We are delighted to announce a collaborative initiative between the University of Cambridge's students of theology and the Institut Catholique de Toulouse's students of philosophy.

Over the past years, our students have discovered mutual enthusiasms, and we aim to strengthen these warm relations further. In this spirit, we are organising two 'journées d'étude', one in Cambridge and one in Toulouse, centred on short postgraduate-student papers. The focus of these study days will be on the theme of artistic creation and inspiration.

The Cambridge Study Day, to be held on 15 February at the Faculty of Divinity, is open to all UK-based postgraduate students, who are invited to submit paper proposals [see details at the bottom of this page].

Keynote papers will be delivered by Professor Andrea Bellantone (ICT) and Professor Catherine Pickstock (Cambridge).

Creation is a commonplace concept, used (and abused) by numerous disciplines. Traditionally, Christian theology, following Jewish sources but also retooling the metaphysical categories of Greek thought, attributed creation uniquely to God, who made the world ex nihilo. It is only in the modern period that human beings have come to understand their own acts of making as ‘creative’, presenting them variously as a ‘participation’ in the divine creatio continuo or as a competitive bid for sovereignty and self-actualisation against the pretence of a divinely predetermined order. Indeed, the artist’s experience of creation is often treated, explicitly or not, as the only remaining vehicle of true transcendence, a kind of earthly divinity ‘after the death of God’. As such, the moment of artistic creation, as well as its reception and repetition in the audience’s encounter with the work, offers a rare site where phenomenological questions–about the essence of manifestation, say, or the lived experience of ‘inspiration’--open onto metaphysical questions–about the extent to which the artist, to quote R.P. Blackmur, ‘adds to the stock of available reality’-- and vice versa. The impetus for these journées d’études is the conviction that both phenomenological and metaphysically realist approaches can mutually enrich our understanding of the emergence, through the artistic process, of something where there once was nothing.

We welcome proposals for papers that investigate various aspects of artistic creation and inspiration, particularly those with philosophical and theological underpinnings.

While not exhaustive, we encourage contributors to address the following issues: