The Beyond Bohm 2024 series is oriented toward sharing unique and unusual perspectives that complement and amplify the work of David Bohm. Now in our fourth year, we are continuing that tradition with an array of new faces and presenters that we are especially excited about.
Willam James’s Radical Empiricism and cognate views going under the general title of Neutral Monism encompass a picture of reality with many attractive features. It presents a straightforward and intuitively attractive solution to the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness. It endorses a view of perception and cognition which puts us in direct contact with the world, indeed, in direct contact with the fundamental nature of reality, where mind does not mirror nature so much as inhabit it. Yet it avoids any facile solutions to the problem of philosophical skepticism. It supports the idea that the world can be scientifically described in terms of structural relations without lapsing into implausible scientistic reductionisms. But it is a truly radical vision of reality raising many immediately apparent objections (many of which date back to James’s original statement of the view). In this presentation, I aim to sketch out a version of Neutral Monism, canvas its virtues and try to at least deflect the main objections.

Alison Liebling is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Cambridge and the Director of the Institute of Criminology’s Prisons Research Centre. She has carried out research on life in prison for over 30 years. Her projects have included suicide and self-harm in prisons, close supervision centres for difficult prisoners, incentives and earned privileges, staff-prisoner relationships, the location and building of trust in high security prisons, the work of prison officers, and conceptualizing and measuring the moral quality of prison life, including comparisons between public and private sector prisons.
Science has helped us to live with less suffering, but has it helped us to understand life or accept death? It cannot do what spiritual traditions do. Ideally, it should remain open to other ways of knowing and this meeting will look at what common ground might exist between them. Speakers from the sciences, arts and the healing traditions will aim to create an open, participatory dialogue on how we might understand the world as a unified whole.
Structuring Process in the Undivided Universe: a series of talks and conversations with Basil Hiley September, 20 – 24, 2024 with Basil Hiley, Hamish Todd, Paavo Pylkkänen, Jonathan Allday and […]
With Rick Tarnas, session 1 of 6.
The profound shift of horizon entailed by the ongoing fact of synchronicities occurring in countless individual lives carries existential implications at the most intimate as well as most cosmic levels of human concern. In this lecture, Rick Tarnas hopes to address some of these more practical implications as well as those that touch on the great metaphysical and epistemological issues at play.
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Dr. John Vervaeke, an award-winning professor of psychology, cognitive science, and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto, brings a wealth of academic expertise to his courses. With a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto, Dr. Vervaeke served as the former Director of Cognitive Science and holds the position of Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology. He has won and been nominated for several teaching awards and has published articles on relevance realization, general intelligence, mindfulness, flow, metaphor, and wisdom.
A two-part series on that Nature of Space, Higher Dimensions and the Multiverse.
Rupert Sheldrake recently made a series of criticisms of Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism on Curt Jaimungal’s Theories of Everything channel. Kastrup soon responded to Rupert’s points and subsequently Rupert sent Kastrup a rejoinder. Here, in a spirit of true collegiality and intellectual pursuit, we will turn this clash into an opportunity to better understand each other’s position and inquire further into the nature of reality itself. The trialogue between Kastrup, Sheldrake, and Gomez-Marin will be followed by Q&A from the audience.