BIRTHA Debate

The 2010 Fifth Annual BIRTHA Debate

Taking place on Wednesday 28th April 2010, 2.00pm - 4.00pm, Lecture Theatre 2,  11 Woodland Road

'Should "impact" be a factor in judging academic research?'

Speakers include:

Simon Jones (Drama, UoB)
James Ladyman (Philosophy, UoB)
Helen Taylor (English, University of Exeter)
Neal Farwell (Music, UoB)
John Steeds (Physics, UoB)

Tea, coffee and cake to be served following the event.

The 2009 Fourth Annual BIRTHA Debate

Taking place on Wednesday, 29 April 2009, 2.00pm – 4.00pm Lecture Theatre 1, 43 Woodland Road

The 4th Annual BIRTHA Debate will consist of a debate and round-table discussion around the theme:

Interdisciplinarity – Why? What? How?

Followed by tea/coffee & cakes in the Coffee Room, 43 Woodland Road.

Programme:

Speakers:

Followed by:

Please inform BIRTHA Administrator Sam Barlow if you wish to attend: Sam.Barlow@bristol.ac.uk

 

 

The 2008 Third Annual BIRTHA Debate

A summary of the Debate has been recorded by Hannah Johnson, University Press Officer, for University Research News.


The Debate will take place on Wednesday, 30 April 2008 from **1.30pm to 3.30pm** in Lecture Theatre 1, 43 Woodland Road.   Followed by tea/coffee and cakes.

The format of the Debate has been changed and will now be in the form of a round-table discussion and debate around the question: "What use to a troubled world is the work of a Faculty of Arts?"

Four to five speakers will be invited to address this question (10-15 minutes for each speaker), with discussion and interventions to follow from the floor, and, by way of conclusion, a response from Professor Robert Fowler, Dean, Faculty of Arts & Henry Overton Wills Professor of Greek. 

Speakers:

 

Please inform Debra Squires if you will be attending:
D.J.Blackmore-Squires@bristol.ac.uk

** Please Note earlier start time**

The 2007 Second Annual BIRTHA Debate

Following the success of last year's debate, the second BIRTHA debate will
take place on Wednesday 2 May from 2-4 pm in LT1, 3-5 Woodland Rd (behind
the Faculty of Arts offices). It will be followed by tea/coffee and cakes.

The motion for the debate will be:

"This house believes that the dominance of English as a global language can
only strengthen Britain's research standing in the arts and humanities"

The motion will be proposed by a team organised by David Punter, and
opposed by one organised by Mike Freeman. Each team will have three
speakers. There will then be an opportunity for speakers from the floor to
present their own views.

The subject for debate is a topical one of general interest to the arts and
humanities, and comes in the wake of the report of the Dearing languages
review published on Monday 12 March

(http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/_doc/11124/LanguageReview.pdf).

Do you believe that our global linguistic dominance is our most valuable
asset, or our greatest blind spot as international researchers? Is English
now the universal currency of research and scholarship, or is the decline
of foreign languages affecting the standard of research across the board?
Come and say what you think!

Read more

PLEASE INFORM SAM BARLOW IF YOU WILL BE ATTENDING
Sam.Barlow@bristol.ac.uk

The first BIRTHA Debate took place on 26th April 2006.

The motion for the debate was:

'Realism is the best model for understanding and research in the  Humanities'.

Proposed by Professor Charles Martindale (Classics & Ancient History):

In his three great Critiques Immanuel Kant subjects to rigorous analysis the extent, and limitations, of what we, as human beings, can be said to know; in the event he opposes both excessive scepticism and excessive claims to knowledge. Our question is about what kind of knowledge is available to us in our encounters with the texts of the past, and in particular those texts traditionally designated works of art. I would argue that the reception theory, or more properly the reception aesthetic, of the critics of the Constance school (led by Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser) provides us with a better model than the various forms of positivism which persist (despite frequent claims to the contrary) in the contemporary academy. We cannot know ‘the past-as-it-really-was’ any more than, in Kant’s account, we can know ‘the thing-in-itself’. This is because any textual encounter involves a dialogue between a ‘text’ and a ‘reader’ and what Hans-Georg Gadamer  (whose version of hermeneutics had a major influence on reception theory) called a ‘fusion of horizons’. A reading today can never merely replicate a past reading, though it may be informed by it.  Reception theory stresses the active participation of readers in a two-way process, backwards as well as forwards, in which the present and past are constantly in dialogue with each other; thus when texts are reread in new situations, they have new meanings. The distinction between a past text ‘in itself’ and the way it has been received and understood in later centuries is thereby blurred, or even dissolved. Each reading takes place within history, and there can be no final reading, since that would imply we have come to the end of history; as the philosopher Arthur Danto puts it, ‘our knowledge of the past is limited by our knowledge (or ignorance) of the future’. Following Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ and Gadamer’s dialectical approach, Jauss breaks down the barrier between the art object and the perceiving subject: the reader experiences ‘self-enjoyment in the enjoyment of something else’.

Proposed by Professor Alexander Bird (Philosophy):


Realism is the philosophy that says that a properly constituted academic enquiry is one that concerns a subject matter that exists largely independently of the way we think it is, and which aims at producing views concerning that subject matter that are true or approximately so. Realism contrasts with scepticism, which says that we cannot know about the relevant subject matter however hard we try, and with anti-realisms of various kinds, such as constructivism, that say that our subject matter is not mind-independent but is wholly or partially constituted by our engagement with it.

Realism is applicable to the physical sciences, to the human and social sciences, and also to the humanities.  In each case we seek evidence and from that evidence we aim to draw inferences about the subject matter.  In all fields of enquiry, facts about the enquirer can contaminate the evidence or the process of reasoning from it.  Careful scholarship is a matter of trying to minimize that contamination.  For example, in the physical sciences, in psychology, and in sociology, the very act of measurement can affect what we are attempting to measure.  We thus either try to design our experiments such that this effect is minimized, or we try to estimate the size of the effect so that we may compensate for it when making inferences from the measurements.

Historians face similar problems, especially when dealing with texts.  Almost all verbal communication depends on features of the author’s and intended audience’s context, and in particular it depends on shared tacit assumptions.  Thus a reader of a text from an alien culture faces the double obstacle of first relieving herself of her own unconscious assumptions and secondly of retrieving the hidden assumptions shared in the culture under investigation.  But such obstacles, like those in other fields of inquiry, are not inevitably insurmountable. Careful scholarship including immersion in as much material from the target culture as possible can achieve a minimization of the impact of the scholar’s modern context on what she reads. 

In summary, according to realism intellectual rigour and honesty in the majority of academic disciplines amount to the same thing:  doing one’s damnedest with whatever evidence one can bring to bear to uncover the facts as they really are, uncontaminated by our own biases and perspectives.  It is the view that accords proper respect for the truth, and suitable humility as regards our role in revealing that truth rather than as forgers of it.