From the Executive Director—May 2008

ByEditor

Eric Spring is here, and that means that “conference mode” is in full flower here at the Institute! Plans are coming along nicely for what promises to be a fantastic Metanexus Conference 2008 in Madrid, July 13-17. If you have not done so already, you can register for the conference online. Featured speakers include William Chittick, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Robert Kane, Nancey Murphy, Stanley Jaki, Le Ron Shults, Tariq Ramadan, Antje Jackelen, Basarab Nicolescu, Norbert Samuelson, Billy Grassie, and many, many more. We have a very special trip planned to Toledo on July 13, featuring Maria Rosa Menocal, George F.R. Ellis, and representatives of the world’s great faith traditions exploring together the possibilities for a new “golden age” of convivencia for Spain, for Europe, and for the world. You won’t want to miss it!

The conference theme is Subject, Self, and Soul: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Personhood. The word “transdisciplinary” in the title signifies our belief that nothing as profound as the human person can be fully understood by the methodologies of any single science. In fact, the human person, in all its depth and mystery, probably cannot be fully understood at all. Our hope is to avoid reducing our understanding of ourselves in a monological manner to the language, say, of physics (however important physics is for understanding ourselves and our world). In a recent article, Stuart Kauffman writes against reductionism:

Biology and its evolution cannot be reduced to physics alone but stand in their own right. Life, and with it agency, came naturally to exist in the universe. With agency came values, meaning, and doing, all of which are as real in the universe as particles in motion. “Real” here has a particular meaning: while life, agency, value, and doing presumably have physical explanations in any specific organism, the evolutionary emergence of these cannot be derived from or reduced to physics alone. Thus, life, agency, value, and doing are real in the universe. This stance is called emergence. [T]here are explanatory arrows in the universe that do not point downward. A couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion. […] Emergence says that, while no laws of physics are violated, life in the biosphere, the evolution of the biosphere, the fullness of our human historicity, and our practical everyday worlds are also real, are not reducible to physics nor explicable from it, and are central to our lives.

A transdisciplinary approach aims at the real. It is a realism in a way that any reductionism, always a product of unbound reason, ultimately, is not. Whether Kauffman is right that it is we who have “invented God” or not, he is right that “the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know. The Enlightenment’s reliance on reason is too narrow a view of how we flourish or flounder.”

So, not by reason alone do we know and flourish, but also by the knowing that comes from the heart, that plumbs the depths of mystery inaccessible to the laws of nature. And by both, by head and heart, by reason and love, do we strive towards wisdom.

So let us seek wisdom together! Join with us at Metanexus as we pursue something like the whole story of the whole cosmos for the whole person!

Author

  • Eric Weislogel, Ph.D., is the Vice President for Academic Affairs of the Metanexus Institute, headquartered in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, USA. In addition, he serves as the Director of the Metanexus Global Network Initiative, with hundreds of projects in more than 40 countries. He is also Senior Contributing Editor of the Global Spiral, the online journal of the Metanexus Institute. From 2006-2008, he served as the Executive Director of Metanexus.

    Prior to joining Metanexus, Dr. Weislogel was assistant professor of philosophy at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and also taught at the Pennsylvania State University. Currently, he teaches philosophy at the Delaware County Community College. He has published a number of philosophical essays and reviews in such journals as Philosophy Today, Transdisciplinarity in Science and Religion, Idealistic Studies, Philosophy in Review, Science and Theology News, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Additionally, his articles have appeared in the online journals Metapsychology and the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, as well as in the Global Spiral.

    Dr. Weislogel is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he was awarded the Diplme d'Honneur by the Centre International de Recherches et tudes Transdisciplinaires (CIRET) in 2007. He is an active member in a number of scholarly societies, including the American Philosophical Association (for which he currently serves on the Committee for International Cooperation), the American Catholic Philosophical Association, and the American Academy of Religion, among others.

    Dr. Weislogel's main philosophical interest may be described as philosophical anthropologythe exploration of the interplay of religion, science, ethics, and metaphysics in the 21st century and what it means for our understanding of the human person. He describes himself as a postmodern peripatetic, an Aristotelian at heart, trained in 19th- and 20th-century continental philosophy, and who especially loves teaching the works of Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, in parallel to Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Marion, Butler, Levinas, and Zizek.. He is a vocal advocate for adopting transdisciplinary approaches to research and teaching.

    He and his wife, Kellie Given, have two children: Lucas, a graduate of St. Vincent College, Latrobe, PA, who teaches high school physics and is a graduate student at the University of Virginia; and Elisa, a graduate of La Salle University and presently in her final year as a student at the Villanova University School of Law.

    In his spare time, Dr. Weislogel can be found pursuing his passion for book collecting, reading, listening to music and going to concerts, trying to figure out whats happening on Lost, rooting for the World-Champion Phillies and the Steelers (and the Eagles), baking bread, or enjoying a walk with his wife. He is still trying to have a meaningful conversation with their two cats, Bagheera (Bags) and KitKat, but so far without success.

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