Nigel McGilchrist – The Mind of Pythagoras: A First Bridge Between East and West
How did we come to think the way we do?
Ancient Greece is not just a place or an epoch of the remote past; it is a whole way of thinking about the world. It is a mirror in which we can see ourselves, and in which we begin to understand who we are, where our science and art come from, and why we think the way we do. In it, we see the origin of what we call, for convenience, a ‘Western’ way of understanding the world around us: yet this was the product of a coming together of the far more ancient knowledge of the East – of Egypt, Mesopotamia and India – with the restless curiosity and ingenuity of the Greek mind.
One particular figure – the philosopher and explorer, Pythagoras – took, from his travels in the East, the fruits of very ancient observations and spiritual enquiry that he found there, and brought them back into the Mediterranean area at the dawn of Classical Antiquity. Not solely a mathematician, or a musician, or a spiritual teacher, or a philosopher, but all of these things in one – Pythagoras is the cornerstone of the way we think today. He married the mind of the East into the West. And neither the revolution of Platonic thinking, nor of Christianity, nor of scientific enlightenment, could have happened quite as they did without his contribution – without his profound curiosity, his distant travels, his spiritual sensitivity, and his appreciation of the fundamental role of beauty in our cosmos.
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About the speaker:
Nigel McGilchrist is a graduate of Oxford University and has lived and worked for most of his life in the Mediterranean world – Greece, Italy and Egypt – as an art historian, teaching and writing about its history and extraordinary cultural diversity. He has taught for universities in both America and in Italy, and is the author of an acclaimed series of books on the art and architecture of the Islands of the Aegean Sea. His most recent publication (2022) is a study of Pythagoras and his Age, entitled: When the Dog speaks, the Philosopher listens.
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Speaker
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Nigel McGilchristArt historian
Nigel McGilchrist is a graduate of Oxford University and has lived and worked for most of his life in the Mediterranean world – Greece, Italy and Egypt – as an art historian, teaching and writing about its history and extraordinary cultural diversity. He has taught for universities in both America and in Italy, and is the author of an acclaimed series of books on the art and architecture of the Islands of the Aegean Sea. His most recent publication (2022) is a study of Pythagoras and his Age, entitled: When the Dog speaks, the Philosopher listens.