This is our concluding blog post for the 2018 Edinburgh Gifford Lectures. Below Dr James Henry Collin offers some philosophical reflections stemming from Fuentes’ lectures. Collin is Lecturer in Philosophy, Science and Religion at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the intersection of issues in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics, and pragmatist conceptions of language. He holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of St Andrews and an MSc by research and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh. We would like to thank Prof Fuentes for giving and excellent series of lectures and for all those who took the time to engage with them, both online and in person. The blog will now be inactive until next year’s series.
What are we? Reconsidering an Enchanted Understanding of Ourselves and the World
– James Henry Collins
In Prof. Fuentes’ excellent Gifford lectures, he weaves together compellingly a rich skein of biological, anthropological, philosophical, and theological issues, to tell us something about what we are – what distinguishes us from other creatures, organisms, or, for that matter, mere matter. Here I want to riff off these insights, and draw our attention towards more philosophical – or more purely philosophical – aspects of this question. As John Maynard Keynes once famously said ‘Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’ And what goes for defunct economists goes doubly so for dead philosophers. A good deal of what we take for granted as sheer common sense – the unshakable bedrock of premises that guide our thought and action – are in fact the conclusions of philosophical arguments that were thrashed out in our recent or distant past. Some philosophical ideas have sunk so deeply into our collective conceptual substratum that we cease to recognise them as being suppositions of any kind, let alone obvious or commonsensical ones.