About
The Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study supports research that is directed toward, or extends inquiry to include, ultimate questions and questions of value, especially as they engage the Catholic intellectual tradition.
The Institute has an open agenda, permitting scholars to pursue outstanding research in all areas. It will, however, have two interrelated emphases intended to help shape discourse and discovery at Notre Dame and within the wider academy.
- First, the Institute encourages fellows to reflect on the broad questions that link multiple areas of inquiry — questions that often escape scholars enmeshed in the everyday and sometimes narrow practices of their own discipline.
- Second, the Institute offers artists, professionals, scholars, and scientists an opportunity to explore the relationship between the descriptive (the world as it is) and the normative (the world as it ought to be).
The Institute provides researchers with the opportunity to engage not only in analysis but also in evaluating what should be done. Fellows are encouraged to include questions of value in their analyses, to examine how their findings might contribute to the advancement and implementation of ideas, and to think through the implications of present behavior for the future of the world. The Institute cultivates collaboration and the contemplative ideal that is an essential factor in both the Catholic intellectual tradition and the progression of scholarship.
The Institute will further its goal of fostering engaging thought on significant issues by hosting a major annual conference. This year’s conference, scheduled for January 2010, will focus on the nature of beauty and various disciplinary and interdisciplinary questions raised about this elusive topic. The conference will include mathematicians, physicists, anthropologists, economists, lawyers, philosophers, theologians, artists, musicologists, literary critics and film scholars from some of the most renowned universities and institutions in the world as presenters and participants. Beauty is one of the three major values — beauty, goodness, and truth — that inspire the Institute.
