Parallax Academy # 8: John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro
After Socrates and Kierkegaard
Hosted by Andrew Sweeny
A discussion with philosopher and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and his writing partner Christopher Mastropietro about the philosophers they love best: for John, Socrates for and Christopher Søren Kierkegaard.
John Vervaeke is an Associate Professor, in the teaching stream. He has been teaching at the University of Toronto since 1994. He currently teaches courses in the Psychology department on thinking and reasoning with an emphasis on insight problem solving, cognitive development with an emphasis on the dynamical nature of development, and higher cognitive processes with an emphasis on intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and the Psychology of wisdom.
He is the director of the Cognitive Science program where he also teaches courses on the introduction to Cognitive Science, and the Cognitive Science of consciousness wherein he emphasizes 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) models of cognition and consciousness .
In addition, he taught a course in the Buddhism, Psychology and Mental Health program on Buddhism and Cognitive Science for fifteen years. He is the director of the Consciousness and the Wisdom Studies Laboratory. He has won and been nominated for several teaching awards including the 2001 Students’ Administrative Council and Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students Teaching Award for the Humanities, and the 2012 Ranjini Ghosh Excellence in Teaching Award. He has published articles on relevance realization, general intelligence, mindfulness, flow, metaphor, and wisdom. He is first author of the book Zombies in Western Culture: A 21st Century crisis which integrates Psychology and Cognitive Science to address the meaning crisis in Western society. He is the author and presenter of the YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
Christopher Mastropietro is a co-author of Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis and two additional publications: “Gnosis in the Second Person: Responding to the Meaning Crisis in the Socratic Quest of Authentic Dialogue” (in the forthcoming Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds by Perspectiva Press) and “Diagnosing the Current Age: A Symptomology of the Meaning Crisis” (“Collective Navigation” of The Side View).