Top level science, path-breaking science can often go on in the university
without any connections with the history and philosophy of science which is
actually coming at the same material from a different direction and so I
wanted to create a program in which there were three or four-way
conversations and in which the young people would be actually embedded in
top-level laboratories.
The three areas that we knew we wanted to disperse
our researchers around in were evolutionary biology or zoology on the
one hand. Secondly, neuroscience and psychology, because there you have
enormously interesting questions that relate to philosophy of mind in the
humanities and thirdly the big questions about cosmology, physics, time, space.
These philosophical questions are extraordinarily pressing and they're not
just background questions there are actually questions the answers to which
partly dictate how you set up your experiments in the first place.
And so I was really delighted
when some truly leading scientists in Cambridge were
more than open to this possibility.
My name is Peter Woodford, I'm a postdoc at
the University of Cambridge right now on a unique interdisciplinary project
that's put philosophers and philosophers of religion into fields in the sciences
that have that studied topics of mutual interest. So right now I'm working with a
lot of zoologists who are researching behaviour in animals, so why animals
behave the way that they do. And I'm linking that to some questions about why
humans behave the way that they do and why they value certain things.
What does the history and our knowledge of the history of life on Earth - what
implication does it have for how we understand ourselves, in particular for
how we understand certain values that we may have - for example the value of
selflessness or altruism or the care of others.
Part of the project I've
basically been embedded in a scientific research group for the
last three years and I've actually been able to visit some of their field sites.
It was obviously a unique experience for any philosopher to have it was an
amazing experience - actually seeing what animals are doing in a direct way really
enriches our, you know, what it means to really understand their
behaviour. To ask that question about why are they doing what they're doing which
is really the one of the central questions that the evolutionary
biologists are asking and that philosophers are interested in, too - what
does it mean to ask why an animal is acting the way that it is?
Ultimately, I really think
the value of pursuing some of these big questions is just
understanding what we believe and why we believe it in a better way. And that
goes no matter where one begins with no matter what starting point one has
whether atheist or theist, sceptic or believer. We all have something to learn
about why other people believe what they believe and why we believe what we believe.
What does it mean to ask whether God exists, and what does it mean to say
that the universe had a beginning? If you ask yourself questions like this you
you are doing philosophy, you're reflecting on the nature of religion and you're
wondering what it means that there was a Big Bang. One reason you might want to
ask questions like that is that you might wonder how the physics relates to
the theology, for example is the Big Bang some scientific evidence that there was
a creation event? Does religion aim to describe reality in the way that physics
does? Does physics even aim to describe reality and if not what does it do? Can
there even be convergence here or is that misunderstanding one or both of
these disciplines somehow. That's the kind of question that this project tries
to address. In order to do that, you want to talk to both physicists and theologians
and the physicists may or may not be religious, the theologian may or may not
want to think much about cosmology, but that's all the more reason to try to
bring them into conversation.
I'm Daniel de Haan. I'm a postdoc working
on the Templeton World Charity Foundation Project in the sciences,
philosophy, and theology. So the big questions are questions about what are
the major implications that neuroscience has with respect to philosophical and
theological conceptions of what it is to be a human person?
There couldn't have been a better postdoc
for me to land myself in than one that allowed me to
have the opportunity to get some formal instruction, some formal training in
neuroscience and psychology. Spend some time in the lab, spend time in lab
meetings and see what it's actually like from day-to-day with postdocs and
graduate students working in a lab and interacting with their supervisors as
well as attending the lectures that undergraduates and master's students
take in neuroscience and psychology.
The people in my lab were quite open to the
idea of having someone around from this other background bringing in a different
perspective. I think one reason why we should all care about these questions is
because we all ask questions about what we are. We do it implicitly in the way
that we behave in the way that we address various problems and conflicts
in life. But we also are very influenced and interested in various portrayals of
what a human being is, so it's really important for universities like
Cambridge to sort of provide an opportunity for hosting these kinds of
interdisciplinary formative experiences.
It's been an overwhelmingly positive
experience. I'm very grateful for it I just don't think it would have been -
it's unimaginable how if I had gone straight into a full teaching position
that I would have had the opportunities and experiences to be in so many
different disciplines and have the real freedom to pursue the questions that I
was interested in.
There are a lot of conversations about the conflict between
science and religion and what this project does is it allows us to try to
engage in this debate in the most sophisticated way possible.
Academics working in the humanities as well as researchers working in the sciences are
beginning to appreciate some of the difficulties that are rising from the
degree of extreme specialisation - where we're losing the ability to talk to each other.
This kind of a project, although it's rare, I think it's
incredibly important and hopefully in the future there will be more
opportunities for people to have an experience like this.
I would definitely do it again.
I'm very thankful and grateful for the opportunities that I've
had here and I hope that I can put it to good work in the future.
For all of us it's kind of an experiment
it was unusual from the beginning and we had
running jokes about this, about the fact that it was sort of an experiment in itself.
I mean I think it's so rich - there's so much to learn that it's more like this
was a really great experience and I hope that I've learned things, but it's
really the start of something.
Well Sarah Coakley has been an extraordinary
supervisor. I think all three of us postdocs have learned an immense amount
from Sarah and the way of going in patiently and listening to our
scientific colleagues, she's really provided a paradigm for that.
I'm more happy than I could even have hoped
for I think because I think this is a rather
unique experiment in how to create a new generation of scholars who quite early
in their careers learn this agility. But now that we've shown it's possible and
that we've shown it's possible in frankly, one of the top universities in
the world for scientific endeavour and mathematiical endeavour, then surely it must
be possible in other places. It was done initially on a wing and a prayer, but the
very fact that we were able to find the right people I think was crucial and
there's no doubt that they have fulfilled all their promise and are now
being snapped up into other jobs in different parts of the world.