PUBLIC LECTURE: Resurrecting the Passions: Lessons from the History of Passion and Emotion

In this lecture bioethicist Professor Louis Charland will examine medical highlights of the history of passion and emotion and then consider several arguments why the passions must be reinstated in Western psychiatry. The passions, it turns out, are not only central constituents of any adequate theory of long-term motivation, but also a precious example of why it is so important to resist the upward reductionist intellectualist pressures of our current, predominantly cognitive, psychiatric culture.

This lecture is presented by the Institute of Advanced Studies at UWA and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion.

Louis Charland is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy, a joint appointment with the Faculty of Health Sciences and a cross appointment in the Department of Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, at the University of Western Ontario. Professor Charland was previously a member of the Biomedical Ethics Unit and the Clinical Trials Research Group in the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University, Montreal. While at McGill, he taught in the Master’s Specialisation Program in Bioethics and served on the Research Ethics Board of the Douglas Psychiatric Hospital. Prior to this, he taught philosophy and bioethics at the University of Toronto, where he served as a Research Associate at the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics. He also worked as bioethicist at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children.

Professor Charland has also worked as a research and program evaluation consultant for the Government of Ontario’s Premier’s Council on Health Strategy, a “think-tank” created to plan for the future of healthcare in Ontario.

This lecture is free, no RSVP required.