William Sweet
Department of Philosophy, St Francis
Xavier University
It is a pleasure to welcome you all here
for this symposium, held on the occasion of John Leslie's most recent book,
and dedicated to discussing John Leslie's work in the philosophy of religion
and cosmology.
Our speakers are:
Elisabeth Boetzkes, who is Associate Professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her primary research interests are Health Care Ethics, Feminist Ethics, and Environmental Philosophy, but also Philosophy of Religion
Leslie Armour, who is Research
Professor of Philosophy at the Dominican College of Philosophy and Theology
(Ottawa), and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa.
He is author of "Infini Rien": Pascal's Wager and the Human Paradox
(1993),
Being and Idea: Developments of Some Themes in Spinoza and Hegel (1992);
The Idea of Canada and the Crisis of Community (1981),
The Faces
of Reason: an essay on philosophy and culture in English Canada, 1850-1950
(1981), The Conceptualization of the Inner Life
(with Edward
T. Bartlett), (1980), Logic and Reality: an Investigation into the Idea
of a Dialectical System (1972); The Concept of Truth
(1969),
The Rational and the Real: an Essay in Metaphysics (1962). He is
a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Finally, let me introduce our 'respondent':
John Leslie
is
a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy
at the University of Guelph. He has held visiting posts at the University
of Calgary (Dept. of Religious Studies), the Australian National University
(Research School of Philosophy), and the University of Liège (Institute
of Astrophysics). His research interests include Metaphysics (with emphasis
on the nature of causation, of time, of the mind, and of the world's unity),
the Philosophy of Religion (emphasizing neoplatonism and spinozism), and
the Philosophy of Cosmology (particularly the suggestion that there exist
many universes, ours being one of the rare ones in which intelligent living
beings can evolve). He is also is interested in Ethics, particularly the
duty to prevent the extinction of the human race. Analysis of Risks. Probability
Theory. Decision Theory.
Professor Leslie is
the author of several books, including Value and Existence (Basil
Blackwell: 1979), Universes (Routledge, 1989), The End of the
World: the science and ethics of human extinction (Routledge: London
and New York, 1996) and, shortly, Infinite Minds: a philosophical cosmology
(Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 2001). He has also edited Physical Cosmology
and Philosophy (Macmillan, New York, 1990; reprinted as Modern Cosmology
and Philosophy (2000).
He is also the author
of an article that provides a brief and general introduction to his current
major field of interest, "Theology and Cosmology," in the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy.