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person1990s-present

Iain McGilchrist

Disciplines:
philosophy
psychiatry
neuroscience

Summary

British psychiatrist and literary scholar who argues that the two hemispheres of the brain attend to the world in fundamentally different ways — and that Western civilization has become pathologically dominated by the left hemisphere.

Core Contribution

The Master and His Emissary: the left hemisphere (focused, analytic, abstracts from context) and the right hemisphere (broad, contextual, attends to the world as it is) have opposing modes of attention — modernity has allowed the emissary (left) to usurp the master (right). The Matter with Things: a two-volume expansion of this argument into metaphysics.

Key Spikes & Highlights

  • Was a Fellow in English Literature at All Souls College, Oxford before training as a psychiatrist — one of the more unusual intellectual trajectories of a contemporary philosopher-scientist.

Notable Works & Achievements

The Master and His Emissary

The Matter with Things

Historical Influences

Heidegger Merleau-Ponty

Intellectual Lineage

Neuroscience Phenomenology

Contemporaries & Peers

Antonio Damasio

Minds Influenced

No recorded minds influenced.

Intellectual Posterity

Hemisphere Theory

Discussing

Iain McGilchrist

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