Rupert Sheldrake has had a long career in the sciences and almost as long a career in provoking indignant reactions from dogmatic materialists and physicalist reductionists, principally in the life sciences. He has been a consistent critic of mechanistic models of nature for many decades, but always within the bounds of experimental discipline. Much of his work and thinking has concerned the enigmas of “memory”—taking that word in a very broad acceptation—not only within conscious life, but also within the structure of all self-organizing natural systems. A great deal of his intellectual development has also, however, had a distinctly spiritual dimension, beginning with his own “conversion” (so to speak) from a materialist vision of reality to one open to the transcendent, and taking him, by way of Indian religious thought and philosophy, back to Christianity (with a bit of guidance from Bede Griffiths).
He has a Substack publication of his own, entitled (obscurely enough) Rupert Sheldrake.
The conversation was delightful.
