Iain McGilchrist & Bernardo Kastrup: With Reality in Mind

Iain McGilchrist is one of the most sought-after thinkers of our time. His research into brain lateralisation has helped illuminate the crises of modern life by showing how different modes of attention shape not only individual perception, but culture, science and our wider sense of reality.

Bernardo Kastrupis leading the modern renaissance of ‘metaphysical idealism’ - the notion that reality is essentially consciousness, and how this accommodates science, psychology and spirituality.

In this dialogue they will compare their views, exploring the nature of reality, culture, perception, and meaning.

Themes will include Iain's two ways of knowing reality based on his neuropsychological research, the nature of time and experience, how it can seem to be made of flow or a series of moments, and what each implies for our understanding of reality, and our relationship to it.

Before the event you might like to watch Iain's brief synopsis of his classic **The Master and His Emissary**

and Bernardo's **Small Theory of Everything**

If you want a deeper dive, check-out Bernardo's free course on idealism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPCvQQQrZwU

About Iain McGilchrist

Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, author, and public intellectual whose work bridges neuroscience, philosophy, and culture. He has held fellowships at Oxford (including All Souls and Green Templeton), worked as a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley NHS Trust in London, and was a research fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. He now lives on the Isle of Skye, where he continues to write and lecture internationally.

He is known for arguing that mind and brain can only be understood within the widest context: our embodied lives, spiritual depth, and the cultures that shape (and are shaped by) how we attend to reality. His career is unusual in that he first studied English at Oxford before retraining in medicine and psychiatry, bringing literary and philosophical sensitivity into clinical and scientific work.

McGilchrist has published across psychiatry, neuroscience, and the humanities, and has appeared widely in broadcast media and long-form interviews. His books include The Master and His Emissary, Ways of Attending, and the two-volume The Matter with Things (2021), a major critique of reductive materialism that ranges across questions of identity, reality, time, value, purpose, and the divine.

About Bernardo Kastrup

Photo by Pedro Henrique Casarin

**Bernardo Kastrup's ** work has been leading the modern renaissance of the philosophical position, ‘metaphysical idealism’ that reality is essentially mental, an appearance in ‘mind.’

Bernardo has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the 'Casimir Effect' of Quantum Field Theory was discovered).

Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured on _Scientific American_, the _Institute of Art and Ideas_, the _Blog of the American Philosophical Association_ and _Big Think_, among others. Bernardo's most recent book is _The Idea of the World: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality_. For more information, freely downloadable papers, videos, etc., please visit www.bernardokastrup.com.