David Bentley Hart, NDIAS Fellow, Explores "Mind, Soul, World: Consciousness in Nature"
David Bentley Hart
3.43
8 March 2017
18 October 2025
David Bentley Hart, 2017 Director's Fellow and 2015-2016 Templeton Fellow at the NDIAS, discusses his research project, "Mind, Soul, World: Consciousness in Nature," around which a conference was held on March 14 & 15, 2016.
In this conference, Professor David Hart, in dialogue with a multitude of eminent scholars, explored the mystery of consciousness (the entirety of mental life), posed critical questions such as the place of nature within mind, and probed more traditional assumptions about the physicalist emergentist accounts of the origins of consciousness. Those attending also examined the idea that careful reflection on the nature of consciousness yields an understanding of consciousness to which certain classical understandings of the soul (Western and Eastern) may prove far better suited than more materialist reductionist approaches.
