The Matter With Things

About

Background summary — AI-generated; not source-grounded.

The Matter With Things (2021) is Iain McGilchrist’s two-volume sequel to The Master and His Emissary. Running to approximately 1,200 pages of primary text (plus hundreds of pages of appendices, notes, and plates), it argues that understanding ourselves and the world requires a radical reorientation of how we attend to reality.

The work is organised in three parts: (I) neuropsychology — the evidence for functionally distinct hemispheric attention modes; (II) epistemology — how we know, what counts as truth, and why the methods we over-rely on systematically fail us; (III) metaphysics — time, space, quantum reality, consciousness, purpose, and value. McGilchrist’s conclusion is panpsychist and process-philosophical: consciousness is an ontological primitive, not a biological product; relations are prior to the things related; and what we call the West’s ‘meta-crisis’ is, at root, an attention disorder — a cultural over-prioritisation of the left hemisphere’s mode of attending.

In the wiki

• Iain McGilchrist on Brain Lateralisation, Ways of Knowing, and the Nature of Consciousness — Jim Rutt (EP 154–155, 2022) covers the full three-part structure of the book
• concepts/Hemisphere Lateralisation — the neuropsychological framework
• concepts/Panpsychism — the metaphysical conclusion