Invited by Dr. Georg Gasser, on March 25th, Dr. Juan F. Franck delivered a lecture at the University of Innsbruck titled “Thomas Nagel, Rationality, and Going Beyond Nature.”

The presentation focused on the problem of philosophical naturalism in its recent version as presented by Nagel. According to Nagel, materialistic reductionism is not as central to the naturalistic program as its rejection of theism, so the failure of materialism would not necessarily require completely abandoning the naturalistic framework. Therefore, an alternative proposal to naturalism must take both aspects into account.

In December of last year, Dr. Gasser visited the Institute of Philosophy and also spoke on «The Naturalization of Man? Prospects and Pitfalls .” Both visits have been highly fruitful in the context of potential future academic collaboration.