Mark Vernon - Talks and Thoughts

Nov 01 2024 161 ep. 35 mins 44

Mark Vernon - Talks and Thoughts Podcast artwork

Assorted reflections on matters mostly to do with inner life, including spirituality and psychotherapy, consciousness and the divine. For more on see www.markvernon.com

Religion & Spirituality

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The Turn of the Tide. Martin Shaw & Mark Vernon talk about discerning the New Christian moment

Nov 01 2024 81 mins

Martin Shaw and Mark Vernon return for a second conversation following Martin’s embrace of Orthodox Christianity. The first conversation, entitled The Mossy Face of Christ, can be found on my YouTube channel.They discuss what is happening with the apparent resurgence of interest in Christianity, not least in relation to Martin’s new course, The Skin-Boat and the Star. How can w

Purposes in nature and minds. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Oct 25 2024 30 mins

One of the premises of modern science is that nature is devoid of purposes. Instead, purposeless explanations for phenomena are sought. And the strategy has proved hugely productive. Except that allusions to purpose never quite fade from the scientific imagination. In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon explore the ways in which the natu

Does the Consolation of Philosophy offered by Boethius, still work, 1500 years on?

Oct 22 2024 34 mins

The 1500th anniversary of the death of Boethius more than likely falls in 2024. He asks a key question: how to find true, lasting, reliable happiness?His answer, The Consolation of Philosophy, was a mediaeval bestseller, massively influencial, and is also very readable.So what do Boethius and, in particular, Lady Philosophy tell us?

All Things Are Full Of Gods by David Bentley Hart. A summary and discussion

Oct 06 2024 29 mins

All Things Are Full Of Gods is David Bentley Hart’s philosophical case for an idealist and theist understanding of consciousness, understood as an intertwining of mind, language and life. As he puts it: “Mind and life, and language too, are possibly only by way of a kind of “downward causation” that informs their “upward” evolution in particular beings.”The book is al

How does memory work? A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Sep 16 2024 39 mins

No one knows. Repeated experiments have failed to locate where memories are stored in the brain, casting doubt on the conventional assumption that memories are stored as material traces. In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss various kinds of memory, from episodic memory to habits. They consider how memory is linked to emotion an

0:00 / 19:22 What did Socrates teach? Or why you only understand Plato if he is decolonised

Aug 26 2024 19 mins

What Socrates taught is, of course, the wrong question. For, if there is one thing that Plato is quite clear about, it is that Socrates taught nothing. Something else is going on when you encounter this figure. So what is it?In this talk I look first at common errors concerning Plato, such as that he pitched body against soul or thought poets were best banned. Other mistakes includ

To see a world in a grain of sand. Poetry & philosophy for a civilisation in distress. A conversation with Valentin Gerlier

Aug 09 2024 49 mins

What has poetry to do with philosophy? Why might poetry particularly matter now? How did figures from Plato to Einstein value the poetic voice?Valentin Gerlier and Mark Vernon return for another conversation about the manner in which we humans are gifted with symbolic as well as cognitive imaginations. They ask why we keep returning to poets such as William Blake and William Shakes

Hallam v the State, and free speech. The Just Stop Oil desecrations are calling to our humanity

Jul 21 2024 26 mins

Just Stop Oil and the imprisonment of Roger Hallam and others has provoked an outcry, on both sides of the dispute. And the heightened emotions have made me think. What's going on here? What is at stake?I suspect that what’s being missed is something fundamental to human society and how we participate in a wider environment, and that can be discerned more fully by considering the

Chance and accidents, indeterminism and prayer. A conversation with Rupert Sheldrake

Jul 18 2024 38 mins

Randomness and luck, fate and providence. How do these facets of life relate to one another? Or is everything, actually, mechanically determined with synchronicities, say, being no more than coincidences? In this episode of the Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues, Rupert Sheldrake and Mark Vernon discuss the ways in which philosophers and scientists, ancient and modern, have imagined and ex

Cultural Christianity kills. Taking Blake's Christianity seriously. William on Jesus

Jul 04 2024 51 mins

At one level, Blake is clearly Christian. It’s even trivial to say so. And yet, his identification with Jesus is often sidelined, even written out, of accounts of the poet's work today.There are many reasons for this neglect: an understandable disillusionment with Christianity; the replacement of participative Christianity with cultural Christianity and its stress on moral law; t