’s contribution to scientific debates concerning teleology and mechanism? analysis and synthesis? induction and deduction? This session will inquire into the relation between science and poetry by comparing a scene from Goethe’s Faust I, in which Mephistopholes discusses natural science, with Goethe’s own reflections on the natural world.
Ross Shields has been a guest professor at Bard College Berlin since 2019. In Fall of 2022 he will join the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin to develop a project on Wittgenstein’s theory of linguistic models. He is currently working on a monograph titled The Critique of Pure Feeling: Goethe Reading Kant.
Christoph F. E. Holzhey – Dis/enchanting Emergence: On Ilya Prigogine’s Science of Self-Organization
Tuesday, May 10, 2022 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm
A Science & Religion Project Talk
Nineteenth-century emergentism promised to mediate between mechanism and vitalism — that is, between the assumption that processes of the living are reducible to Newtonian physics and the claim that they require non-physical life forces or souls. Soon dismissed as neo-vitalist, it was re-habilitated in the 1970s through sciences of complexity, chaos, and self-organization. While emergence has become a popular notion that is mobilized in a host of different theories, disciplines, and contexts, its function remains highly ambiguous, oscillating between neo-vitalism and neo-mechanicism. Focusing on Ilya Prigogine, an influential protagonist and popularizer of the sciences of self-organization in the 1970s and 80s, and with a brief comparison to Francisco Varela, co-inventor of the notion of autopoiesis, the seminar explores some aspects of emergence’s bifurcation and multistability, including its relation to time and eternity, non-dualist thought, and the attempt to explain the mysteries of life and consciousness.
Christoph F. E. Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, which he has directed since 2006. He received a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Princeton University in 1993 with a dissertation on the entropy and information loss of black holes. At Columbia University, he studied German Literature and wrote a dissertation on paradoxical pleasures in aesthetics (PhD 2001). Returning to Germany, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2001-03) and at the Universität Siegen (2003-06) in the VW-project ‘Mystik und Moderne’. He has directed the interdisciplinary projects Tension/Spannung, ERRANS, and Reduction at ICI Berlin and (co-)edited several interdisciplinary volumes, including Biomystik: Natur – Gehirn – Geist (2007), Tension/Spannung (2010), Multistable Figures: On the Critical Potential of Ir/Reversible Aspect-Seeing (2014), De/Constituting Wholes: Towards Partiality Without Parts (2017), and Weathering: Ecologies of Exposure (2020).