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

Dr Iain McGilchrist delivers “Symmetry and Asymmetry,” the second lecture in his three-part series, Wholeness, Imagination, and the Cosmos. This compelling talk examines the generative power of asymmetry, challenging our deeply ingrained notions of balance, perfection, and creation. Drawing on physics, mathematics, biology, and art, Dr McGilchrist reveals how asymmetry drives life and meaning, taking us to the edge of chaos where the most fruitful conditions for existence arise.

Recorded in March 2024 as part of the Sophia Lectures at Ralston College’s Savannah campus, this annual series features leading thinkers engaging with the perennial questions of human existence.

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Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode:

Johann Sebastian Bach
John Donne - “Holy Sonnet 7: At the round earth’s imagin’d corners”
Gerard Manley Hopkins - “Carrion Comfort”
Werner Heisenberg - Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations with Einstein, Planck, Dirac, Bohr, and Other Physicists of Our Time
Alexander Pope - “The Rape of the Lock”
Iain McGilchrist - The Master and his Emissary
Pierre Curie
Chien-Shiung Wu
Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Aesop
Heraclitus
Democritus
Leonardo da Vinci
Louis Pasteur
Rong Li & Bruce Bowerman - “Symmetry breaking in biology”
Arthur Koestler
Aristotle
Oliver Sacks
Thomas Holstein
Tim Crow
Onur Güntürkün
Jane Clark & Daniel Simons (Christopher Chabris) - Gorillas in Our Midst
Jonathan Rowson
Alastair McIntosh
Richard Dawkins
Nikolaj Nikolaenko
Luciano Laurana
Giorgio Martini - Ideal City
Raphael - The School of Athens
Andrea Palladio
William Blake - “The Tyger”
Theodosius II
Christ Pantocrator
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
John P. McGovern
William Osler
William Alwyn Lishman
William Shakespeare - King Lear
John Cleese
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Sir Roger Scruton


Links of Possible Interest:

https://www.winchestercollege.org/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Winc...

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Timeline:
0:35 - Introduction by Dr. Stephen Blackwood
6:11 - Dr Iain McGilchrist’s lecture begins
10:08 - Limit Cases
11:41 - The Nature of Symmetry
18:17 - Asymmetry and Existence
27:53 - Asymmetry and Life
56:12 - Asymmetry, aesthetics, and ontology
1:14:21 - Asymmetry as the locus classicus of difference within sameness and vice versa
1:16:12 - Q&A