The Ralston College Podcast

In this episode, our Chancellor, Dr Iain McGilchrist, sits down with President Stephen Blackwood to discuss the formation of a human being. From Plato's reflections on the conditions required for intellectual development to Antonio Damasio's insights into how the brain works, this exchange stays with the question of how human beings achieve the capacity to think for themselves. Rather than focusing on standardized outcomes and instrumental ends, their exchange invites us to consider what happens when we pay attention to a given work for its own sake. The role of education, Dr McGilchrist argues, does not stop at the accumulation of information or the learning of rules, but extends into our capacity to go beyond the rules and reach past what is known for certain.  In an age defined by algorithms and distraction, this conversation presents a vision of education that awakens the faculties by which human beings come to know freedom. This spark, well-tended, is what gives rise to the ideas and individuals that have the power to shape the course of history.  If you would like to learn more about our mission, please visit www.ralston.ac Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode: Plato's Seventh Letter Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops Plutarch  Friedrich Nietzsche  Samuel Johnson Margaret Mead  Henry David Thoreau  Daniel Kahneman Isaac Newton  Antonio Damasio  Alfred North Whitehead Viktor Frankl  D. H. Lawrence J. S. Bach  Alfred Brendel  

What does it mean to find our way home? In this conversation with composer and classicist Eugenia Manolidou, President Stephen Blackwood asks how the living inheritance of ancient Greece – through language, music, poetry, and the pursuit of freedom – can reconnect us with sources of self-understanding, helping us to recover a sense of where we come from and what we are here for. Beginning with Homer, their discussion examines the enduring principles and intellectual postures that have characterized the spirit of Hellenism for millennia.  Beyond the language of the ancients, Eugenia raises music as an ontological reality, suggesting that melody and rhythm pervade the whole of existence. In considering what music and Greek thought have in common, she gestures toward a mutual intuition first pointed out by Pythagoras: beneath the seeming disorder of things, there exists intelligible harmony, ratio, and proportion. To live well, with this in mind, is to become attuned to that very order.  To learn more or become part of our community, please visit www.ralston.ac Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey Plato Lord Byron's Don Juan

To mark the opening of applications for Ralston College's 2027–28 MA in the Humanities, President Stephen Blackwood and Provost David Butterfield sat down on Samos to discuss the theme of the coming academic year: the Self. Their conversation considers why self-knowledge has remained a perennial human concern, and how questions of character, desire, consciousness, and the soul shape our understanding of how we ought to live. They also reflect on what distinguishes Ralston's MA: its ambitious scope across disciplines and centuries, its movement between Greece and Savannah, and its commitment to pursuing fundamental questions through great works, close study, and serious conversation. Applications are now open. Full and partial scholarships available. Priority deadline: December 18th, 2026.  Apply now at: https://www.ralston.ac/humanities-ma

Generously sponsored by the Ben Delo Foundation. The final lecture of Ralston College's symposium, AI and the Battle for the Soul, asks a question that turns from the future of artificial intelligence to something far older and more enduring: What does freedom require? Weaving together neuroscience, philosophy, physics, and literature, Dr Iain McGilchrist examines free will, consciousness, and the forms of attention that compose our engagement with the world. Over several decades at the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience, Dr McGilchrist's contributions have transformed contemporary discussions of consciousness, attention, and meaning. At a moment so often dominated by mechanical explanations and computational models, he emphasizes the indispensable role of openness, receptivity, and participation in understanding, arguing that reality exceeds reductionist accounts.  If you would like to support us in this work, please visit ralston.ac/donate. Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode: Henry Stapp Pierre-Simon Laplace Benjamin Libet Immanuel Kant Plato Socrates Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound Charles Darwin William Blake Carl Jung Albrecht Altdorfer Daniel Phillips  

Generously sponsored by the Ben Delo Foundation. Ralston College welcomed Iain McGilchrist and Stephen Wolfram in May of 2026 for a public conversation during our symposium, AI and the Battle for the Soul. Beginning with the promises and implications of this technology, the discussion opens onto a deeper inquiry concerning consciousness, computation, purpose, and the irreducible constitution of reality itself.  Setting out from seemingly distant philosophical commitments, these thinkers demonstrate an uncommon willingness to follow first principles wherever they lead. After decades in physics, computer science, and the study of complex systems, Wolfram shares his vision through the lens of computation, looking for the simple rules underlying complexity in the natural world. Drawing upon decades studying philosophy, literature, and neuropsychiatry, McGilchrist makes the case that reality exceeds computation, suggesting that consciousness is grounded in embodiment, receptivity, and participation. The two thinkers do not remain at the level of disagreement, but examine one another's fundamental assumptions with a rare seriousness and intellectual charity.    If you would like to support us in this work, please visit ralston.ac/donate. Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode: Alan Turing Isaac Newton Albert Einstein Charles Darwin Aristotle René Descartes Ludwig Wittgenstein John von Neumann  Roger Penrose  

Generously sponsored by the Ben Delo Foundation. In this second lecture from our recent symposium, AI and the Battle for the Soul, theologian and iconographer Jonathan Pageau asks: Who, or what, does AI serve? By drawing on mythology, scripture, symbolism, and poetry, he argues that the questions raised by AI directly concern human purpose and meaning. Through the stories of Prometheus, the Holy Grail, Moloch, and the Tower of Babel, Pageau unpacks the deepest questions raised by AI, calling on us to recognize what technology reveals about ourselves and the civilization we are building.    Recorded at Ralston College in May 2026, this event brought together leading thinkers including Iain McGilchrist, Jonathan Pageau, and Stephen Wolfram for a day-long engagement with some of the most pressing questions facing technological advancement, the meaning crisis, and ultimately, civilization itself.  If you would like to support us in this work, please visit ralston.ac/donate. Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode: Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy The Holy Grail (Arthurian Legend) Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch Allen Ginsberg's Howl Alfred North Whitehead Simone Weil Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound Yuval Noah Harari Viktor Frankl: Man's Search for Meaning  

Generously sponsored by the Ben Delo Foundation. In this opening lecture from Ralston College's symposium, AI and the Battle for the Soul, Dr Iain McGilchrist traces a line of questions concerning the nature of intelligence, embodiment, wisdom, and the soul in an age increasingly defined by mechanistic thinking and the rise of large language models. Drawing on neuroscience, literature, theology, music, and myth, he explores what it means to understand beyond the constraints of reductionist accounts that view the human being as a computational information processor. In this wide-ranging and dynamic talk, he invites us to consider, as deeply as we can, the essence of our humanity.   Recorded at Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, this event brought together leading thinkers including Jonathan Pageau and Stephen Wolfram for a day-long engagement with some of the most pressing questions facing technological advancement, the meaning crisis, and ultimately, civilization itself. .  If you would like to support us in this work, please visit ralston.ac/donate. Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode: E. M. Forster: The Machine Stops Isaiah Berlin Plato David Bohm Ludwig Wittgenstein  Gabriel Marcel Homer William Shakespeare: Othello  William Ernest Henley:  Invictus Nelson Mandela William Wordsworth: Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey Thomas Tallis Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina Tomás Luis de Victoria William Byrd Emil Cioran Johann Sebastian Bach Eugene Gendlin George Gaylord Simpson Galileo Galilei Peter Medawar Niels Bohr Joseph Pieper V. S. Ramachandran D. H. Lawrence Laozi: Tao Te Ching George Steiner Martin Heidegger Hannah Arendt John Milton: Paradise Lost Saint Paul: Epistle to the Ephesians Onondaga Nation Yuval Noah Harari Viktor Frankl: Man's Search for Meaning  

Dr Armand D'Angour turns our attention to the lyrical poetry of Horace, as it is placed within the Greek musical and poetic inheritance. With close readings of key odes, he shows us how Horace uses Greek lyric meters to achieve something both rhythmic and aural. Constructed around the themes of love, time, and political life, these poems can be seen as carefully constructed personnae, rather than autobiographical confession. This lyric poetry is shown to be a disciplined artform that carries inherited Greek forms into something distinctly Roman, without disturbing the musical intelligence beneath them. These poems were not written to be read silently, but were deeply connected to music, rhythm, and memory. By recovering this dimension, Professor D'Angour illuminates Horace not just as a literary figure, but as a poet working within a living tradition of song in which meaning is brought about through the interplay of sound, structure, and voice.    Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode: Horace's Odes Homer's Iliad and Odyssey Sappho Alcaeus Anacreon Pindar Catullus Virgil Aristotle Plato Epicurus Augustus Maecenas  

Great works of literature are often regarded with admiration and even intimidation for their role as the lofty subject of scholarly analysis, but these books were not written for the halls of the university alone. These works were composed to be used: insofar as they are able to challenge, guide, and transform the lives of those who come into their possession. The redemptive power of philosophy and literature is something we focus on often at the college, but few people today model this power as well as Rod Dreher. In this lecture, we find a potent example of the enduring vitality that exists in Dante Alighieri's  Divine Comedy. The resulting expanse is an account of literature as something spiritually operative. Dante's poem becomes, in Dreher's telling, a work not only to be interpreted but to be inhabited, as a means by which grace can possess the imagination and heal what argument alone cannot.  Subscribe for updates at www.ralston.ac/subscribe  Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode: Inferno Purgatorio Paradiso Augustine's Confessions Julian of Norwich Benedict XVI Thomas Aquinas Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue

The great books have never been more accessible, yet we live in a moment increasingly drawn away from them. Their value and transformative power are immediate, but many lack the patience and desire to become truly acquainted with the great minds of antiquity. In this installment of the Career and Life Conversation series, Dr Spencer Klavan joins Ralston College Fellow Connor Livingston for a discussion on the utility of the classics, the confluence of religion and philosophy, and the role of embodiment in human reason, along with what this reveals about artificial intelligence. From Athens to Jerusalem, from Plato to Paul, this exchange offers lofty reflections alongside practical insights for those seeking wisdom in an age that does not make it a priority.  If you have found these conversations meaningful, please consider supporting our work at www.ralston.ac/donate. Subscribe for updates at: www.ralston.ac/subscribe Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode: Athanasius's On the Incarnation C.S. Lewis Plato's Republic Aristotle's De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics Socrates St. Paul Augustine's Confessions Disputation of the Holy Sacrament by Raphael T.S. Eliot's The Four Quartets  Dante Aquinas Shakespeare Sir Arthur Conan Doyle  Owen Barfield