CONFERENCE VISION AND RATIONALE: San Francisco, CA – Co-organized by California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) & Center for Process Studies (CPS)

Iain McGilchrist’s recent magnum opus The Matter With Things (2021) constitutes one of the most significant contributions to the contemporary process tradition as revealed through layers of neuroscientific data and decades of remarkable clinical research into brain lateralization and the hemisphere hypothesis. Drawing from multiple scientific disciplines, and from both ancient and modern philosophers including Heraclitus, Schelling, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and others, McGilchrist has established himself as a formidable process thinker committed to reintegrating the holistic modes of thought associated with the right hemisphere as a guide to cultural renewal. As part of this effort, he affirms the ontological irreducibility of relationality, time, value, purpose, experience, consciousness, and the sacred. This conference brings leading process thinkers across various disciplines, including physics, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and theology into critical dialogue with McGilchrist’s work in a collegial effort to assess, question, extend, and apply it.