We had a lively opening Gifford lecture with Professor Tanner at the Business School tonight! If you missed it, you can review the ‘live’ rendition at the Twitter hashtag #GiffordsEd. Also, as of Wednesday, May 4th, the lecture video has been available at this link. For this and subsequent discussion threads, consider responding to the following questions: Is there a technical […]

Our 2016 Gifford Lectures begin next week! You are invited to join a number of contributors who will be responding to Professor Kathryn Tanner, and one another, on this blog. We’re hoping to develop a lively community discussion, both at the lectures and online, so we want you to take part. Here’s how to join the discussion in three […]

In Professor Kathryn Tanner’s introduction to this year’s Giffords theme, she states that contemporary capitalism can ‘hinder the development of any critical perspective on it.’ Given this situation, we are looking forward to her lectures as a mode of resistance to the influence of finance-dominated capitalism on our societies, workplaces, and ‘spiritualities’. This weblog offers the […]

In a sensitively structured and cogent conclusion to his Gifford Lecture Series, Professor Jeremy Waldron tonight set out his argument for the full, unequivocal inclusion of those who are ‘profoundly disabled’ within his schemata for ‘basic human equality’. As he described his ‘bottom line’: ‘those who are profoundly disabled are human persons too, endowed with […]

Turning his attention now to human equality and its relationship to concepts of God, Professor Waldron offered the following alternative challenges: Can there be a religious argument for equality which holds firm in the present day? Or accepting some original theological foundations for human equality, can the ‘jist of the argument be detached from its […]

Building on his adoption last week of John Rawls’ concept of ‘range properties’, that above certain thresholds we all can be considered as bearing ‘equal’ moral capacity irrespective of our variation within the range, Professor Waldron tonight concentrated on working through the challenges and implications that would follow. In other words, if the concept of […]

What are the basic features of the cluster of principles that we would associate with human equality? How do we move from the general to the particular to answer the fundamental question: if the presence of a ‘continuous’ equality amongst humans is to be accepted, or even a ‘distinctive’ equality which would raise us to […]

Exploring ‘The Logic of Human Equality’, in his second Gifford Lecture Professor Waldron delved tonight into the technical framework that he saw as an essential pre-requisite of developing in his remaining lectures a coherent and robust validation of the essence of ‘basic human equality’. Description and Prescription Professor Waldron began by distinguishing between the ‘descriptive’ […]

In a stimulating opening Gifford Lecture tonight, Professor Jeremy Waldron emphasised the urgency of not only eradicating ‘surface inequality’ in public legal relations, but in carrying out a theological and philosophical examination of what may underpin human equality in a world where ‘grotesque differences in economic lives’ create the risk of ‘leech and leak’ to […]

The magnificent surroundings of the neo-classical Playfair Library in Old College will shortly play host to Professor Jeremy Waldron’s Gifford Lectures for 2015. It promises to be an engaging and inspiring series, striking at the root of what might define our equality as humans in philosophical, theological or legal terms. With a backdrop internationally of continuing violence and […]