The Ralston College Podcast

Mar 02 2025 57 ep. 82 mins 190

The Ralston College Podcast artwork

The Ralston College Podcast delivers a series of conversations and lectures aimed at fostering a deeper, livelier, and freer intellectual culture for us all.

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The Enduring Consolation of Philosophy with Stephen Blackwood

Mar 02 2025 53 mins

“The Enduring Consolation of Philosophy” is the keynote lecture delivered by Dr Stephen Blackwood at the 2024 Symposium of Medieval and Renaissance studies. In this talk, commemorating the 1500th anniversary of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, Dr Blackwood shows why this work is more relevant than ever. After takinging stock of the “meaning crisis” and our dire ne

Dr Iain McGilchrist in Conversation with Ralston College’s Students

Feb 10 2025 102 mins

In this intimate question and answer session, conducted in March 2024 with the students enrolled in Ralston College’s MA in the Humanities, the world-renowned psychiatrist, philosopher, and literary scholar Iain McGilchrist explores topics that animate the collective intellectual life of Ralston’s student body. Answering questions that range from the metaphysical heights of th

The Sophia Lectures with Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 3: Finitude and the Infinite

Jan 13 2025 107 mins

In his final Sophia Lecture, “Finitude and the Infinite,” Dr Iain McGilchrist grapples with the vital role that the imagination plays in the perception of reality, and what this power can disclose about reality itself. He shows that imagination has the capacity to make contact with an illimitable, irreducible, and inexhaustible world, one that presents itself to us under the as

The Sophia Lectures with Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 2: Symmetry and Asymmetry

Jan 06 2025 95 mins

In his second Sophia Lecture, Dr Iain McGilchrist gives a bracing, counterintuitive account of the fundamental categories of our experience of the world. McGilchrist shows how fundamental binaries—such as stasis and motion, simplicity and complexity, order and randomness, and even straight lines and curves—do not occur in nature in ways that conform to our assumptions about an

The Sophia Lectures with Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 1: Division and Union

Dec 30 2024 95 mins

This lecture, like the very essence of Ralston College’s mission, explores the profound interplay between division and union—a relationship that illuminates the nature of wholeness itself. Dr Iain McGilchrist delves into the insight that the whole is far more than the sum of its parts; it is a dynamic synthesis, a living interplay that transcends reductionism. Drawing on analo

Dr Iain McGilchrist on the Cultivation of Wisdom

Dec 23 2024 28 mins

A conversation between Dr Iain McGilchrist, neuropsychiatrist, philosopher, and literary critic, and Dr Stephen Blackwood, President of Ralston College, on the occasion of Dr McGilchrist’s March 2024 visit to Savannah to deliver Ralston College’s annual Sophia Lectures. Dr McGilchrist discusses his experience spending time with Ralston College students, his reasons for acceptin

The Education of Iain McGilchrist, Part II: Medical School and Beyond

Dec 16 2024 90 mins

The second part of a conversation between the renowned literary scholar and psychiatrist Dr Iain McGilchrist and Ralston College president Dr Stephen Blackwood about Dr McGilchrist’s remarkable educational trajectory. In this episode, Dr Iain McGilchrist explains how he left his successful career as a literary scholar to pursue training as a psychiatrist and how his combined stud

The Education of Iain McGilchrist, Part I: From Winchester College to All Souls

Dec 09 2024 99 mins

A conversation between Dr Iain McGilchrist, the renowned polymath, and Dr Stephen Blackwood, President of Ralston College, about Dr McGilchrist’s formative experiences at Winchester College, the prestigious British public school, and his subsequent training as a literary critic at Oxford University and his appointment as a Fellow at All Souls. Drs McGilchrist and Blackwood emphas

We Live in the Flicker: T. S. Eliot and Dante on the Spaces Between

Nov 18 2024 67 mins

Ralston College presents a talk by Christopher Snook, Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University, on the influence of Dante’s Purgatorio on two of T.S. Eliot’s most important works: The Waste Land and Four Quartets. Mr Snook attends, in particular, to how Eliot’s treatment of fragments represents at once both a departure from and a return to medieval under

The Other Side of Despair: The Search for Meaning in T.S Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

Nov 12 2024 99 mins

Ralston College presents a talk by Christopher Snook, Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dalhousie University, on T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece The Waste Land. The lecture explores the personal, historical, and literary contexts of Eliot’s poem. Through an engagement with the Western tradition that is simultaneously rich and fragmented, The Waste Land confronts cult