Ralston College debuts second annual Sophia Lectures featuring world-renowned author Iain McGilchrist
News 27th January 2025
Three-part public lecture launches online, first delivered to sold-out crowds in Savannah in Spring 2024
Ralston College’s annual series of Sophia Lectures debuted online in recent weeks, offering audiences around the world access to three discourses by acclaimed scholar Dr Iain McGilchrist on recovering wholeness in an age of fragmentation and reductionist thinking.
The second annual series was first presented to audiences in Savannah last spring: Over three days in March, the world-renowned British psychiatrist, neuroscientist, philosopher, and literary scholar, who is best known for his influential works The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things, lectured before an audience of hundreds.
The College was delighted to welcome so many local Savannah residents, as well as many guests who traveled from out-of-state, that additional tickets for the final lecture had to be added at the last minute.
The Sophia Lectures at Ralston College
The Sophia Lectures stand as Ralston College’s flagship public lecture series, which every year welcomes to Savannah distinguished academics and public intellectuals to share their insights and engage with the fundamental questions of the human condition.
Through the study of Western culture’s foundational texts, ideas, and spiritual insights, the series aims to make sense of our contemporary era by exploring profound and perennial questions as they bear on the meaning and value of human life.
Established in the College’s first academic year, the lectures also offer to the wider world the kind of intense, enriching conversations and debates that are central features of what students of Ralston’s Master of Arts in the Humanities experience.
During the inaugural year of the series, Professor Douglas Hedley examined the philosophical dimension of play in all its forms in a five-part lecture delivered over five weeks.
About the 2024 Sophia Lectures by Dr McGilchrist: Wholeness, Imagination, and the Cosmos
In Dr McGilchrist’s three-part lecture series Wholeness, Imagination, and the Cosmos, he critiques modern society’s excessive reliance on the left hemisphere’s reductive, analytical approach to the world, advocating instead for a reintegration of the right hemisphere’s holistic, interconnected perspective.
Describing the series, Dr McGilchrist encouraged audiences to recover wholeness:
“The word ‘cosmos’ implies a beautiful and harmonious whole. For at least the last 300 years, and arguably much longer in the Western world, we have come to see the universe as at best a mechanism, if not a mere agglomeration of material bits and pieces, without intrinsic order, purpose or meaning,” Dr McGilchrist said.
“Its very wholeness has been lost, and with it our capacity to understand ourselves in relation to that whole. This follows an exaggerated tendency to use our analytic, and therefore naturally fragmenting, faculty to the exclusion of our capacity to see complex wholes, and above all to understand the profoundly relational nature of all that exists.
“This tension arises because of the necessary evolutionary specialisations of the two cerebral hemispheres, a tension which can and should be fruitful: we need harmony between both ways of being in the world if we are to flourish.
“In the absence of that harmony—the harmony that brings depth to life—the world is drained of its meaning. But crucially, although each hemisphere plays a role, they are not of equal import. “In the Sophia Lectures for 2024, I draw on neuropsychology and physics, as well as the humanities—philosophy, poetry, music, painting and myth.
“I fear that if we fail to understand these matters, we will continue to sleepwalk into the abyss.”
Following the series, Dr McGilchrist joined Dr Stephen Blackwood, President of Ralston College, to reflect on his stay in Savannah. Dr McGilchrist discussed the cultivation of wisdom, the importance of leisure for deep thought, the relational nature of reality, and the enduring value of intellectual fellowship.
Praising Ralston College’s dedication to wisdom, truth, and community, he underscored the necessity of recovering a rich, non-instrumental education to foster culture and human flourishing in a fragmented world.
Based on the Isle of Skye, Dr McGilchrist continues to bridge disciplines, urging a balance between science, imagination, and meaning, sharing many of his insights with audiences of his popular online platform Channel McGilchrist.
Donor support allows the College to host public events of this calibre. To help us continue in this essential part of our work, please consider making a financial gift to Ralston College.