Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study: Call for Fellows

Notre Dame's new Institute for Advanced Study announces its inaugural annual conference, on "Beauty", to be held on Jan. 21-23, 2010, here.  Note also the "call for Fellows."  I hope a number of Catholic legal scholars will apply!  Here's some info on the IAS:

Contemporary scholarship has advanced our understanding of specific disciplinary questions. But the need remains to ask ultimate questions, to reflect morally, and to integrate fact and value. The Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS) favors research that extends beyond analyzing particular problems to the examination of larger, frequently ethical questions that modern academic disciplines often do not explicitly address. Such questions can be addressed wherever the human intellect flourishes. But a Catholic university that aspires to integrate the normative and the descriptive and to foster the unity of knowledge across disciplines is duty bound to nurture that project.

The NDIAS focuses on three major topics: Traditions — Sciences — Modernities. The modern world has been created by using science to reshape traditional life-worlds, often dominated by religious beliefs. Whereas ancient science was mostly disconnected from technology, the essence of modernity is the combination of science, technology, and capitalism. Any understanding of the formative categories of traditions, sciences, and modernities must recognize the pluralism within each of them. Just as different conceptions of modernity and of science compete with one another, so the traditions that have informed our current understanding are diverse.

The NDIAS welcomes scholars who, in addition to pursuing specific disciplinary questions, also seek to integrate into their research overarching questions, such as: What different types of modernities have arisen in the last centuries? How do these competing modernities use science and engineering in varying ways? How do these modernities relate to the traditions of the pre-modern world? In addition, investigations into the moral dimensions of the world are welcome, including questions such as: What in the process of modernization is morally justified, even obligatory, and what is not? Can we envisage a modernity that is able to maintain the obvious advantages of scientific modernity, such as increased life-expectancy, without having to pay the price, such as increased environmental destruction? What must we change in order to help us bridge the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be?

At the NDIAS these and related questions, including their broad reach and moral import, are based in a vision of Catholicism that full-heartedly accepts the basic ideas of modernity as a legitimate step in the history of humankind, while at the same time embracing a moral interpretation of the world. Interdisciplinary and integrative research in the twenty-first century can find inspiration in the search for the unity of knowledge characteristic of Catholic thinkers and writers as well as of other thinkers — often pre-modern — even as this research seeks to take account of the diversity of contemporary sciences and concepts of modernity.