“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 powerful, beautiful, and therapeutic precisely because its harmonies reflect the reality of both the world and the world within.

Both the order of the cosmos and the order of the self unfold, for the reader of the Consolation, by way of the book’s carefully calibrated pedagogical dimension. Its therapies for the soul consist of tenderness and tough love alike, because the sight, insight, and assent that it seeks to instill cannot be induced by any other means. Instead, the liberating power of consciousness to which this work so insistently points depends on the innate freedom that we all possess—the very freedom to which the example of Boethius endures, to this day, as a singular witness.

Learn more at www.ralston.ac.

Authors, Artists, and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

• Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
• The Consolation of Philosophy, H. F. Stewart & E. K. Rand, trans. (Loeb, 1918)
• Alfred the Great, King of the Anglo-Saxons
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• Dante Alighieri
• Saint Thomas Aquinas
• Sir Thomas More
• Queen Elizabeth I
• C. S. Lewis
• Pope Benedict XVI
• Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
• Peter Abelard
• Plato, Timaeus
• Gospel of John
• Saint Augustine of Hippo
• Robert Crouse
• Aristotle

 

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, science and religion, and, ultimately, humanity and the divine. 

Authors, Artists, and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

• Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

• Albert Einstein

• Aristotle

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

• Meister Eckhart

• John Donne

• George Herbert

• Thomas Traherne

• Rumi

• Henry Moore

• Blaise Pascal

• St. Augustine

• William Shakespeare, King Lear; The Merchant of Venice; Hamlet; The Tempest

• Metrodorus of Lampsacus 

• Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

• G.W.F. Hegel

• Alwyn Lishman

• St. Francis of Assisi 

• Plotinus

• Thomas Edison

• St. Gregory of Nyssa

• Carl Jung

• Glenn Gould

 

In his final Sophia Lecture, “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 brain is adept at rendering, representing, and modeling, but it does so at the cost of simplifying whatever it constructs. Poets like Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Blake strove to remove the film of familiarity from their vision. For them, imagination was the power that made intuitive connections and integrative “leaps,” giving access to a richer, unbounded reality not subject to the strictures of reductive categories.

In dialogue with physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians, McGilchrist ultimately shows how the vision of the world offered by the Romantic poets lays claim to the infinite and the eternal. For these artists, eternity is “adverbial”: it is a way of being, a manner, and a modality. McGilchrist convincingly shows us that we, too, can decline to see the world through categories that are measurable, predictable, and countable—but finally lifeless; like the poets whom he takes as his main interlocutors in this lecture, we can, instead, open ourselves to reality’s boundless, vital, and infinite character.

Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

• William Wordsworth - Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Biographia Literaria
• Percy Bysshe Shelley - A Defence of Poetry
• Max Scheler
• William Blake
• Richard Feynman
• James A. Shapiro
• Denis Diderot
• Barbara McClintock
• William James
• Albert Einstein
• Leonhard Euler
• William Wilson Morgan
• Richard Feynman
• The Ancient of Days (William Blake, 1794, watercolor etching)
• Nicholas of Cusa - De Docta Ignorantia
• Jason Padgett
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Galileo Galilei
• David Hilbert
• Henri Bergson
• Richard Wagner
• Isaac Luria - Lurianic Kabbalah
• Edward Nelson
• Alfred North Whitehead
• Eugène Minkowski
• Heraclitus
• Jordan Peterson
• Zeno of Elea
• John Milton
• John Keats
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Martin Heidegger
• Tao-te Ching
• William Blake - “The Tyger”
• Emily Dickinson
• Marianne Moore
• Robert Browning - “Two in the Campagna”
• Bhagavad Gita
• Peter Cook
• John Polkinghorne
• Mary Midgley
• René Descartes
• Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
• J. B. S. Haldane
• Lee Smolin
• Eugene Koonin
• Hildegard of Bingen - The Choirs of Angels
• Christ Pantocrator and Signs of the Zodiac
• C. S. Lewis
• Johannes Kepler
• Jesus

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 beauty. McGilchrist argues that asymmetry is primary, a reality that is prior to symmetry and which forms the basis of the very symmetries in nature and the arts to which it gives rise. The dynamism which results from the drive to balance and to resist balance is at the root of the vigor of natural systems, the beauty that they embody, and which the arts then reflect.

With examples ranging from the elegance of the golden ratio to the structure of the human brain, McGilchrist’s lecture offers a fresh perspective on the nature of patterns in complex systems and human creations. His work invites us to search for wholeness, harmony, and connection from a set of starting points which are as surprising as they are fruitful; as always, he challenges us to see our world in new—and newly unified—ways.

Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

• Johann Sebastian Bach
• John Donne - “Holy Sonnet 7: At the round earth’s imagin’d corners”
• Gerard Manley Hopkins - “Carrion Comfort”
• Werner Heisenberg - Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations with Einstein, Planck, Dirac, Bohr, and Other Physicists of Our Time
• Alexander Pope - “The Rape of the Lock”
• Iain McGilchrist - The Master and his Emissary
• Pierre Curie
• Chien-Shiung Wu
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
• Aesop
• Heraclitus
• Democritus
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Louis Pasteur
• Rong Li & Bruce Bowerman - “Symmetry breaking in biology”
• Arthur Koestler
• Aristotle
• Oliver Sacks
• Thomas Holstein
• Tim Crow
• Onur Güntürkün
• Jane Clark & Daniel Simons (Christopher Chabris) - Gorillas in Our Midst
• Jonathan Rowson
• Alastair McIntosh
• Richard Dawkins
• Nikolaj Nikolaenko
• Luciano Laurana
• Giorgio Martini - Ideal City
• Raphael - The School of Athens
• Andrea Palladio
• William Blake - “The Tyger”
• Theodosius II
• Christ Pantocrator
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• John P. McGovern
• William Osler
• William Alwyn Lishman
• William Shakespeare - King Lear
• John Cleese
• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Sir Roger Scruton

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 union are not adversaries but partners, each essential to the vitality of the other, enabling the brain to function as a unified and life-giving organ of thought and perception. Such a model reflects the very spirit of Ralston College’s aim to unify what modernity has fractured—the intellectual and the spiritual, the individual and the communal, the ancient and the urgent.

The lecture also engages with the concept of emergence, a phenomenon where systems reveal qualities and capacities far beyond what their components alone could predict.

Ultimately, McGilchrist’s argument aligns with the vision of this College: that division and union are not contradictory but complementary forces, driving the renewal of meaning and vitality. It is through this synthesis, through holding the tension between opposites, that true wholeness and innovation emerge—a principle as foundational to the functioning of the human brain as it is to the regeneration of our civilization.

• Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:
• Pythagoras: 00:09:02:20
• Heraclitus: 00:21:34:04
• Goethe: 00:23:14:21
• Whitehead: 00:24:36:18
• Robert Rosen: 00:27:08:02
• Rowan Williams: 00:28:44:05
• Vesalius: 00:29:37:01
• Camillo Golgi: 00:35:14:22
• Santiago Ramon y Cajal: 00:35:47:05

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.  Apply now.  

 

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 The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva, 2021).

List of people referenced in this episode:

• Ted Hughes
• William Wordsworth
• Samuel Johnson
• John Boswell
• Laurence Sterne
• William Shakespeare
• Oliver Sacks
• John Cutting
• Louis Sass
• Jan Zwicky
• Robert Bringhurst
• Erwin Schrödinger
• Martin Heidegger
• Max Planck
• Niels Bohr
• Michael Levin

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 

 

Ralston College presents a talk by Christopher Snook, Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University, on the influence of Dante’s Purgatorio on two of T.S. Eliot’s most important works: The Waste Land and Four Quartets. Mr Snook attends, in particular, to how Eliot’s treatment of fragments represents at once both a departure from and a return to medieval understandings of the whole. This medieval understanding is evidenced in the “manifold articulation” of particulars within the architecture of the Gothic cathedral, the literary shape of the Divine Comedy, and the logical structure of the Summa Theologicae. Mr Snook’s lecture was given in the final term of the 2023-24 year of Ralston College’s MA in Humanities program, which focused on the concept of the Whole. 

 

Applications are now open for the upcoming year of the MA in the Humanities program, which will focus on the theme of Fellowship. Apply now. 

 

Authors, Artists, and Works Mentioned in this Episode: 

 

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologicae

• René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

• Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” 

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

• T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

• T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

• T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

• Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

• Dante, The Divine Comedy 

• T. S. Eliot, The Family Reunion

• Ezra Pound

• William Shakespeare, Macbeth

• John Donne, “No Man is an Island” 

• Charles Baudelaire, “À une passante”

• William Shakespeare, The Tempest 

• George Herbert 

• Nicene Creed 

• Augustine, Confessions 

• Charles Williams

• Filippo Tommaso Marinetti 

• Franz Kafka, “Before the Law” (from The Trial) 

• Freidrich Schlegel 

• Pascal, Pensées 

• Michel de Montaigne 

• Plato, Republic 

 

Ralston College presents a talk by Christopher Snook, Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University, on T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece The Waste Land.

The lecture explores the personal, historical, and literary contexts of Eliot’s poem. Through an engagement with the Western tradition that is simultaneously rich and fragmented, The Waste Land confronts cultural and personal crises that have atrophied both memory and desire. Snook finds in Eliot’s work a mournful modernism that serves as a serious and searching rejoinder to the more frivolous and enervated responses present in some modernist schools, most notably Dadaism.

This lecture was delivered on April 15th, 2024 at Ralston College’s Savannah campus, during the final term of the second year of the MA in the Humanities Program. Applications are now open for next year’s MA program.

Full scholarships are available. https://www.ralston.ac/apply

Mentioned in this episdoe: 

T. S. Eliot “The Waste Land”The DialKathleen RaineVirgil, AeneidEliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent”Eliot, The Family Reunion Henri BergsonBertrand Russell Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s RoomLeonard WoolfEzra PoundJames Joyce, Ulysses Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Oswald Spengler, Decline and Fall of the West Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past Claude McCay, Harlem Shadows August Strindberg Neo-impressionism Cubism Dadaism Surrealism Futurism Taxi Driver (film) Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, War, the World’s Only Hygiene Hugo Ball, Dada Manifesto “That Shakespearian Rag” William Shakespeare, Hamlet World War I Henry James F. H. Varley Punic Wars Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy The Tempest Modernism Collage Pablo Picasso Georges BraqueMarcel Duchamp, Nude Descending Staircase; Fountain Montage F. H. BradleyHegel, Phenomenology of Spirit Plato The Matter of Britain Jessie Weston James Frazer Richard Wagner, Parsifal Augustine, Confessions Charles Dickens, Hard Times Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Eliot, “The Hollow Men” Tower of Babel Petronius, The Satyricon Michelangelo, frescoes of Sistine Chapel Virgil, Eclogues Ovid, Metamorphoses Franz Kafka Chaucer, Canterbury Tales Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women; A Game at Chess Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra Charles Baudelaire, “Au Lecteur” Fredrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals