Richard Tarnas, author of the acclaimed and highly entertaining work on Western intellectual and cultural history, reveals the profound richness of our heritage even as our civilization seems to be falling off-course. Tarnas draws from both traditional and contemporary sources that can help us rediscover a sense of wonder and belonging in a fragmented world. Psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist extends Tarnas' narrative by exploring the hemispheres of our brain and how they evolved to afford us different ways of being in the world. McGilchrist demonstrates how these complementary ways of engaging with reality, when properly balanced, foster both our sense of wholeness and our remarkable problem-solving abilities.
This panel took place on Saturday, September 13, as part of Frontiers of Knowledge, a day-long symposium featuring an amazing collection of world-renowned speakers conceived by Candice Olson and co-produced by Aspen Public Radio, Center for MINDS, California Institute of Integral Studies and the Mays Family Foundation at the historic Wheeler Opera House in the heart of Aspen, Colorado. Learn more at: frontiersofknowledge.org
Speakers:
Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He is best-known as the author of The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009), and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva, 2021).
Richard Tarnas is Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he was founding director of the graduate department in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. During his thirty years there he taught courses in the history of ideas, depth psychology, archetypal cosmology, cultural history, and the evolution of consciousness. He has also frequently lectured on archetypal studies and depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and was formerly the director of programs and education at Esalen Institute. He is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a narrative history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern that is widely used in universities. His second book, Cosmos and Psyche, received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network. He is a past president of the International Transpersonal Association and was a long-time member of the Board of Governors for the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.
Andrew Davis is an American process philosopher, theologian, and scholar of the cosmos. He is research and academic director for the Center for Process Studies where he researches, writes, teaches, and organizes conferences on various aspects of process-relational thought; an advocate of metaphysics and meaning in a hospitable universe, he approaches philosophy as the endeavor to systematically think through what reality must be like because we are a part of it. He is author, editor, and co-editor of nearly a dozen books including Mind, Value, and Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy; Process Cosmology: New Integrations in Science and Philosophy; Metaphysics of Exo-Life: Toward a Constructive Whiteheadian Cosmotheology; and Whitehead's Universe: A Prismatic Introduction (forthcoming). Follow his work at andrewmdavis.info.