Course presentation
The 19th Summer Bioethics Course will take place at 15:30-18:30 on July 2-3 and 9-10, 2021. Simultaneous translation will be available into English, Italian, and Spanish. The title of the course is “Bioethics and Consciousness: an interdisciplinary and interreligious reflection on an essential dimension of the human person.”
The course is organized by the Faculty of Bioethics in collaboration with the UNESCO Chair in Bioethics and Human Rights established at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum and the European University of Rome.
Description
The course is organized by the Neurobioethics research group, in particular by the subgroup on consciousness, with the participation of all other subgroups and researchers of the group. The theme of consciousness is at the center of contemporary bioethics debates. At the beginning stages of human life, the absence of self-consciousness is invoked to justify depriving the human organism of the status of personhood. At the final stages of human life, it is argued that an apparently irreversible loss of the manifestations of human self-consciousness can justify the harvesting of organs as a “donation” from subjects in gravely compromised states of altered consciousness. Moreover, two tensions are widespread in neuroscientific, philosophical and social contexts. On the one hand, there are attempts at reductionism, whether in the merely neurobiological sense or in a functionalist sense. On the other hand, there have emerged many substitutionary approaches that seek to identify personal self-consciousness with mere digitizable information. Therefore, correct information and formation regarding consciousness is important.
This international summer course in bioethics proposes an interdisciplinary and interreligious study of human consciousness with the aim of understanding the plurality of meanings corresponding to the multi-layered complexity of personal dimensions of which it is composed. The course will offer its participants the chance to acquire the knowledge regarding the following areas: the state of the art of the so-called “science of consciousness” ranging from neuroscience to artificial intelligence and including quantum physics; the medical-clinical and psychiatric-psychological context; the philosophy and anthropology of consciousness; the artistic-aesthetic and theological-spiritual dimension. In this final context, special emphasis will be given to interreligious dialogue about the theme. Finally, the course will give its participants the competencies necessary to discern critically the varied contemporary contexts in which consciousness is invoked in order to evaluate critically clinical protocols, proposed laws, sanitary applications, and the political, economic and social implications of the theme.
Coordinators of the course:
Prof. Alberto Carrara: acarrara@legionaries.org
Prof. Alberto García: agarcia@unescobiochair.org