This event will be online only. Registation will give you access to the Zoom link on the online event page. To register for the entire series on "Mind, Death, & Rebirth," please go here.
A recording of this talk will be shared via email a few days after the event.
*If tickets are sold-out, you can choose "Donate (any amount)" in the "Get Ticket" options for entry.
Description: Edward F. Kelly is an experimental psychologist and neuroscientist by training, but over the past 30 years he has had numerous opportunities to interact with scholars of religion, mostly in connection with the Esalen fellowship that resulted in Irreducible Mind (2007), Beyond Physicalism (2015) and Consciousness Unbound (2021). Those interactions showed him how deeply and destructively the currently prevailing science-based worldview known as “physicalism” has colonized the humanities in general, and to his surprise even religious studies, where its impact on the subject matter is perhaps most immediate and direct, and almost invariably hostile to traditional beliefs. The main purpose of this talk will be to explain why the physicalist worldview is in fact collapsing and no longer deserves to be presumed correct by scholars of religion. Nor can physicalists claim that theirs is the only game in town: Scientifically and philosophically respectable alternatives to physicalism are already in play, with more steadily emerging, and these are in general far more hospitable than physicalism to spiritual experiences and truth-claims of the sorts associated with traditional religions.
Edward F. Kelly is a Professor in the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at UVA. He received his Ph.D. in psycholinguistics/cognitive science from Harvard in 1971, and spent the next 15-plus years working mainly in experimental parapsychology, followed by a similar stint with a large neuroscience group at UNC-Chapel Hill where he carried out EEG and fMRI studies of human cortical adaptation to natural tactile stimuli. He returned full-time to psychical research in 2002, serving as lead author of Irreducible Mind (2007), Beyond Physicalism (2015), and Consciousness Unbound (2021), all produced under the auspices of Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research. He is now returning to his central research interest – functional neuroimaging studies of psi and altered states in exceptional subjects.
