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Event | 09 March 2023 17:30-18:45

Creation Beyond Creativity

Key Details

Location:
Pembroke College, Pichette Auditorium

About

 

Tim IngoldIn March 2023, the LSRI is delighted to be offering a public lecture by Professor Tim Ingold, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen.

This lecture will explore debates around creation and creativity that have been integral to theology and philosophy from the classical through to the medieval period. 

It will explore how with rise of modern science the idea of "creation" came to be strongly associated with the recombinant power of intelligent design. From the mid-twentieth century, this association went on to underpin the burgeoning field of creativity research in psychology, leading to an exclusive focus on the novelty of ideas and products that left no room for the creativeness of life itself, in its intrinsic potential for renewal. Drawing on the thinking of John Dewey, Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, on questions of philosophy, religion and art, the lecture will elaborate on the distinction between novelty and newness, and will make a plea for the restoration of the idea of creation not as the proliferation of ends but as the promise of perpetual beginning.

This public lecture will be offered as part of a research visit by Professor Ingold in March 2023.

About the Speaker

Tim Ingold, FBA, FRSE, is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on cultural attitudes to animals, on the connection between language and technology in human evolution, on human ecology and on anthropologies of technology and art. His recent books include The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013), The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2018), Anthropology: Why it Matters  (2018), Correspondences (2020) and Imagining For Real (2022).