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The Education of Iain McGilchrist, Part I: From Winchester College to All Souls

Release Date: 12/09/2024

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...

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...

Why We Tell Stories: Greg Hurwitz & Jonathan Pageau in Conversation

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

More Episodes

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 March 2024 to deliver The Sophia lectures for the 2023-24 academic year.

List of People Mentioned in the Episode:

Cicero
George Herbert
John Donne
John Clare
Guido d’Arezzo
Alexander Pope
Freeman Dyson
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Friedrich Schelling
G.W.F. Hegel
John Bayley
Christopher Tolkien
John Milton
Edmund Spenser
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Georg Chritoph Lichtenberg
Derek Parfit
Thomas Hardy
Oliver Sacks
Roger Scruton

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