Treasure Seminar, Trinity Term, 2019 Cathy Cantwell Tuesday 30th April, Wolfson College Seminar Room 3, 5.pm - 7pm, followed by dinner at Wolfson Title: The Phurpa Consecrations Practice (byin rlabs phur pa'i sgrub pa) texts from the Eightfold Buddha Word, Embodying the Sugatas (bka' brgyad bde gshegs 'dus pa), revealed by Nyang ral Nyi ma ’od zer (1124-1192), and their connections with the Transmitted Textual Traditions

Treasure Seminar, Trinity Term, 2019 Robert Mayer Tuesday 7th May, Wolfson College Seminar Room 3, 5.pm - 7pm, followed by dinner at Wolfson Title: Some early tantric rituals for recovering hidden Treasures (nidhi, gter), as presented in Imperial-period Tibetan translations, and also in some surviving Sanskrit mss., and their reception in Tibet.

Anna Sehnalova Tuesday 21st May Seminar Room 3, 5.pm - 7pm, followed by dinner at Wolfson Title: Mountain Deities and Their Treasures: Possible Indigenous Origins of the Tibetan gTer ma tradition

Wolfson College Seminar Room 3, 15:00 - 17:00

Title: Boons from Bones: Dead Ancestors and Buried Treasure in Eastern Tibet  

In 2009, Elinor Olstrom became – and remains – the only woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, awarded for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons. Ten years on, we revisit her groundbreaking book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts, yet solutions remain elusive. Offering a critique of the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Dr Ostrom explores different ways – both successful and unsuccessful – of governing the commons. She seeks solutions to the “Tragedy of the Commons”, analysing both the prisoners’ dilemma and innovative use of game theory to provide alternatives to narrow models of rational choice.

Unities: Science/Religion/Interfaith

This will be a series of facilitated discussions about science, religion and interfaith covering various ethical fields. The idea is to explore how the three strands contribute to ethical issues and how universities participate in tikkun olam = repairing the world.

This lecture, part of the Khalili Research Centre weekly seminars, is about the early history of the Qur'an. By confronting some of the earliest extant Qur'an manuscripts with Arabic textual sources, it sheds new light on the process of canonisation of the Qur'anic text and the probable existence of non-'Uthmanic codices in the early Islamic period.

Unities: Science/Religion/Interfaith

This will be a series of facilitated discussions about science, religion and interfaith covering various ethical fields. The idea is to explore how the three strands contribute to ethical issues and how universities participate in tikkun olam = repairing the world. 

There’s little doubt that most humans today are better off than their forebears. The poorest of humanity, McCloskey shows, will soon be joining the comparative riches of Japan and Sweden and Botswana. Why? Most economists — from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty — say the Great Enrichment since 1800 came from accumulated capital. McCloskey disagrees, fiercely. “Our riches,” she argues, “were made not by piling brick on brick, bank balance on bank balance, but by piling idea on idea.” Capital was necessary, but it was ideas, not matter, that drove “trade-tested betterment.” Nor were institutions the drivers. The World Bank orthodoxy of “add institutions and stir” doesn’t work, and didn’t. McCloskey builds a powerful case for the initiating role of ideas — ideas for electric motors and free elections, of course, but more deeply the bizarre and liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for ordinary folk.

A panel discussion of Niall Ferguson's bestelling book. The renowned historian Niall Ferguson asks: What if everything we thought we knew about history was wrong? What if our conception of history as hierarchical - that of popes, presidents, and prime ministers - is simply because they create the historical archives? The 21st century has been hailed as the Networked Age. But in The Square and the Tower Niall Ferguson argues that social networks are nothing new. From the printers and preachers who made the Reformation to the freemasons who led the American Revolution, it was the networkers who disrupted the old order of popes and kings. Far from being novel, our era is the Second Networked Age, with the computer in the role of the printing press. Once we understand this, both the past, and the future, look very different indeed.