Dr Tracy Wietecha offers a keynote lecture on Becoming Human in the age of AI through the theology of St Albert the Great

Dr Tracy Wietecha reflects on what is special about humans by considering the work of Albert the Great. Albert thinks we have a duty to improve ourselves both intellectually and morally (through learning virtues). She examines his path of perfection as it appears in his mature ethical work. How do we human learns to desire rightly, to act well, and to judge particulars in the changing circumstances of life?

This lecture is a joint partnership between The Albertus Institute and the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. Registration is required FOR THE DRINKS RECEPTION ONLY, the lecture is unticketed.

Tracy Wietecha conducts research at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin where she works on medieval theology and philosophy and the history of premodern science. She completed her dissertation in philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich in 2021 on the ethical commentaries of the thirteenth-century Dominican Albert the Great. She was the 2020 Lorenz Bausch Fellow at the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in Halle, Germany and has taught at Bard College Berlin, Technical University Berlin, and Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. She also holds a MA in philosophy from Marquette University (Milwaukee, WI USA) and a MA in theology from Sacred Heart Major Seminary (Detroit, MI USA).

Her research brings together the history of philosophy with the history of science to address the role of observation and judgement in forming the human being as a knower and virtuous person. She has published on Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great, Albert’s Mystical Theology, and on early modern natural history. Her work on the contemplation of God and nature in relation to the American agave plant was awarded first prize in the British Royal Society Notes and RecordsEarly Career Researcher Essay Contest. Her monograph Albert the Great on Becoming Good: A Peripatetic Ethics is in press with Brepols.

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