In this wide-ranging conversation with students at Ralston College, evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying reflect on how to live well in the modern world, biologically, philosophically, and spiritually. Moving from Aristotle's De Anima to the ethics of diet and the future of civilization, they explore the body not as an obstacle to overcome but as the very substrate through which consciousness takes form. From lineage and the long arc of life on Earth to nutrition, parenthood, grief, and the challenges of modern medicine, the discussion reveals an integrated vision of human flourishing rooted in both biology and meaning.

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• Aristotle's De Anima

In the fourth and final lecture of the 2025 Sophia Lecture series, Dr Bret Weinstein explores how humanity's evolutionary inheritance, both genetic and cultural, has enabled us to navigate an extraordinary range of ecological and social niches. They show that while genes provide the foundational architecture of the mind, culture allows for rapid adaptation and the creation of new possibilities, from the construction of monumental cathedrals to the development of shared narratives that transmit knowledge across generations.

Weinstein examines consciousness as a tool for novelty, emphasizing its role in parallel processing, collective problem-solving, and the creation of stories that humanize experience more efficiently than manuals or mechanistic instructions. Humans, he argues, have no fixed niche. Instead, we invent niches through language, shared imagination, and the transmission of culture, feeding back into the evolutionary pressures that continue to shape us.

In the concluding discussion, joined by his wife Dr Heather Heying, Dr Weinstein explores how, by tracing the patterns of evolution and the ways we construct civilizations, we can reflect on the enduring questions of human life, our responsibilities within nature, and the role of beauty, creativity, and imagination in shaping a sustainable future.

• Notre-Dame Cathedral of Paris

• Tikal Ruins of Guatemala

In this third lecture, Dr Heather Heying turns to the conditions sufficient for the emergence of sentient consciousness, exploring how life evolves the capacity to perceive, learn, and create. Drawing on the examples of primates, corvids, dolphins, elephants, wolves, and others, she reveals how traits such as long lifespans, extended childhoods, sociality, and play recur in the rare instances where sentience has independently evolved. These convergences, she argues, point to universals in the nature of intelligence itself, from cooperative learning to creative problem-solving. Along the way, Heying connects the biological scaffolding of consciousness to broader questions of culture and discovery, reclaiming science as a pursuit not only of logical proof but also of intuitive insight, where the recognition of pattern is inseparable from the apprehension of beauty.

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• Thomas Henry Huxley
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Spiral Staircase: Sagrada Família, Barcelona, Spain
• Alhambra: Granada, Spain
• Mattias Desmet
• Hannah Arendt
• Henri Poincaré
• Louis Agassiz
• Yanagi Soetsu

In his lecture Biological Nature to What End?, Dr Bret Weinstein explores the principles of evolution as a lens for understanding human nature, culture, and the pursuit of well-being. Moving from the biotic and abiotic universes to the subtle dynamics of kin and group selection, he reveals how traits emerge, persist, and change across generations. Weinstein challenges the conflation of data collection with science, advocating for predictive models that embrace paradox, complexity, and long-term explanatory power. Throughout the talk, he considers how evolutionary patterns shape morality, culture, and human creativity, demonstrating how the principles of biology illuminate both the substrate of our nature and the universals that underlie human civilization. Bret is later joined by his wife, Heather, to respond to audience questions exploring the relationship between scientific insight and the aesthetic and conceptual modes of the arts, underscoring the complementary ways humans discern meaning and pattern in the world.

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• Maimonides

• Notre Dame

• Richard Dawkins: Selfish Gene

• Aristotle

• The Cathedral of Córdoba

• Dmitri Mendeleev's Periodic Table of Elements

In this opening lecture, Dr Heather Heying invites listeners on an exploration of the deep structures that underlie both scientific inquiry and the human experience of knowing. Moving fluidly between biology, philosophy, and the history of ideas, she challenges inherited beliefs while seeking reconciliation through a broader epistemic lens. Weaving together Darwin's early evolutionary sketches, the concept of universals, and the distinction between biotic and abiotic origins, she explores how evolution shapes everything from molecular structures to symbolic expression, and how the universals of biology illuminate both human uniqueness and our continuity with the rest of life. Along the way, she reclaims the scientific method from dogma, distinguishes between biotic and abiotic origins, and examines the patterns of similarity and difference that reveal descent with modification. Ultimately, this talk is an invitation to see science not as a closed system of answers, but as a living mode of inquiry, attuned to both mystery and discovery.

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• Nicole Oresme
• Galileo
• Mendeleev
• Willi Hennig
• Von Baer - On the History of the Development of Animals
• Ernst Haeckel

In this informal and wide-ranging conversation with Stephen Blackwood, Drs Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying reflect on the formative influences that shaped their intellectual journeys, the role of teachers in cultivating curiosity and courage, the spirit of play as essential to genuine learning, and the challenges of navigating hyper-novelty in the modern world. Throughout the discussion, they explore the limits of empiricism, the need for humility in the face of complex problems, and the enduring value of beauty, biology, and philosophy in guiding human flourishing.

Applications for Ralston College's MA in the Humanities are now open. Learn more and apply today at www.ralston.ac/apply

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• Karl Popper

• Plutarch

• Aristotle

• Luca Turin

• Jonathan Haidt

Mari Otsu joins Stephen Blackwood for a deeply personal conversation about her journey through the wounds of materialism, ideology, and spiritual forgetting, and her return to the soul through the beauty of the humanities. Reflecting on her years at NYU and the Grand Central Atelier, Mari speaks of a longing that nothing in the modern, politicized worldview could satisfy, and how she found healing in therapy, classical painting, and, most profoundly, the living philosophical community of Ralston College. Engaging with the works of Plotinus, Boethius, and Dante, she discovered a path of purification and ascent that restored her sense of meaning and inspired her to share these treasures with others. This conversation explores the roots of today's meaning crisis and the redemptive power of beauty, thought, and imagination to heal the soul.

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• Plotinus' Enneads
• Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy
• Augustine's Confessions
• Plato
• Dante's Divine Comedy
• Monique Wittig's The Straight Mind

Chapters

• 00:00 - Introduction
• 01:29 - Conversation Begins
• 02:18 - About Mari
• 6:00 - Βrief Review of Mari's time at Ralston
• 8:00 - Mari's Descent into Anguish and Fragmentation
• 15:20 - The Ideological Component: NYU
• 23:30 - Leaving Blame Behind
• 27:20 - Fear as a Symptom of a Spiritual Pathology
• 29:00 - The Role of Therapy and Right Relationship
• 34:00 - The Power of Art
• 44:16 - Moving from Beauty to Contemplation
• 46:51 - Beginning at Ralston
• 1:00:00 - Plotinus Moving Beyond Beauty
• 1:08:00 - Wrapping It All Up
• 01:11:01 - Exit Music and Fade

Ralston College presents a lecture by Dr Jason Pedicone, distinguished scholar and classicist and the co-founder and President of the Paideia Institute.

In this rich and compelling address, Dr Pedicone introduces the subject of philology - the study of language in its historical context - before embarking on a historical tour of philological interventions – times when people have decided to pay particularly close attention to language for societal, historical or technological reasons. Our tour takes us from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds of Plato and Pisistratus through Charlemagne, Valla, Erasmus, Nietzsche and up to the present day and the inexorable rise of AI.

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• C.S Lewis

• Plato

• Suetonius

• Pisistratus

• Homer - The Iliad; The Odyssey

• Aristophanes of Byzantium

• Aristarchus of Samothrace

• Callimachus of Cyrene

• Quintus Ennius

• Livius Andronicus

• St. Boniface

• Jerome

• Charlemagne

• Alcuin of York

• Boniface

• Lorenzo Valla

• Desiderius Erasmus - Novum Instrumentum Omne

• Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy

• Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff - Philology of the Future

• Friedrich August Wolf - Prolegomena ad Homerum

• Derrida

• Plato - The Phaedrus

• Roland Barthes - The Death of the Author

• Wilhelm von Humboldt

• Heidegger - Being and Time

• Camus

• Shakespeare

• Marsilio Ficino

• Nick Bostrum - Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World

• Ray Kurzweil

Ralston College presents a talk by Christopher Snook, Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University, on St. Augustine's great autobiographical text The Confessions. This talk offers a detailed walk through of Books VII and VIII of Augustine's text in light of Augustine's "abiding preoccupation with the nature of the created order."

Snook explores how Augustine absorbed the insights of Platonist philosophers like Plotinus and Porphyry but also moved beyond them as he sought a more embodied account of the nature of the human person. Augustine's own conversion stresses the importance of encountering models for life and reveals the centrality of the incarnate Logos to the Christian understandings of self-realization.

This lecture was delivered on January 9th, 2025 at Ralston College's Savannah campus during the third term of the MA in the Humanities program. Support Ralston College's mission to revive the conditions of a free and flourishing culture.

• Dante, The Divine Comedy

• Cicero, Hortensius

• T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

• St. Ambrose

• Plotinus

• Porphyry

• Gaius Marius Victorinus

• Plato, The Republic

• Virgil, The Aeneid

• Iamblichus

• Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

• St. Anthony the Great

• John Scotus Eriugena

• Anselm of Canterbury

• Martin Luther

• Rene Decartes

Douglas Murray, revered cultural critic and author, delivers the highlight of Ralston College's symposium of "Renewal and Renaissance," 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 modernism, postmodernism and finally deconstructionism. The lecture then takes a more optimistic turn as Murray confidently asserts that after decades of deconstruction, especially in the field of higher education, we are now entering an era of reconstruction. He explains how this process of cultural renewal can come about through both the opportunities afforded by technology and the process of going back into the great literary treasures of the past, finding our place amongst these works and adding to them.

Murray shares his love of books, describing himself as "not only a bibliophile but something of a bibliomaniac," and expresses how literature, and especially poetry, can ground us in the world and make us feel that we are never alone for we will always have "friends on the shelves." Traversing through Byron, Gnedich, Stoppard, Auden and Heaney, Murray recounts three powerful stories that reveal the lengths certain individuals will go to recover, preserve and transmit our cultural treasures.

The talk was followed by a captivating Q&A session which ranged from the current status of poetry to the topics of writing, war and human nature.

As part of the stirring introduction to the lecture from Stephen Blackwood, President of Ralston College, soprano Kristi Bryson performed Handel's Lascia ch'io pianga, accompanied on the piano by Ralston alumna and fellow, Olivia Jensen. A splendid performance showcasing perfectly the ability of culture to transcend the difficulties of life through the power of beauty. A reminder for us all of exactly what it is that we are seeking to preserve and renew.

Mr Murray's books, including his most recent, are available here: https://douglasmurray.net.

To watch the first conversation of the day—the roundtable from the Ralston College Renewal and Renaissance Symposium, featuring multiple speakers discussing the future of education, culture, and human flourishing—click here.