In 1928, Miss Edith Zweybruck established the Foerster Lectureship to honor the memory of her sister Agnes A. Foerster and her brother-in-law Constantine E. A. Foerster. Miss Zweybruck requested that lectures be given "on the immortality of the soul or other kindred subjects. Such lecture is not to form a part of the regular college course and shall be delivered by some person especially qualified therefore and especially appointed for the purpose."
Title | Lecturer | Year |
The Soul – Spirit is My Altar | Marta Moreno Vega | 2025 |
The Search for Paradise | Sudipta Kaviraj | 2024 |
On Uncertainty: Wittgenstein: Habits of Thought and Thoughts of Habit | Jane Taylor | 2019 |
Souls in Other Selves, and the Immortality of the Body | Marilyn Strathern | 2018 |
Embodied Souls — Lessons from Neurology | V.S. Ramachandran | 2016 |
Immortality of the Soul – An Ancient Egyptian Invention? | Jan Assmann | 2015 |
A Neanderthal Perspective on Human Origins | Svante Pääbo | 2014 |
Considering Dogs | Alexandra Horowitz | 2013 |
The Quest for Heaven is Local: How Spiritual Experience is Shaped by Social Life | Tanya Luhrmann | 2013 |
Happiness and Ultimate Good | Peter Singer | 2012 |
A Passion for Waiting: Messianism, History, and the Jews | Leon Wieseltier | 2012 |
From Salvation to Spirituality | Susumu Shimazono | 2010 |
Explaining Transformation: Material Miracles and Their Theorists in the Later Middle Ages | Carolyn Walker Bynum | 2009 |
Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics | Talal Asad | 2008 |
God’s Problem and Human Solutions: How the Bible Explains Suffering | Bart Ehrman | 2008 |
The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach | Christof Koch | 2006 |
Equal Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams and the Roots of a Constitutional Tradition | Martha Nussbaum | 2006 |
The Soul of Brutes: A Sixteenth Century Debate | Carlo Ginzburg | 2004 |
Being No One: Consciousness, the Phenomenal Self, and the First-Person Perspective | Thomas Metzinger | 2004 |
Trobriand Rebirth and the Fate of the Soul: An Old Debate Revisited | Gananath Obeyesekere | 2003 |
The Hope of Heaven: A Spiritual Universe | Robert Merrihew Adams | 2002 |
Body and Soul in Plato and Descartes | Sarah Broadie | 2000 |
Composing Life after Death | Jonathan Harvey | 1998 |
The Place of Consciousness | Robert Nozick | 1998 |
Virtue, Deed and Word – Confucian Paths to Immortality | Tu Weiming | 1996 |
Awakenings Revisited | Oliver Sacks | 1994 |
Sacrifice, Surplus and the Soul | Romila Thapar | 1992 |
Heaven Is No Holiday – Eternal Life in the View of the Sufis and of Muhammad Iqbal | Annemarie Schimmel | 1991 |
Physical Theory, Brain Theory, Theories of Everything | Gerald Edelman | 1989 |
Christian Platonism | Henry Chadwick | 1987 |
How to Become Immortal without Really Trying: Taoism and the Nature of Ritual | Kristofer M. Schipper | 1985 |
Ancient Near Eastern Concepts of Life after Death: A Background of the Judeo-Christian Tradition | Wilfred Lambert | 1984 |
The Immortality of the Soul Among North American Indians | Ake Hultkranz | 1983 |
Former Lives, or the Man Who Met the People in His Dream | Wendy O'Flaherty | 1982 |
Personality Post-Mortem: Psychological States Attributed to the Deceased | George Devereux | 1981 |
Mortal Neurons, Immortal Monads | Jerome Y. Lettvin | 1979 |
The Spirituality of Man’s Nature | Elizabeth Anscombe | 1979 |
Ancient Egyptian Ideas on the Reunion of Soul and Body | Erik Hornung | 1978 |
The Soul and the Land of the Dead: South Asian Views | Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf | 1978 |
Reflections on Science and Human Rationality | Stefan Amerdamski | 1976 |
Does Knowledge Grow? | Thomas S. Kuhn | 1976 |
Space as an Image of Time | Rudolf Arnheim | 1975 |
Computers and the Mind | Seymour Papert | 1973 |
The Makropoulos Case | Bernard A. Williams | 1972 |
Participatory Evolution, the Drive of Creation | Charles Birch | 1971 |
The Brain and the Soul | Sir John C. Eccles | 1969 |
The Biology of Dreaming as an Approach to the Mind | Michel Jouvet | 1969 |
Eternal Life and Social Action Now | James A. Pike | 1963 |
Mind Fossils, Human Culture, and Eternity | Loren C. Eiseley | 1962 |
The Meaning of Resurrection | Jacques Courvoisier | 1961 |
Symbols of Eternal Life | Paul J. Tillich, | 1960 |
Matter, Mind, and the Question of Survival | Aldous Huxley | 1960 |
Platonic Trends in Christian Thought and Mysticism | Paul Henry | 1956 |
Immortality | H. J. Paton | 1955 |
Human Personality and the Possibility of Its Survival | C. D. Broad | 1954 |
The Teaching of Immortality in Buddhism | G. P. Malalasekera | 1953 |
Pantheism and Personal Immortality | Radoslav A. Tsanoff | 1951 |
The Hindu View of Eternal Life | T. M. P. Mahadevan | 1949 |
Is a Future Life Possible? | Curt John Ducasse | 1947 |
Immortality and Fulfillment | Edward Lambe Parsons | 1945 |
Imagination and Immortality | Arthur Cushman McGiffert | 1944 |
The Human Soul and the Cosmic Mind | William Pepperell Montague | 1943 |
Immortality: The Relativity of Death | William Ernest Hocking | 1942 |
Earliest Traces of the Belief in Our Civilization | Axel W. Persson | 1941 |
The Immortality of the Soul in Greek Religion and Philosophy | Martin P. Nilsson | 1940 |
The Spiritual Character of Man and Its Relation to the Philosophy of Politics | Fulton J. Sheen | 1938 |
The Belief in Immortality and the Triumph of Christianity | Henri Grégoire | 1938 |
The Hope of Immortality | Douglas Clyde McIntosh | 1937 |
The Experience of Immortality | Harold E. B. Speight | 1936 |
The Premises of Our Faith in Immortality | Willard Learoy Sperry | 1935 |
The Life of the Spirit | Walter Goodnow Everett | 1934 |
The Meaning of Death | Ralph Barton Perry | 1933 |