O'Donovan Lectures Available

September 16, 2007

Professor Oliver O'Donovan's addreses for the 2007 New College Lectures are now available from the New College Website.

As indicated in my previous posts the series was titled Morally awake? Admiration and resolution in the light of Christian faith. Professor O'Donovan suggested in his lectures that the experience of moral wakefulness is universal and ways of describing the experience, and the philosophical puzzles they pose numerous. In his three talks he considered how we overcome the constant tensions that arise between the objective and subjective, valuing and deciding, “good” and the “right”? He argued that Christian faith can shed light on this commonest and yet most mysterious of human experiences.

The three lectures were:

Tuesday 4th Sept | Waking

The metaphor of wakefulness is constantly drawn on in the Gospels to focus the heart of moral sensibility. How does the invocation of God serve to make the moral stance conceivable to us?

Wednesday 5th Sept | Admiring

Moral attentiveness to the world is a task of affective intelligence, of “admiration”, not merely of “cognition”. What kind of coherence and order do we suppose in our world and how do assertions about a “Word of God” serve to underpin that coherence?

Thursday 6th Sept | Resolving

How can we make the transition of reason from what is the case to what we are to do? How may we intelligently “frame” an action to perform without arbitrariness?

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