Heathenism, Immortality and the Secularisation of the Soul
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- This lecture is by Michelle Aroney who is a PhD Candidate within the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH). An ARC Laureate Fellowship Postgraduate and an Endeavour Postgraduate Scholar, Michelle’s research explores the relations between religion, science and secularisation in respect to understandings of the human soul in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Britain.
In 1659, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More warned his readers that if materialism were true, the existence of God, freedom, virtue or justice was necessarily impossible. More’s stance has typically been seen to represent the Christian position on materialism. This interpretation has coloured the way historians depict theology’s relationship with materialism: modelling More’s sentiments, the two are typically characterised as each other’s antithesis.
For many, this story fits nicely into metanarratives of the secularisation of the western world at the hand of natural science. However, in contrast, Michelle will contend that seventeenth and eighteenth-century English materialism is an important exception to this narrative. In this lecture Michelle will introduce a group of late 17th and early 18th century English physicians, philosophers and theologians who maintained the absolute congruity of materialism with Christianity, claiming that the immaterial and immortal soul was a concept traducted from the ‘heathens’.
A light lunch will be served at 12.30pm followed by the lecture and discussion at 1pm. Please RSVP through the URL provided above.
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