WEEK 8 - 4 December
11am-12.30pm (Seminar in the Gibson Building) AND 5pm-6.30pm (Ian Ramsey Centre Lecture at St Luke’s Chapel, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Oxford):
Louise Hickman, Birmingham Newman University:
‘Likely stories: How the ancient drama of philosophy can help us think about the nonhuman world’
Abstract: Insights from narrative and literary fiction have come to play an important part of the science-and-religion discourse. This paper asks how such a discourse informed by narrative might be more fully inclusive of the nonhuman world. The risk that conceptions of narrative might be constricted by the dominance of written stories—and might borrow too much from a literary focus on coherence and plot—is identified, along with the exclusory tendencies of the textualization of narrative. These problems come to the fore when considering the nonhuman world. If evolution is told as a narrative of drama, it is humanity who has told this tale. Nature does not have a unified soundbox, while even vocal animals cannot produce sounds recognisable enough by us to contribute to a textualized version of the evolutionary epic. This paper will consider how the nonhuman might participate more fully in this story.
It will do so by reflecting on how the problems with textualization, and its tendency to neglect context, sit centre-stage in ancient philosophy and are intertwined with shifting ideas of logos and myth. It is often forgotten that Plato wrote philosophy not in the form of treatises but as dramatic dialogue, often full of myth and abounding with animals. In the Platonic corpus, narrative is an integral part of gaining knowledge of the world. Plato’s dialogues also put before us a trenchant critique of writing.
This paper will argue that revisiting this era of shift from oral to written culture, and the resultant debates about mythos, logos, truth, and human knowledge of the natural world, can point us towards a way of including nonhuman species more meaningfully in narrative by affirming the co-created nature of stories. Using insights from the dramatization of philosophy can help to shift the focus onto often overlooked questions about the ways in which narrative functions. Plato’s writing of animals and use of mythos foreshadows more recent insights showing us how animal narrative is inseparable from shifts in politics and science. Furthermore, it demonstrates the impossibility of distinguishing neatly between the different disciplines of science, literature, ethics, theology, and philosophy.
Dr Louise Hickman is Reader in Philosophy of Religion, and programme lead for taught postgraduate Theology provision at Birmingham Newman University. She studied for her first two degrees at the University of Exeter and completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge. She has published on various aspects of the history of philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and science and religion. From 2011-2018, she was editor of Reviews in Science and Religion. Louise is a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion
