Science, Philosophy and Belief Conference

June 16-19, 2009
Peking University

In June 2009, the project will hold an exciting four-day conference at Peking University. The conference will include major keynote speakers such as Nobel laureate Bill Phillips, Gerald Gabrielse (Chair of Harvard’s Physics department) and Alvin Plantinga (John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame). This meeting will include presentations by other Chinese and Western scholars.

Conference Director, Dr. Kelly James Clark

The conference is free and open to the public.

The conference is co-sponsored by
The Institute of Foreign Philosophy, Peking University.
Director: Prof. Shang Xinjian
Deputy Director: Prof. Xu Xiangdong

In addition, Kelly James Clark, Michael Murray and Del Ratzsch will
direct an intensive seminar for selected Chinese students the week
prior to the conference.

Further details will be added as the conference approaches.

Conference Speakers

Katherine Blundell, Astrophysicist, is a University Research Fellow of the Royal Society and a Science Research Fellow of St John's College, Oxford University. She is co-author of Concepts in Thermal Physics (Oxford University Press).

Susan P. Bratton is Chair of Environmental Studies at Baylor University. She specializes in environmental ethics and is the author of Six Billion and More: Human Population Regulation and Christian Ethics, and Christianity Wilderness and Wildlife: The  Original Desert Solitaire.

Gerald Gabrielse is George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics, Harvard University. Prof. Gabrielse leads the international ATRAP Collaboration whose goal is accurate laser spectroscopy with trapped antihydrogen atoms. He was awarded the 2002 Davisson-Germer Prize by the American Physical Society "for pioneering work in trapping, cooling, and precision measurements of the properties of matter and antimatter in ion traps."

William Phillips is a leading researcher in ultra-low temperature atomic physics at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Atomic Physics Division. Phillips was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.

Alvin Plantinga is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Warranted Christian Belief, Warrant and Proper Function, God, Freedom & Evil, and The Nature of Necessity.

Eleonore Stump is The Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University. Prof. Stump's many publications include The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, and Aquinas in the series “Arguments of the Philosophers.”

Seminar Directors

Kelly James Clark is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College and Executive Director of the Society of Christian Philosophers. He is author of over fifty articles and author, co-author or editor of over a dozen books including Return to Reason, The Story of Ethics, Philosophers Who Believe, When Faith is Not Enough, 101 Key Philosophical Terms and Their Importance for Theology, Five Views on Apologetics, and Faith, Philosophy and Film.

Michael J. Murray is the Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor in the Humanities and Philosophy at Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster, PA). In addition to a variety of articles in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of religion, he has published Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions (Blackwell, with Eleonore Stump), Reason for the Hope Within (Eerdmans), and has two books forthcoming: Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge, with Michael Rea) and Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering (Oxford).

Del Ratzsch is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI.). His work includes Science and its Limits (InterVarsity), The Battle of Beginnings (InterVarsity), and Nature, Design and Science (in the State University of New York "Philosophy and Biology" series). His work has been translated into a number of languages including Chinese and Korean.

Xu Xiangdong is Professor of Philosophy at Peking University. He got his Ph. D from Columbia University in 2002 under the supervision of Thomas Pogge and Philip Pettit. He is the author of over 45 articles and five books: Liberalism, Social Contract and Political Justification (2004), Skepticism, Knowledge and Justification (2005), Moral Philosophy and Practical Reason (2006), The Self, Others and Morality (2006), and Making Sense of Free Will (2008).