Professor Eric Dayton

Food, its preparation and consumption, plays a central role in human life. It is both a cultural achievement and a human necessity; it is a central source of pleasure, necessary for health, and undergirds diverse forms of human cultural flowering. It also disappears into the ordinary everydayness of living, blinding us to its significance for living well. I will attempt to bring that significance into view through philosophical illumination.

Professor Heidi Epstein,
Department of Religious Studies, St. Thomas More College

This talk explores the creative tensions, problems and opportunities endemic to using human language – philosophical and scriptural – to name and conceptualize God. Particular attention will be devoted to the socio-cultural repercussions that issue from literalist approaches to religious language, as evidenced, for example, in fundamentalist attitudes toward women, warfare and the environment.

Professor Peter Alward
Department of Philosophy, University of Lethbridge

Professor Emer O'Hagan

In Canada informed consent to treatment is both a legal requirement and professional standard governing clinical encounters between health care professionals and patients. Clinical encounters involve the disclosure of risks, benefits and any alternatives to the proposed test or treatment. In my presentation I will argue that the Breast Cancer Screening Program fails to include the relevant information that would allow women to provide truly informed consent for this test.