Levels of Intelligibility, Levels of the Self: Realizing the Dialectic with Dr John Vervaeke | Ralston College
Release Date: 08/02/2024
Douglas Murray: Reconstructing our Culture | Renewal and Renaissance: A Ralston Symposium
The Ralston College Podcast
Douglas Murray, revered cultural critic and author, delivers the highlight of Ralston College’s symposium of “,” a lecture exploring the theme of cultural reconstruction. Delivered from one of the beautiful, stately galleries of Savannah’s Telfair Academy, the audience is treated to an intimate address that is both deeply moving and inspiring of hope. Murray’s talk begins with the sober reflection that civilizations are mortal and share the fragility of life. He recounts how the loss of confidence experienced after the catastrophes of the World Wars led to the development of...
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What does it take to spark a new Renaissance?
The Ralston College Podcast
In February 2025, Ralston College hosted a landmark symposium in Savannah, Georgia, bringing together leading thinkers, artists, educators, and students for a searching conversation about the renewal of our shared culture. Over the course of a wide-ranging roundtable, speakers explored the collapse of higher education, the need for sacred space, the conditions for reawakening beauty and truth, the integral importance of literature, music and architecture, and the crucial role of the young in rebuilding a meaningful culture that can inspire and endure. This conversation is not an academic...
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The Ralston College Podcast
“Why We Tell Stories” is a discussion between Greg Hurwitz & Jonathan Pageau which took place on January 31, 2025. In this exchange, two prominent professionals in creative fields discuss the place of passion, productivity, and integrity in the context of their careers, and offer insights which range from guiding, general principles to concrete, practical advice. Over the course of their discussion with each other and with the students, they field questions about the artistic process; about the public attention they’ve received for their work; about the lessons they’ve learned; and...
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The Enduring Consolation of Philosophy with Stephen Blackwood
The Ralston College Podcast
“The Enduring Consolation of Philosophy” is the keynote lecture delivered by Dr Stephen Blackwood at the 2024 Symposium of Medieval and Renaissance studies. In this talk, commemorating the 1500th anniversary of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, Dr Blackwood shows why this work is more relevant than ever. After takinging stock of the “meaning crisis” and our dire need for depth, Dr Blackwood meditates on the first great insight of the Consolation: that the remedies of the self must emerge from the self. The complex and intricate structures and patterns of Boethius’ work are...
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Dr Iain McGilchrist in Conversation with Ralston College’s Students
The Ralston College Podcast
In this intimate question and answer session, conducted in March 2024 with the students enrolled in Ralston College’s MA in the Humanities, the world-renowned psychiatrist, philosopher, and literary scholar Iain McGilchrist explores topics that animate the collective intellectual life of Ralston’s student body. Answering questions that range from the metaphysical heights of theology, liturgy, and religious life to the tangible depths of scientific inquiry and medical progress, Dr McGhilchrist challenges his interlocutors to think deeper about the relationship between mind and matter,...
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The Sophia Lectures with Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 3: Finitude and the Infinite
The Ralston College Podcast
In his final , “Finitude and the Infinite,” Dr Iain McGilchrist grapples with the vital role that the imagination plays in the perception of reality, and what this power can disclose about reality itself. He shows that imagination has the capacity to make contact with an illimitable, irreducible, and inexhaustible world, one that presents itself to us under the aspects of finitude and infinitude. Beginning with the English Romantic poets, McGilchrist shows how these artists resisted the habits of perception that can be associated with the brain’s left hemisphere. This part of the...
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The Sophia Lectures with Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 2: Symmetry and Asymmetry
The Ralston College Podcast
In his second Sophia Lecture, Dr Iain McGilchrist gives a bracing, counterintuitive account of the fundamental categories of our experience of the world. McGilchrist shows how fundamental binaries—such as stasis and motion, simplicity and complexity, order and randomness, and even straight lines and curves—do not occur in nature in ways that conform to our assumptions about an inert, independent, and predictable universe. Drawing from disciplines as disparate as physics, mathematics, biology and art, McGilchrist shows that asymmetry is not simply a principle of vitality, harmony, and...
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The Sophia Lectures with Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 1: Division and Union
The Ralston College Podcast
This lecture, like the very essence of Ralston College’s mission, explores the profound interplay between division and union—a relationship that illuminates the nature of wholeness itself. Dr Iain McGilchrist delves into the insight that the whole is far more than the sum of its parts; it is a dynamic synthesis, a living interplay that transcends reductionism. Drawing on analogies from music, nature, and the human brain, McGilchrist reveals the delicate harmony between separation and connection, a truth exemplified most vividly in the brain’s two hemispheres. Here, division and...
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Dr Iain McGilchrist on the Cultivation of Wisdom
The Ralston College Podcast
A conversation between Dr Iain McGilchrist, neuropsychiatrist, philosopher, and literary critic, and Dr Stephen Blackwood, President of Ralston College, on the occasion of Dr McGilchrist’s March 2024 visit to Savannah to deliver Ralston College’s annual Sophia Lectures. Dr McGilchrist discusses his experience spending time with Ralston College students, his reasons for accepting the College’s invitation to deliver the Sophia lectures, and the necessity of leisure for deep thought. Applications for Ralston College’s MA in the Humanities program are now open.
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The Education of Iain McGilchrist, Part II: Medical School and Beyond
The Ralston College Podcast
The second part of a conversation between the renowned literary scholar and psychiatrist Dr Iain McGilchrist and Ralston College president Dr Stephen Blackwood about Dr McGilchrist’s remarkable educational trajectory. In this episode, Dr Iain McGilchrist explains how he left his successful career as a literary scholar to pursue training as a psychiatrist and how his combined study of literature, philosophy, and neuroscience informed his later academic work, including his books The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009) and...
info_outlineDr John Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist and philosopher who explores the intersections of Neoplatonism, cognitive science, and the meaning crisis, focusing on wisdom practices, relevance realization, and personal transformation.
Ralston College presents a lecture titled “Levels of Intelligibility, Levels of the Self: Realizing the Dialectic,” delivered by Dr John Vervaeke, an award-winning associate professor of cognitive science at the University of Toronto and creator of the acclaimed 50-episode “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” series. In this lecture, Dr Vervaeke identifies our cultural moment as one of profound disconnection and resulting meaninglessness. Drawing on his own cutting-edge research as a cognitive scientist and philosopher, Vervaeke presents a way out of the meaning crisis through what he terms “third-wave Neoplatonism.” He reveals how this Neoplatonic framework, drawn in part from Plato’s conception of the tripartite human soul, corresponds to the modern understanding of human cognition and, ultimately, to the levels of reality itself. He argues that a synoptic integration across these levels is not only possible but imperative.
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00:00 Levels of Intelligibility: Integrating Neoplatonism and Cognitive Science
12:50 Stage One: Neoplatonic Psycho-ontology and the Path to Spirituality
41:02 Aristotelian Science: Knowing as Conformity and Transformation
46:36 Stoic Tradition: Agency, Identity, and the Flow of Nature
01:00:10 Stage Two: Cognitive Science and the Integration of Self and Reality
01:04:45 The Frame Problem and Relevance Realization
01:08:45 Relevance Realization and the Power of Human Cognition
01:20:15 Transjective Reality: Affordances and Participatory Fittedness
01:23:55 The Role of Relevance Realization: Self-Organizing Processes
01:31:30 Predictive Processing and Adaptivity
01:44:35 Critiquing Kant: The Case for Participatory Realism
01:53:35 Stage Three: Neoplatonism and the Meaning Crisis
02:00:15 Q&A Session
02:01:45 Q: What is the Ecology of Practices for Cultivating Wisdom?
02:11:50 Q: How Has the Cultural Curriculum Evolved Over Time?
02:26:30 Q: Does the World Have Infinite Intelligibility?
02:33:50 Q: Most Meaningful Visual Art?
02:34:15 Q: Social Media's Impact on Mental Health and Information?
02:39:45 Q: What is Transjective Reality?
02:46:35 Q: How Can Education Address the Meaning Crisis?
02:51:50 Q: Advice for Building a College Community?
02:55:30 Closing Remarks
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Authors, Ideas, and Works Mentioned in this Episode:
Antisthenes
Aristotle
Brett Anderson
Byung-Chul Han
Charles Darwin
Daniel Dennett
D. C. Schindler
Friedrich Nietzsche
Galileo Galilei
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Heraclitus
Henry Corbin
Immanuel Kant
Iris Murdoch
Isaac Newton
Igor Grossmann
Johannes Kepler
John Locke
John Searle
John Spencer
Karl Friston
Karl Marx
Mark Miller
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Nelson Goodman
Paul Ricoeur
Pierre Hadot
Plato
Pythagoras
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Descartes
Sigmund Freud
W. Norris Clarke
anagoge (ἀναγωγή)
Distributed cognition
eidos (εἶδος)
eros (ἔρως)
Evan Thompson’s deep continuity hypothesis
Generative grammar
logos (λόγος)
Sensorimotor loop
Stoicism
thymos (θυμός)
Bayes' theorem
Wason Selection Task
The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber
The Ennead by Plotinus
Explorations in Metaphysics by W. Norris Clarke
Religion and Nothingness by Keiji Nishitani
The Eternal Law: Ancient Greek Philosophy, Modern Physics, and Ultimate Reality by John Spencer
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Additional Resources
https://www.youtube.com/@johnvervaeke
Ralston College (including newsletter)
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Thank you for listening!