Vice-Chancellor’s lecture series: Professor Raymond Tallis December 6, 2011

Venue/Location: Chamber, The Old Fire Station, University of Salford
Event type: One-off event
Description:

The second lecture in the 2011/12 Vice-Chancellor’s Lecture Series will be Professor Raymond Tallis, philosopher, poet, novelist and cultural critic and was until recently a physician and clinical scientist. Professor Tallis will speak about his new book Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Mankind.

About the Lecture

Increasingly, it is assumed that human beings are best understood in biological terms; that, notwithstanding the apparent differences between humans and their nearest animal kin, people are, at bottom, organisms. This has had numerous consequences but among the most prominent is the encroachment of biology on the humanities. Neuro-evolutionary approaches to art (neuro-aesthetics, evolutionary literary criticism), to the law (neuro-law), to ethics (evolutionary ethics), to the social sciences (as in evolutionary economics and neuro-politics) are symptoms of the ascent of biologism.

Biologism has two main pillars. The first is Neuromania. This is based on the incorrect notion that human consciousness is identical with activity in the brain, that people are their brains, and that societies are best understood as collections of brains. Professor Tallis will argue that, while the brain is a necessary condition of every aspect of human consciousness, it is not a sufficient condition – which is why neuroscience, and the materialist philosophy upon which is it based, fails totally to explain any aspect of the human person. Since the brain is an evolved organism, its function can be understood in terms of its role in maximising our chances of survival. Neuromania therefore leads to Darwinitis, the second pillar of contemporary biologism. This is the assumption that, since Darwin demonstrated the biological origins of the organism H sapiens, we should look to evolutionary theory to understand what we are now; that our biological roots explain our cultural leaves.
Against biologism, Professor Tallis will emphasise the extent to which we are not identical with our brains, and that we are part of a community of minds that has grown up over the hundreds of thousands of years since we parted company from the other primates. The gap between our nearest animal kin and ourselves is too wide to read across from the one to the other. The aspiration of the humanities to become ‘animalities’ is a major obstacle to serious thinking about our own nature.

About Professor Tallis

Medical

Between 1987 and 2006 Raymond Tallis was Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician in Health Care of the Elderly in Salford. He also advised the government on health care of older people and in particular on the development of stroke services.

Most of his 200 research publications are in the field of neurology of old age (epilepsy and stroke) and neurological rehabilitation. He has published original articles in Nature Medicine, Lancet and other leading journals. In 2000 he was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and has been involved in producing two major reports for that institution: Restoring Neurological Function: Putting the neurosciences to work in neurorehabilitation (2004); and Rejuvenating Ageing Research (2009).

In 2002 he was awarded the Dhole Eddlestone Prize; in 2006 the Founders Medal of the British Geriatrics Society; in 2007, the Lord Cohen Gold Medal for Research into Ageing.

Non-Medical

He has published fiction (a novel and short stories), three volumes of poetry, and 22 books on the philosophy of mind, philosophical anthropology, literary theory, the nature of art, and cultural criticism. These offer a critique of current predominant intellectual trends and an alternative understanding of human consciousness, the nature of language and of what it is to be a human being. For this he has been awarded two honorary degrees: DLitt (Hon Causa) University of Hull, 1997; and LittD (Hon Causa) University of Manchester 2002.

In 2008 he was appointed Honorary Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Liverpool. He was on the judging panel of the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. He writes regularly for The Times and has a column in Philosophy Now. For the last few years he has appeared regularly at the leading literary and science festivals such as Hay and Cheltenham. He is a frequent broadcaster, with recent appearances on Start the Week, Nightwaves, Inside the Ethics Committee and The Moral Maze. His latest book Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity was published in June 2011.

This event is free but please register.
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Official Website: http://www.salford.ac.uk/home-page/events/events/vice-chancellors-lecture-series-professor-raymond-tallis