Laurence Hemming

11-6.30pm | Thursday 16 November 2006
Gresham College, Baranard’s Inn, Holborn, London

Speaker
Laurence Hemming, Dean of Research, Heythrop College, University of London; Keith Ward, Gresham Professor of Divinity and a Fellow of the British Academy; Sir Anthony Kenny, Former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Master of Balliol College, Chairman of the Board of the British Academy; Waldyslaw Strozewski, Professor of Ontology at Jagiellonion University, Krakow

Karol Wojtyla is well known for having been the Bishop of Krakow. It is less known that he was also the Chair of Ethics at Catholic University in Lublin. His second doctoral thesis, on ethics, was published in 1960, and he went on to write The Acting Person, a distinctive blend of Aristotelian, Thomist and phenomenological approaches, in 1969. Only a year before the election of Karol (now Cardinal) Wojtyla as the 26th pope of the Roman Catholic Church he gave a talk at a university in Milan called ‘The Problem of Creating Culture through Human Praxis’. In 1978 it was a formidable philosophical voice and not as a leading Church official that Wojtyla was best known. In this one-day conference in collaboration with Gresham College, we will discuss John Paul II philosophical legacy.