Max More will replace Natasha Vita-More as a keynote speaker at the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010. Below is more information about each of the exciting keynote speakers. Register for the conference today!
Terryl Givens
Terryl L. Givens was born in upstate New York, raised in the American southwest, and did his undergraduate and graduate work in Comparative Literature (Ph.D. UNC Chapel Hill, 1988), working with Greek, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and English languages and literatures. As Professor of Literature and Religion, and the James A. Bostwick Professor of English at the University of Richmond, he teaches courses in Romanticism, nineteenth-century cultural studies, and the Bible and Literature. He has published in literary theory, British and European Romanticism, Mormon studies, and intellectual history.
Dr. Givens has authored several books, including The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (Oxford 1997); By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (Oxford 2003); People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture (Oxford 2007); The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2009); and When Souls had Wings: Pre-Mortal Life in Western Thought (2010). Current projects include a biography of Parley P. Pratt (with Matt Grow, to be published by Oxford in 2011), a sourcebook of Mormonism in America (with Reid Neilson, to be published by Columbia in 2011), a history of Mormon theology, and a study of the idea of human perfectibilty in the Western tradition. He lives in Montpelier, Virginia.
James Hughes
James Hughes Ph.D., the Executive Director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, is a bioethicist and sociologist at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut where he teaches health policy and serves as Interim Director of Institutional Research and Planning. He holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago, where he also taught bioethics at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Dr. Hughes is author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future , and is working on a second book tentatively titled Cyborg Buddha. Since 1999 he has produced a syndicated weekly radio program, Changesurfer Radio.
He is a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of Humanity+, the Neuroethics Society, the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities and the Working Group on Ethics and Technology at Yale University. Dr. Hughes speaks on medical ethics, health care policy and future studies worldwide, and appears often on radio and television.
Max More
Max More, PhD, is a strategic philosopher widely recognized for his thinking on the philosophical and cultural implications of emerging technologies. Max’s contributions include founding the philosophy of transhumanism, authoring the transhumanist philosophy of extropy, and co-founding Extropy magazine and Extropy Institute, an organization crucial in building the transhumanist movement since 1988.
Max is been concerned that our escalating technological capabilities are racing far ahead of our standard ways of thinking about future possibilities. Through a highly interdisciplinary approach drawing on philosophy, economics, cognitive and social psychology, and management theory, Max developed a distinctive approach known as the “Proactionary Principle” a tool for making smarter decisions about advanced technologies by minimizing the dangers of progress and maximizing the benefits.
Max has a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from St. Anne’s College, Oxford University (1984-87). He was awarded a Dean’s Fellowship in Philosophy in 1987 by the University of Southern California and received his PhD in Philosophy from USC in 1995.