The Blind Spot
Dear subscribers,
Please join us in San Francisco on Wednesday, November 13 for an evening dialogue with philosophers Evan Thompson and Matthew David Segall, where they will discuss Thompson’s new book The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience.
Audience Q&A will follow.
The schedule, description, and bios are below. We hope to see you there.
Schedule
5:30 pm: Arrival + Refreshments
6:00 – 7:00 pm: Event Time
7:00 – 7:30 pm: Q&A
Description
Join philosophers Matthew David Segall and Evan Thompson for a dialogue about Thompson’s new coauthored book The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (MIT Press, 2024). Thompson and his coauthors, the physicists Marcelo Gleiser and Adam Frank, argue that modern science has often overlooked the importance of direct experience, leading to reductive misunderstandings of phenomena, including time, life, and consciousness. Segall and Thompson will explore how reconnecting science with human experience can address not only various theoretical challenges, but also the social and ecological consequences of ignoring the embodied origins of scientific knowledge.
Participants
Matthew David Segall is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer, teacher, and philosopher applying process-relational thought across the natural and social sciences, as well as to the study of consciousness. He is Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Department at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and the Chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute. His most recent book is titled Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (Revelore, 2023).
Evan Thompson is a writer and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he is also an Associate Member of the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Psychology (Cognitive Science). His most recent book, co-authored with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, is The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (MIT Press, 2024). He is also the author Why I Am Not a Buddhist (Yale University Press, 2020); Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy (Columbia University Press 2015); Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007); and Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception (Routledge Press, 1995). He is the co-author, with Francisco J. Varela and Eleanor Rosch, of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991; revised edition 2016). Thompson is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Past President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association.
