Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Materialism and the Value of Conscious Life

Apart from the time devoted to collaborative reading sessions during Ordered Universe Symposia, there is also room for broader conversation and exchange of ideas. These conversations are very interesting and maybe also quite unusual, as they represent a rare instance of academics from very different disciplines being brought together. Interdisciplinary discussions are challenging in manyContinue reading “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Materialism and the Value of Conscious Life”

About What It Takes: Assumptions About Skill Sets in the Humanities and Sciences

From relatively early on in school, young people start to think of themselves as ‘more sciency’ or ‘more of a humanities or languages person’. With these two poles, to one of which many students sooner or later find themselves gravitating, we tend to associate different personality attributes and skills. For humanities subjects, creative and outside-the-boxContinue reading “About What It Takes: Assumptions About Skill Sets in the Humanities and Sciences”

New Season, Updates and Events

After the intellectual delights of Porto, we have been busy, variously, on developing the strands of the Durham Grosseteste project. Work on the De luce edition, translation and multi-disciplinary volume is well advanced, and there are other publication projects in the pipe-line, which we’ll post separately on. The main work of the summer has been on theContinue reading “New Season, Updates and Events”

Medicine, Science and a Porto Perspective

I first heard about The Ordered Universe Project in a seminar led by Giles Gasper and Tom McLeish at Durham last autumn. As someone who specialises in medieval medicine and gender, I was initially fascinated by their willingness to combine medieval science with modern physics, yet I was unaware of what contribution (if any) IContinue reading “Medicine, Science and a Porto Perspective”

The educational strand – ideas from the student perspective

When I first read about the idea of linking the Ordered Universe Project to education, I was fascinated by the parallel drawn between knowledge development across time, within the individual on the one hand and in the history of science on the other. It seems to me to be an intriguing suggestion that there mayContinue reading “The educational strand – ideas from the student perspective”

Porto Experiences Thursday 27th June: De luce, Education and the History of Science

Thursday and the team kept at it, moving through the rest of the De luce, through the creation of the 9 celestial spheres (they are not named by Grosseteste but presumably followed the pattern 1 First Mover, 2 Fixed Stars, 3 Saturn, 4 Jupiter, 5 Mars, 6 Sun, 7 Venus, 8 Mercury, 9 Moon) and thenContinue reading “Porto Experiences Thursday 27th June: De luce, Education and the History of Science”

Greti at the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences/Canadian Society of Medievalists

Greti Dinkova-Bruun, one of the core team members for the Ordered Universe/Grosseteste Science project gave a paper in early June to the 2013 Congress of of the Humanities and Social Sciences/Canadian Society of Medievalists June 1-8, at the University of Victoria in Canada. The session was a roundtable on Grosseteste’s letter collection, and also to honourContinue reading “Greti at the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences/Canadian Society of Medievalists”