Levels of Intelligibility, Levels of the Self: Realizing the Dialectic with Dr John Vervaeke | Ralston College
Release Date: 08/02/2024
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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...
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A conversation between Dr Iain McGilchrist, the renowned polymath, and Dr Stephen Blackwood, President of Ralston College, about Dr McGilchrist’s formative experiences at Winchester College, the prestigious British public school, and his subsequent training as a literary critic at Oxford University and his appointment as a Fellow at All Souls. Drs McGilchrist and Blackwood emphasize the vital role of freedom, friendship, and the expectation of excellence in providing students with an authentic education. This conversation was recorded during Dr McGilchrist’s visit to Ralston College in...
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The Ralston College Podcast
Ralston College presents a talk by Christopher Snook, Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University, on the influence of Dante’s Purgatorio on two of T.S. Eliot’s most important works: The Waste Land and Four Quartets. Mr Snook attends, in particular, to how Eliot’s treatment of fragments represents at once both a departure from and a return to medieval understandings of the whole. This medieval understanding is evidenced in the “manifold articulation” of particulars within the architecture of the Gothic cathedral, the literary shape of the Divine Comedy, and the...
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The Other Side of Despair: The Search for Meaning in T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land”
The Ralston College Podcast
Ralston College presents a talk by Christopher Snook, Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University, on T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece The Waste Land. The lecture explores the personal, historical, and literary contexts of Eliot’s poem. Through an engagement with the Western tradition that is simultaneously rich and fragmented, The Waste Land confronts cultural and personal crises that have atrophied both memory and desire. Snook finds in Eliot’s work a mournful modernism that serves as a serious and searching rejoinder to the more frivolous and enervated...
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Polytheism and the Polis: The Drama of the Individual Before the Self with Paul Epstein | Ralston College
The Ralston College Podcast
Dr Paul Epstein is a distinguished classicist and Professor Emeritus of Classics at Oklahoma State University, renowned for his extensive knowledge of Greek and Latin literature. In this lecture and discussion—delivered in Savannah during the x term of the inaugural year of Ralston College’s MA in the Humanities program—classicist Dr Paul Epstein considers how Sophocles’s tragedy Women of Trachis and Aristophanes’s comedy Frogs arise from—and reflect upon—the polis-centered polytheism of ancient Greece as it appeared during the Athenian flourishing of the fifth...
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Levels of Intelligibility, Levels of the Self: Realizing the Dialectic with Dr John Vervaeke | Ralston College
The Ralston College Podcast
Dr 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...
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Knowing God in the Book of Job | Dr David Novak with Ralston College
The Ralston College Podcast
Dr David Novak is a distinguished professor at the University of Toronto, renowned theologian, and esteemed rabbi. He has authored numerous books, delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures, and bridges ancient philosophical traditions with modern ethical issues. Recorded live at Ralston College in Savannah, GA in November of 2022. Dr David Novak—Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto—offers a lecture on the Book of Job followed by an extended question and answer session with students enrolled in Ralston College’s Master’s in the...
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Unlocking Consciousness with Dr Stephen Wolfram: AI & Philosophy | Ralston College
The Ralston College Podcast
Dr Stephen Wolfram is a renowned computer scientist, physicist, and entrepreneur who earned his PhD in particle physics at 20 and became the youngest MacArthur Fellow at 21. As the founder of Wolfram Research, he has developed groundbreaking technologies widely used by university researchers in engineering, physics, mathematics, and computing. How can computational thinking and philosophy together unlock the mysteries of human consciousness and the universe? In this Q&A session, conducted in February 2024 with students enrolled in Ralston College’s MA in the Humanities...
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!