Zen Neoplatonism and the Nature of Reality with John Vervaeke
Anagoge Podcast
John Vervaeke returns to the podcast 5 years later to argue that the modern war between science and religion was always a mistake. A cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, he makes the case that his own field needs religious studies: the first generation of the cognitive science of religion tried to explain religion away, smuggling in an unexamined naturalism and treating believers as defective. Vervaeke reframes religion not as a set of beliefs about a supernatural object but as a comprehensive orientation to meaning that the sciences themselves quietly presuppose. The...
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Affordances, Embodiment & the Hard Problem with Julian Kiverstein
Anagoge Podcast
Most people take it for granted that consciousness is the one thing science cannot explain. Julian Kiverstein thinks the problem has been set up backwards from the start. Rather than beginning with dead, inert matter and asking how it could ever give rise to experience, he inverts the question: start from lived experience, which is where phenomenology begins, and then ask how the physical world fits inside it. From that single move he rebuilds the story of how mind emerges from life, and argues the notorious "hard problem" looks far less intractable once you stop trying to squeeze...
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Edith Stein, Empathy & the Loss of Wonder with Allister Lee
Anagoge Podcast
The danger of AI, Allister Lee argues, is not that it lies to you but that it flatters you. A PhD candidate at the University of Exeter, Allister applies the phenomenology of Edith Stein to the failures of chatbots, coining "sycophantasy" for the way AI offers the form of empathy while lacking its substance: real otherness, real friction, real resistance. Without an "other" who can push back, recursive self-reflection becomes a closed loop that slides toward what the literature calls AI psychosis. But Allister resists pure pessimism. AI is a "negative tool," a photographic negative that...
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Enactivism, Buddhist Epistemology & the Cosmic Play with Hüseyin Beyköylü
Anagoge Podcast
Hüseyin Beyköylü left medicine for cognitive science after an LSD experience, and five years later he's arguing that mainstream psychology and neuroscience are built on assumptions that systematically miss what matters most about the mind. This is a dense, careful conversation about epistemology, metaphysics, and why randomized controlled trials can't capture human transformation. We get into the entropy-fluency hypothesis, how destabilization and reorganization cycle through every scale from insight to mystical experience, and why false fluency (the smoothness of a conspiracy theory, the...
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Psychedelic Realism, Platonism & The Ground of Being with Danny Forde
Anagoge Podcast
Most philosophical work on psychedelics either reduces the experience to brain states or floats off into vague mysticism. Danny Forde carves a third path. He argues that psychedelics strip away the ego's narrative overlay and give you direct contact with reality as it actually is. The case is built on realist phenomenology, anti-psychologism, and a sober Platonism that treats essences as real but not otherworldly. The episode is a sustained, sometimes contentious dialogue about whether that claim holds up: whether perception can ever be "raw," whether the minimal self really persists...
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God and Technology with Heidi Campbell
Anagoge Podcast
Can technology save us? That question has been asked since the Industrial Revolution, and Heidi Campbell has spent 30 years studying how religious communities keep answering it. In this conversation, she walks through her Religious Social Shaping of Technology framework, showing that even the most conservative groups do not reject technology outright but filter it through their core values and authority structures. From the kosher cell phone in Israel to Zoom communion during the pandemic, the research reveals a consistent pattern that most popular narratives get wrong. The conversation then...
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The Orthodox Vision of Beauty with Timothy Patitasas
Anagoge Podcast
Timothy Patitsas argues that Western ethics has the order of the transcendentals backwards. Truth and goodness come first in most traditions. But Patitsas, drawing from Greek Orthodox theology, argues that beauty must come first. Not beauty as aesthetics, but beauty as the force that draws you toward God, toward wholeness, and toward a life worth living. In this conversation, we work through what that actually means: how liturgy functions as a structuring force analogous to high-reliability organizations like aircraft carriers, why asceticism follows naturally from eros rather than opposing...
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The Timaeus, Beauty and Tradition with Piero Boitani
Anagoge Podcast
How much of what you read are you actually missing? In this in person conversation recorded in Rome (full video on YouTube), comparative literature scholar Piero Boitani makes the case that most of us are functionally illiterate when it comes to the Western canon, not because we lack access to the texts, but because we lack the layered knowledge required to read them. He demonstrates this with a single word in Tolstoy that links The Death of Ivan Ilyich to Christ's crucifixion through Tolstoy's own Gospel translation, a connection invisible without Russian, Greek, and biblical literacy working...
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The Science & Spirituality of Psychedelics with Michiel van Elk
Anagoge Podcast
This is a in-person recorded podcast. The video is available on YouTube. Michiel van Elk is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Leiden University and head of the PRiSM Lab, where he studies the cognitive neuroscience of religion and psychedelic experiences. In this episode, we take a sober look at the current state of psychedelic science, moving beyond the cultural evangelism and media hype. Michiel critiques the biomedical model of psychedelic therapy, discusses the disappointing effect sizes in recent clinical trials, and highlights methodological issues like "breaking blind"...
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Platonism, Mysticism & Mysteries with Arthur Versluis
Anagoge Podcast
Arthur Versluis is the author of Platonic Mysticism: Contemplative Science, Philosophy, Literature, and Art and a Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. His work bridges the gap between rigorous scholarship and the experiential reality of spiritual traditions. We examine the transformative power of art and its ability to mediate between the material and the transcendent. Versluis highlights the Hudson River School and the concept of "Luminism," explaining how the visual representation of light in nature mirrors the internal experience of mystical illumination....
info_outlineJohn Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading and an Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. Renowned for his work on Descartes, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of religion, he has authored over thirty books, including The Spiritual Dimension, Why Believe?, and Philosophy of Religion: Towards a More Humane Approach. His scholarship bridges analytic rigor with a deep concern for the emotional and spiritual dimensions of human life.
His latest book is In Search of the Soul: A Philosophical Essay:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174426/in-search-of-the-soul
In this episode, we explore Cottingham's call for a more 'humane' philosophy of religion—one that acknowledges the roles of emotion, ritual, and embodied practice in shaping belief. He critiques the overly abstract methods of contemporary philosophy and argues that genuine understanding of the sacred requires engaging the full range of human experience. We discuss how rituals and worship practices can be seen not merely as symbolic acts but as vital expressions of our search for meaning and connection.
We also cover the interplay between science and spirituality, examining how a scientific worldview can either harm or coexist with a sense of the transcendent. Cottingham shares insights on the human longing for the good and how this desire points beyond material explanations, inviting a reevaluation of the role of religion in modern life.
Timestamps:
0:00:00 - Introduction
0:02:59 - Cottingham's Philosophical Journey & "Humane Perspective"
0:06:39 - Philosophy's Accessibility & Bridging the Gap for Non-Specialists
0:12:38 - The Starting Points of Religion
0:17:19 - Critiquing Scientism & the Need for a Broader Epistemology
0:25:33 - Grappling with Christian Doctrine vs. Science
0:38:49 - The Nature of "The Good": Platonic vs. Christian Conceptions
0:49:10 - The Necessity of Religious Practice
0:54:17 - Psychedelics and Spirituality
1:04:05 - Cottingham's Career Reflections
1:08:14 - Closing Remarks
My new book: "In Search of the Infinite - A Psychedelic Memoir":
If you would like to connect with me on Instagram, you can do so at @tiagobooks