Contemporary Articles

This area of Channel McGilchrist is dedicated to articles of interest on contemporary topics as chosen by Dr Iain McGilchrist.

Recovering the Sacred, Recovering the Soul: Session 1 of the ‘Recovering the Sacred’ online series – Pari Perspective

Recovering the Sacred, Recovering the Soul: Session 1 of the ‘Recovering the Sacred’ online series – Pari Perspective

According to Laozi:

He who knows does not tell and he who tells does not know.

The power of unknowing and not doing is celebrated in Chinese philosophy. Also in the Western tradition. For example, Meister Eckhart in one of his sermons speaks of the attainment by the soul of darkness and unknowing and he imagines a bystander asking him:

‘But what is this darkness and unknowing and what is its name?’ To this he replies, ‘I can only call it a loving and open receptiveness which however in no way lacks being. It is a receptive potential by means of which all is accomplished.’

This suggests the fertility of union between a creative principle and a receptive, womb-like space in which something is to grow: a process. It’s of this encounter, this process, that I wish to speak today.

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Festival of Writing & Ideas (in-person event)

Festival of Writing & Ideas (in-person event)

16th June to 18th June 2023 Event description. 2023 will be the eleventh edition of Borris House Festival of Writing & Ideas, and we are proud to have weathered the last few years to bring you another intimate and invigorating weekend, in a place as beautiful as...

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Wonder and Enchantment – Iain McGilchrist and Patrick Curry

Wonder and Enchantment – Iain McGilchrist and Patrick Curry

FREE online event in which Iain and Patrick will be discussing the phenomenon of enchantment, especially the experience of wonder that is at its heart. Why does it matter? And what are some of its attributes and dynamics? We shall also look at how it relates to the two modes of right and left brain hemispheres, and why it might be a possible effect of their integration, and therefore a life of sanity.

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The Master’s Theory of Everything: A review of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World – author Marius Dorobantu, from ‘Reviews in Science, Religion and Theology’, 2023, 2-1, pp. 6-17.

The Master’s Theory of Everything: A review of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World – author Marius Dorobantu, from ‘Reviews in Science, Religion and Theology’, 2023, 2-1, pp. 6-17.

Abstract: When pointing towards inanimate objects, chimpanzees use their right hand, whereas when pointing towards living creatures, they do it with their left. Such a striking difference can, to some extent, also be noticeable in humans: for grasping things, we...

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Two Minds – by Wendell Berry

Two Minds – by Wendell Berry

Human orders – scientific, artistic, social, economic, and political – are fictions. They are untrue, not because they necessarily are false, but because they necessarily are incomplete. All of our human orders, however inclusive we may try to make them, turn out to be some degree exclusive. And so we are always being surprised by something we find, too late, that we have excluded. Think of almost any political revolution or freedom movement or the ozone hole or mad cow disease or the events of September 11, 2001.

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Science and Metaphysics: A Family Quarrel? by Iain McGilchrist – from the Marginalia Review of Books

Science and Metaphysics: A Family Quarrel? by Iain McGilchrist – from the Marginalia Review of Books

In the lecture series given in Cambridge in 1951 that formed the basis of his book Science & Humanism, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger observed:

It seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said: the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand, τίνες δὲ ἡμεῖς; “Who are we?”

Schrödinger is recalling the words of the third-century Greek philosopher Plotinus; but his point is of a contemporary relevance that it is impossible to overstate. It is reinforced by the words of the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, whose work on mapping the brain is renowned: “The problem of neurology is to understand man himself.”

From the Marginalia Review of Books

Thank you for writing with the Marginalia Review of Books. We are delighted to publish your essay, “Science and Metaphysics: A Family Quarrel”, which is available to read and share both as a web-page and PDF.

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