University of Cambridge professor Douglas Hedley debuts new work at Ralston College’s inaugural Sophia Lectures
News 15th March 2024
Ralston College is delighted to announce publication of the Sophia Lectures for 2023 which present University of Cambridge Professor Douglas Hedley on the Spirit of Play.
Professor Hedley visited Savannah last March to deliver the inaugural series dedicated to exploring the perennial questions of philosophy as they bear on the meaning and value of modern life.
Over five weeks, Professor Hedley–who is an internationally recognized scholar and Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge–shared with the public his most recent scholarly work.
By engaging with a wide array of sources—from Greek philosophy to Patristic and medieval theology, Indian metaphysics and contemporary ludic studies—Professor Hedley considered the underlying philosophical dimension of play in all of its forms.
Is there a principle that unites the play of animals, the simple games of children, the intricacy of fine art, or the paraphernalia of professional athletics? And what connection exists between the free play of the imagination and the divine act of creation? Professor Hedley takes up these questions, among many others, in conversation with interlocutors like Schiller, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Johan Huizinga, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The Sophia Lectures, a free series open to the public–and last year hosted in Ralston College’s flagship property at 3 West Gordon Street–aims to make sense of our contemporary moment, and does so through the study of Western culture’s foundational texts, ideas, and spiritual insights.
This year, the celebrated scholar, public intellectual, and author of several critically acclaimed books, Dr Iain McGilchrist, was the feature speaker of the second series of annual Sophia Lectures.
Before sold out crowds, on three consecutive evenings beginning March 13th in Savannah, Dr McGilchrist drew on his most recent work, two monumental volumes on The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, and on his years of experience as a neuroscience researcher to explore how society can flourish by bridging modes of thinking which he associates with the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
These are the sorts of questions Dr McGilchrist regularly considers on his popular online platform Channel McGilchrist.
Stephen Blackwood, founding President of Ralston College introduced Dr McGilchrist, whose interviews on the College’s podcast are among the most popular, to more than 150 guests attending each lecture.
“Dr Iain McGilchrist is one of the world’s most profound and inspiring thinkers. His ability to combine science and philosophy to explore the most difficult and demanding questions about the human condition is truly unique. His wide-ranging body of work demonstrates the remarkable results that emerge when a rigorous immersion in the humanities is combined with deep knowledge of the physical sciences,” Dr Blackwood said.
“Dr McGilchrist’s wonderfully multi-disciplinary career demonstrates that range need not preclude rigor. This conviction also underpins Ralston College’s own curriculum: our MA in the Humanities is ambitious in scope, covering several disciplines, three thousand years of cultural production, and multiple languages, and yet the students approach this broad range with rigorous focus and in forensic detail.”
Dr McGilchrist’s Sophia lectures will be published in late 2024.