Introduction


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.
 

William L. Vanderburgh, who is Assistant Professor at Wichita State University, Kansas. He completed his Ph.D., in Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario, with a dissertation on "Dark Matters in Contemporary Astrophysics: Problems in Evidential Reasoning." His principal areas of interest are Philosophy of Science, History and Philosophy of Astronomy and Cosmology (especially early modern and twentieth century)
 
James Gerrie, who teaches Philosophy at the University of Guelph. He completed his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Guelph, with a dissertation on "Some Ethical and Public Policy Implications of Technological Dependency With Reference to the Works of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and George Grant." He is also interested in Logic and issues in the philosophy of religion

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.