Synchronicity and Jung’s Holistic Epistemology with Professor Roderick Main

Описание: Synchronicity and Jung’s Holistic Epistemology with Professor Roderick Main from the series Beyond Jung: Living Synchronicity

The phenomenon of synchronicity represents a distinctive challenge to the dominant scientific world picture of our time: If synchronicity is real, the universe must be very different indeed from what is assumed by the mainstream modern scientific understanding with its fundamental conviction that the cosmos is a randomly evolving mechanistic phenomenon blindly indifferent to human concerns, with no intrinsic meaning or purpose outside of human subjectivity. Yet this paradigm conflict is not merely of possible theoretical interest to a few open-minded scientists and philosophers. The profound shift of horizon entailed by the ongoing fact of synchronicities occurring in countless individual lives carries existential implications at the most intimate as well as most cosmic levels of human concern. In today’s lecture, I hope to address some of these more practical implications as well as those that touch on the great metaphysical and epistemological issues at play.

Roderick Main holds a BA and MA in Classics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Religious Studies from Lancaster University. He now works at the University of Essex, where he is Professor in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies and Director of the Centre for Myth Studies. His books include Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal (1997; edited); The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern Western Culture (2004); Revelations of Chance: Synchronicity as Spiritual Experience (2007); Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious (2013; co-edited); Holism: Possibilities and Problems (2020; co-edited); Jung, Deleuze, and the Problematic Whole (2021; co-edited); and most recently, Breaking the Spell of Disenchantment: Mystery, Meaning, and Metaphysics in the Work of C. G. Jung (2022).

Recorded on December 8, 2024.