Spherical Causation
Iain McGilchrist · All Souls College, Oxford · Psychiatry & philosophy
Overview
Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things, argues that the brain's two hemispheres deliver two whole ways of attending to the world — one narrow, abstracting, and manipulative; the other broad, contextual, and relational — and that Western culture has over-committed to the former. His symposium title, “Spherical Causation,” pushes against the linear, billiard-ball picture of cause and effect: causation, on this view, is better imagined as radiating in all directions at once, with wholes and contexts shaping their parts as much as the reverse. For the Platonic-Space program this is a claim about how form should be approached at all — that reducing rich, mutually-constituting patterns to one-way mechanical chains loses precisely the structure that matters. It connects naturally to formal causality and to the symposium's resistance to flat, bottom-up “emergence.”
AI-generated overview based on the talk title and the speaker's published work; the authoritative recording is on the symposium YouTube playlist.