Please join us for a memorable Closing Night of this year’s Beer Culture Summit and the very first major public event at the new Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Chicago.
The evening begins with a unique and fascinating lecture from Dr. Edward Slingerland who joins us from the East Coast via Zoom. The exciting night concludes with a very special announcement from the Chicago Brewseum.
$25 ticket includes lecture, two beers, small bites, a chance to explore new Guinness Open Gate Brewery Chicago, a very special announcement, and a darn good time! Lecture begins promptly at 6:30pm CST. This event is 21 and over.
Big thank you to Guinness Open Gate Brewery for sponsoring this event and the entirety of the Beer Culture Summit.
How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way To Civilization
Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, this talk will argue that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. Our desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We would not have civilization without intoxication. Beer, as the oldest documented intoxicant, the most widespread and safest form of alcoholic beverage, plays a particularly central role in this story.
Edward Slingerland is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he also holds appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Asian Studies. Educated at Princeton, Stanford and UC Berkeley, he has taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the University of Southern California and the University of British Columbia.
Dr. Slingerland is an expert on early Chinese thought, comparative religion and cognitive science of religion, big data approaches to cultural analysis, cognitive linguistics, digital humanities and humanities-science integration. He is the recipient of several book, research innovation and teaching awards. Dr. Slingerland’s broad research goals involve exploring the potential of novel digital humanities techniques, introducing more psychological realism and evolutionary perspectives to cultural studies and philosophy, and getting scientists to understand the importance and value of humanistic expertise—especially when it comes to research areas such as literature, ethics or religion.