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Contents
01) May 1 | Graduate Student Event Grants in Religion | Applications Due
02) May 2 | Physico-Theology and Taste: 1650-1720 | Alexander Wragge-Morley
All events free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted.
For more information, visit bcsr.berkeley.edu.
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01) May 1 | Graduate Student Event Grants in Religion | Applications Due
The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) announces a program of small grants funding UC Berkeley graduate student events on topics in religion. These grants provide partial support and range from $250-$500 for a single event, and up to $1,000 for a conference. For requirements, visit bcsr.berkeley.edu. Completed applications should be submitted electronically as a single PDF document by Thursday, May 1 at 4pm.
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02) May 2 | Physico-Theology and Taste: 1650-1720 | Alexander Wragge-Morley
Physico-Theology and Taste: 1650-1720
Alexander Wragge-Morley, Postdoctoral Fellow, California Institute of Technology and Huntington Library
Friday, May 2, 4-6 pm
300 Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley
This talk offers a reconsideration of the workings of one of the key claims made in the canonical physico-theological texts published in England between 1650 and 1720, including works by Robert Boyle, William Derham, Nehemiah Grew and John Ray. It is well known that the physico-theological authors, most of whom were also practising naturalists, urged that physico-theology was distinct from other varieties of natural theology because it depended upon the evidence of the senses to help lead people to a better knowledge of God, and an improved moral disposition. The aim here is to reconsider this fundamental claim in the light of a range of different types of evidence, internal and external to physico-theology, showing that this embodied theology was bound up with concerns about the affective mechanisms of sensation and cognition. Ray and his contemporaries urged that pleasure followed naturally from the apprehension of God's beautiful and purposeful designs. At the same time, however, they recognised that many people simply failed to experience the pleasures that they found so obvious. This paper will explore the responses offered by Ray and his contemporaries to this difficult dilemma, arguing that physico-theology invoked standards of taste, grounded in contemporary discourses about (what we would now call) aesthetic and stylistic judgments. (Wragge-Morley)
Alexander Wragge-Morley is a historian of Britain and Europe in the early modern period. Most of his research is about the history of medical and scientific ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The themes that particularly interest him include the history of the nervous system, senses and emotions; the uses of vivid imagery in scientific representations of nature; the roles of ethics and religion in scientific discourse and early modern debates about design in natural and human-made things. He completed his PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, and is a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology and the Huntington Library.
Co-presented by the Department of English and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.
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By connecting scholars, students, and the global community, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) fosters critical and creative scholarship on religion and activates this scholarship for students and the public at large.
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