The Brain and our Encounter with the World - Iain McGilchrist

The Brain and our Encounter with the World - Iain McGilchrist from the series "What is Consciousness?"

At the very least, our brains help to shape our consciousness. Can an examination of the way in which they do so help us to reconcile different visons of ourselves and of our world? There is nothing reductionist about asking such a question: rather, McGilchrist shall suggest, it helps us to transcend the limitations of reductionism itself. Importantly it may, for the first time, give philosophy a basis for judging certain views on the world as worthier of acceptance than others.

Dr Iain McGilchrist is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London. He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry. He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009), and is shortly to publish a book on epistemology and ontology called The Matter with Things. He lives on the Isle of Skye, and has two daughters and a son.

Recorded on September 4, 2021.