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| A collaborative dialogue. |
Tired of hearing and thinking about the pandemic? Want to listen in on an enlightening conversation? Then here's a good alternative. Rebel Wisdom is a relatively new Youtube/podcast site that conducts and facilitates quite thoughtful and provocative conversations and interviews. In this particular instance, they bring together Professor John Vervaeke, a cognitive psychologist and philosopher at the University of Toronto with Dr. Iain McGilchrist, a literary scholar-turned-psychiatrist (M.D.) who wrote The Master & His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, and they compare their respective projects. Vervaeke is best known for a series of lectures entitled "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" that he's posted (free) on Youtube.
This conversation is not for those not willing to go down deep into the operations of the human mind. The conversation references Martin Buber, Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Plato, Aristotle, the New-Platonists, and John Scotus Eriugena, among others. But this is not a contest in name-dropping; it's a genuine dialogue between two thinkers whose heretofore independent works are found to be headed in very similar directions. (Vervaeke was still in the process of reading The Master & His Emissary at the time of the conversation.) The respective projects of both of these thinkers are to drill down into (primarily) Western ways of thinking and perceiving the world to find out where it's causing us some of our deepest problems. Much of our current ways of perceiving and thinking about the world short-circuit our full potential and have led us to a place of deep crisis. This manner of dialogue is a rewarding exercise that we all need to engage in now more than ever.
By the way, McGilchrist mentioned in passing that just that week (shortly before the pandemic came onto the front-burner) he'd finished his next book, which took him almost ten years to write. Some very good news!
