One of the premises of modern science is that nature is devoid of purposes. Instead, purposeless explanations for phenomena are sought. And the strategy has proved hugely productive. Except that allusions to purpose never quite fade from the scientific imagination. 
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon explore the ways in which the natural world is indeed full of purposes, both at the level of the so-called inanimate, as well as in the living world, and the reality we know most immediately and best, namely our own lives and consciousness. 
The discussion ranges over a range of matters, from the growth of embryos to the attractive nature of gravity and the tendency towards order and beauty. An implication of the presence of purpose in nature and minds is a need to rethink phenomena such as matter and power. And there is an obvious reason that purpose keeps reappearing in scientific accounts, namely that purposes are present in all things. 
Mark's discussion of David Bentley Hart’s book, All Things Are Full Of Gods, mentioned in the discussion can be found as an early post on this podcast.

The 1500th anniversary of the death of Boethius more than likely falls in 2024. He asks a key question: how to find true, lasting, reliable happiness?

His answer, The Consolation of Philosophy, was a mediaeval bestseller, massively influencial, and is also very readable.

So what do Boethius and, in particular, Lady Philosophy tell us?

All Things Are Full Of Gods is David Bentley Hart’s philosophical case for an idealist and theist understanding of consciousness, understood as an intertwining of mind, language and life. As he puts it: “Mind and life, and language too, are possibly only by way of a kind of “downward causation” that informs their “upward” evolution in particular beings.”

The book is also a careful debunking of materialist alternative explanations such as that mind emerges from matter, that consciousness is an illusion, or that consciousness doesn’t really exist at all; it is a careful examination of everything from eliminativism to integrated information theory, from the ideas of Daniel Dennett to those of Philip Goff.

Personally, I also hugely valued the book because it is, in a way, therapeutic. A nihilist cosmos has become default and it is not only intolerable to live in, it is gaslighting. A thought or experience is only possible because we have capacities for attention and intention, desire and perception, communication and participation - and following those qualities through, leads to the realisation that consciousness is not born in us, but that we are born in consciousness.

As on of his characters, Psyche, puts it: the mind’s “transcendental preoccupation with an infinite horizon of intelligibility that, for want of a better word, we should call God; and that the existence of all things is possible only as the result of an infinite act of intelligence that, once again, we should call God.”

David Bentley Hart’s repeated point, as his interlocutors propose and take apart the materialist explanations, is that everything we might experience explodes with meanings. That is what mind does, in response to the life within which it is immersed.

That said, the book ends on a downbeat note. Psyche hopes the we humans “might yet learn to know themselves in a new way as spiritual beings immersed in a world of spirit, rather than machines of consumption inhabiting a machine of production, and remember that which lies deepest within themselves: living mind, the divine ground of consciousness and life, participating in an infinite act of thought and communication, dwelling in a universe full of gods and full of God.” The book is, of course, an invitation and nudge to do so.

No one knows. Repeated experiments have failed to locate where memories are stored in the brain, casting doubt on the conventional assumption that memories are stored as material traces. 

In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss various kinds of memory, from episodic memory to habits. They consider how memory is linked to emotion and place, drawing on insights from Aristotle to AN Whitehead. 

Rupert’s own work has led to the theory of morphic fields, within which all self-organising systems dwell. They also ask about Indian ideas of memory and how that is related to ideas about reincarnation and the possibility that everything that exists lives, in some way, in the memory of God.

What Socrates taught is, of course, the wrong question. For, if there is one thing that Plato is quite clear about, it is that Socrates taught nothing. Something else is going on when you encounter this figure. So what is it?

In this talk I look first at common errors concerning Plato, such as that he pitched body against soul or thought poets were best banned. Other mistakes include treating his philosophy as a training in eudaimonia and reading his dialogues as stages in his philosophical development - the early ones being close to the historical Socrates, the middle ones being the mature Plato, the late ones being the disillusioned Plato. Similarly, Socrates did not seek definitions.

The irony, given the sensitivity to this charge often from philosophers who misread Plato, is that this is a colonial reading of Plato. Scholars like Julia Annas have shown that reading Plato changed during the period of the British empire, when texts like Plato’s Republic came to be treated as a manifesto for young minds in public schools being preparing to rule the world. 

Before that, Plato Plato was understood not to have a message but instead a path. Roughly speaking, the aporetic dialogues - the ones that end in radical uncertainty - offer a preparation in the form of an undoing. Then, next, into that space, the visionary dialogues speak. I'm indebted to the scholar Sara Ahbel-Rappe for so clearly stating that Socrates stands for a mode of being, thereby imparting a taste for it, stirring a love of it. 

Socrates can't give that presence, because it is already within you. This awareness actually already belongs to us, and we sense a distant yearning for it because of feeling separate from it, through ignorance or forgetting. The way back is to clear the space that makes us more ready to know it once more.

This is the meaning of the message Socrates received from the Delphic oracle: knowing yourself means knowing yourself, at base, to know nothing because all your theories or assumptions or certainties will turn out to be limited or straightforwardly wrong. Take that on board and then, regarding yourself as poor, come to know the richness of life, which is not eudaimonistic but rather theotic: a participation by contemplation, or theoria, in God.

That divine end, stressing the inadequacy of an isolated sense of our humanity, must be the fundamental reason why Plato is so widely dissed. He ready does offend, though in Socrates saw why that disquiet is so wonderfully worth undergoing.

What has poetry to do with philosophy? Why might poetry particularly matter now? How did figures from Plato to Einstein value the poetic voice?

Valentin Gerlier and Mark Vernon return for another conversation about the manner in which we humans are gifted with symbolic as well as cognitive imaginations. They ask why we keep returning to poets such as William Blake and William Shakespeare, how the wellspring of a civilisation is found in its mythos, and whether a literal age might be recovering the age of sense of transcendence that is also immanent.  

In short, they ask why seeing a world in a grain of sand, and not just a grain of sand in a grain of sand, might matter.

Their first conversation was released as Heaven in a Wild Flower.

Just Stop Oil and the imprisonment of Roger Hallam and others has provoked an outcry, on both sides of the dispute. And the heightened emotions have made me think. What's going on here? What is at stake?

I suspect that what’s being missed is something fundamental to human society and how we participate in a wider environment, and that can be discerned more fully by considering the true nature of freedom of speech.

I draw on a talk given by Joseph Milne at the excellent Temenos Academy. The archive of talks can be found here - https://www.temenosacademy.org/main-lecture-archive/

The approach is to consider what freedom of speech meant to our ancestors, so as to cast a light on the present. Aristotle's thoughts in the Politics is key, as speech for him is what makes human society - speech understood as a sharing the wider rationality and intelligence of the animate cosmos.

Justice, then, is an exercise in the bonds of friendship, which is very different from an exercise in rights and the will to power. 

The limits of social contract theories, the mainstay of modern understandings, are on display. And what we need to recover are other ways of speaking freely - modes of dialogue and discourse that aren't primarily about proposition or facts, but commitments, relationships, devotions, celebrations.

Randomness and luck, fate and providence. How do these facets of life relate to one another? Or is everything, actually, mechanically determined with synchronicities, say, being no more than coincidences? 
In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss the ways in which philosophers and scientists, ancient and modern, have imagined and explored notions of causality and sympathy in nature, alongside fortune and calamities. 
The ideas of Aristotle and Boethius provide a striking background against which to consider more recent scientific work. 
Rupert also demonstrates how fields can influence seemingly random effects using a Galton Board - a remarkably profound analogue for, say, practices such as prayer.

At one level, Blake is clearly Christian. It’s even trivial to say so. And yet, his identification with Jesus is often sidelined, even written out, of accounts of the poet's work today.

There are many reasons for this neglect: an understandable disillusionment with Christianity; the replacement of participative Christianity with cultural Christianity and its stress on moral law; the rise of atheism in the 19th century; the colonisation of literary studies with secular assumptions.

But Blake is quite clear: without the divine vision, focused on Jesus the imagination and the centrality of the continual incarnation, the golden string he offers us today, will not lead to heaven's gate.

So what type of Christianity does he champion? How does he communicated it? And why is it still so needed, 200 years on.

This talk was originally given to the Blake Society.

0:00 Introduction
0:47 The centrality of a continual incarnation
6:00 His links with Orthodoxy and mystical Christianity
9:44 The place of Jesus
11:31 Transfiguration as a foretaste of Eternity
12:34 The divinity of the woman caught in adultery 
14:36 Jesus in the poem Jerusalem
16:00 "I have power to raise from death"
18:50 The breath divine or Spirit in Blake
19:58 Union with Jesus
21:25 The purpose of forgiveness
24:00 The meaning of self-annihilation
27:54 Inspired by the Gita
29:31 A commodious Christianity
33:26 The failure of naturalism and the cosmos as a closed system
38:34 The inhumanity of atheistic humanism
40:33 Mystical Christianity and participation with nature
44:09 Ethical Christianity divides: religion hid in war
46:53 "Thy own humanity learn to adore". Restoring humanism
49:18 "There is a moment in each day". Blake's apocalypse is now

Three “trans” issues seem to be proxies for vision in contemporary politics, feeding the sense of despair and disillusion.

Trans activism, which is not the same as trans pathology.
Transhumanising, the techno-utopian dream of tomorrow.
Transitioning the economy, moving from extractive consumption.

All three  are about qualities of relationship:
- to our bodies
- to our minds
- to the rest of the natural world.

And I wonder if all three are missing a common element: an understanding of soul.

I draw on thoughts made by Rowan Williams at the Realisation Festival 2024.

My previous thoughts on disillusionment in politics can be found in my feed, too, looking at Plato on beauty, Aristotle on ethics, Jesus on being in the world but not of it, Dante on civilisational decline, Blake on abstraction, and Barfield on literalism.