GENERATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY,
RELIGIONS, AND SCIENCES
14th Annual Generative Anthropology Summer Conference
Bar-Ilan University, Israel
JUNE 14-16, 2021
The conference program is now available on the website. Click here.
To download the PDF file of the program, click here.
Generative Anthropology (GA) founded by Eric Gans is a transformative science of the human, inquiring into culture, society, politics, and the arts. Since GA begins with a hypothesis about the origin of cultural representation, Eric Gans calls it “originary thinking.” GA reframes the relation between science and religion by treating religion as a primary source of anthropological insight, and therefore a source of scientific concepts and methods.
The 14th annual international conference of the Generative Anthropology Society will focus on religions and piety, faiths and beliefs, their study and their relationships with the sciences, including the human sciences, scientific epistemologies, philosophy and the sociology of science.
We are especially interested in discussing the following subjects in relation to GA:
The originary hypothesis and practices of proof, evidence, belief, and faith;
The relationships between religion and science and between science and metaphysics;
The ethics of/in religions and sciences;
Contemporary philosophies, theologies, and mysticisms;
Origination and representations of religious and scientific ideas in arts, popular culture, and political discourse;
The sociology of science and religion;
The essence and emergence of scientific representation, ethos, community, and symbols;
Originary thinking and the foundations of reason, and of the concepts of causality, contingency and randomness;
Biological and cultural origins of consciousness;
Humanistic anthropology of materiality, ecology, and the body.
In the wake of the Covid-19 situation, the conference will take place online.
Since this conference, at least virtually, takes place in Israel, papers dealing with the three Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – or monotheism in general would be especially welcome. Proposals are also welcome across the range of themes within the wide scope of GA and cultural and philosophical anthropology, such as the origins of language, symbols, morality, rituals and customs, literature and mythology, sociology and anthropology of verbal and nonverbal communication, and other related themes.
Download the Call for Papers: Call for Papers.pdf
Keynote speaker: Prof. Menachem Fisch
Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science, and Director of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies at Tel Aviv University, and Senior Fellow of the Goethe University Frankfurt's Forschungskolleg Humanwisseschaften, Bad Homburg.
Keynote speaker: Prof. Eric Gans
Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the UCLA Department of French & Francophone Studies, literary scholar, philosopher of language, and cultural anthropologist. The founder of Generative Anthropology.
Sessions of the conference, except for the two plenary lectures mentioned above, will be arranged in three formats:
1. Panel: one-hour conversation of two or three participants around a certain question; speakers will be required to submit their papers two weeks before the conference;
2. TED forum: one-and-half hour session of three lectures of 10 minutes each one, followed by discussion by the speakers and the audience.
3. One-hour session: two presentations, 20 minutes each.
Send proposals to Prof. Roman Katsman: roman.katsman@biu.ac.il. Please indicate which of the three formats you would prefer. Proposers will be notified of acceptance promptly.
Submit any time before: April 30, 2021.
See our Student Award (Approx. $USD 500): Student award
To pay GASC membership and/or conference participation fees, click here.