Religion and the Body: Kevin Schilbrack to Deliver the 2025 Paulson Lectures in Tartu

4.11.2025 – 16:15-17:45 Ülikooli 18-228

In the first lecture, Schilbrack draws on tools developed in phenomenology of embodiment to outline how religious practices train their participants to be able to see "affordances", that is, value-laden opportunities in their environment. Affordances emerge in the relationship between entities, and so the values they carry are not subjective or mental, but are instead properties that a trained person can discover in their environment. A benefit of this approach is that it locates not only facts but also values – including religious values – within a naturalistic account of the world.

5.11.2025 – 16:15-17:45 Ülikooli 18-228

In the first talk, Schilbrack outlined the idea of affordances and the implication that religious values can be discovered as objective facts in the material world. In this second talk, he connects the idea of affordances to religious forms of life and illustrates it with examples drawn from Buddhist, Christian, and Confucian practices. This approach treats religious forms of life as offering opportunities for embodied training. Given this focus on transformation through practice, one should not consider religious practitioners simply as generic "insiders" but instead should see them as seeking and achieving different levels of skill – for example, novice, competent, or expert – at their religious practices. However, if religions train their members to see the world in new ways, this raises an important and difficult epistemological question that he will address: how can scholars understand the world of someone who is expert in a practice if the scholar is not even a novice?

6.11.2025 – 16:15-17:45 Ülikooli 18-228

In his second talk, Schilbrack developed the idea that religious forms of life offer opportunities for training that enables participants to discover values in the world they otherwise could not see. In this final lecture, he wants to develop the idea that this religious training can be a form of niche construction. "Niche construction" refers to the fact that some animals do not simply accept the natural environment as they find it but also transform it to make it a more congenial home – as, for example, when beavers build dams. Human animals also transform their environments, though, unlike beavers, human creative powers are not fully determined by human instincts and the cultural niches they create therefore vary widely. In this way, human cultures, including religious cultures, are rooted in human biology as human animals seek ways to flourish. In this closing talk, Schilbrack explores how flourishing might provide a criterion not only for understanding but also for evaluating religious practices across cultures.

7.11.2025 – 14:15-15:45 Ülikooli 18-230

NB! Limited spots. Only with pre-registration! Contact: [email protected]

The seminar focuses on the matter of the trans-cultural applicability of general concepts such as religion in the study of religion. In dialogue with required readings the seminar will focus on discussing different possibilities and perspectives concerning this issue with particular focus on some competing ideas in this discussion. On the one hand, it has been proposed that general concepts should be understood as useful tools that do not necessarily correspond to anything specific in the world, on the other hand others have emphasize the necessity of a realist position that insists on a more direct relationship between the concepts and the phenomena.