Events

We live in a challenging time of transition which promises both hope and peril.  How are we to navigate a course that will take us from a story of separation, competition, and distrust to a new narrative of inter-being, cooperation, and love? How do we begin to give up and move beyond an incoherent and too often destructive structure of consciousness and a world which seems rarely to see the mediating presence of what has been called ‘evolutionary love’?

What is philosophy? Why do we philosophise? And why, in a time of crisis, does philosophy matter?

In a time of crisis, the temptation is often to withdraw, to fall back on our own resources, or to batten down the hatches. But in this talk, writer and philosopher Will Buckingham will explore how Levinas sets out a more challenging, and more fruitful, path. Weaving together philosophy and storytelling, he will argue that in a time of crisis, the greatest philosophical demand may be this: to open up the door.

In this installment of The Future Scientist series, we will concentrate on the revolutions of physics at the dawn of the 20th century. The transformations of the very idea of science that ensued from certain ways of interpreting those advances percolated to biology and neuroscience all the way to the present moment. Drawing from major concrete historical events, we will discuss the very concept of measurement, the troubled relationship between the sciences and the humanities, and the crucial question of who has the authority to make claims about reality, and why. Although historians repeatedly learn that we hardly learn from history, a careful looking back can certainly offer a glimpse as to how to make the future science more scientific.

In 1978, as David Bohm was bringing forth his vision of the implicate order, he pointed out that, rather than being a new model, “I regard the implicate order as a new form of imagination.” There are many potential lines of inquiry bound up in this statement. Among those that we will take up are: What did Bohm mean by “a new form of imagination”? How might this differ from a model? We tend to think that descriptions and models are either literal or metaphorical – but are there aspects of imagination that are neither of these? Could a renewed and revitalized imagination itself the key to this inquiry?

Il seminario si articola in un’alternanza di momenti di spiegazione e altri di sperimentazione pratica delle idee del fisico quantistico David Bohm: la vita e lo sviluppo del suo pensiero, la tecnica metamorfica riletta alla luce del concetto di ordini di realtà, la connessione tra fisica e senso della vita, e la ricerca del superamento della coscienza individuale attraverso il dialogo bohmiano.

The topic of the sacred is immense, as I confirmed to myself when I wrote a very long chapter on it in The Matter with Things. I have chosen to approach it here by directing our attention, as it might seem at first, to one side: on the soul. I will argue that the sacred exists not simply in this or that thing—an object, a place, or an act—but in the relationship between whatever it is beyond ourselves that we recognise as sacred and that part of our being that has been traditionally referred to as the soul; that this relationship is one of the reasons for evolved beings such as ourselves to have come into existence; that whatever else it may be, the soul is a faculty, like intellect or eyesight, but much more than, and more important than, either; and that our sense of the sacred is both driven by, and in turn drives, the actively receptive attention paid by the soul. I suggest that the soul is in process, and that it is one task of our lives to grow the soul—an important task, because much depends on it: we can, like attentive or neglectful gardeners, nourish, stunt the growth of, or extinguish, that soul. I suggest that therefore we need first to attend to our souls if we are to recover the sacred, and I make a few exploratory forays into what we can (and cannot) say about the soul, and how it might be integrated into a new cosmology.

To mark the one year since the publication of The Matter with Things, this free online event will reflect on its first year of being in the world. Dr. McGilchrist will be interviewed by the publisher of the book, Perspectiva’s Jonathan Rowson, followed by a discussion with experts for the sciences and humanities. The final part of the event will give you a chance to put a question to Dr. McGilchrist.