#414 Robert McCauley & George Graham: Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind

Jan 7, 2021

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Dr. Robert McCauley is the William Rand Kenan Jr. University Professor of Philosophy at the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, at Emory University.

Dr. George Graham is former Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Georgia State University, and the AC Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University.

They are both authors of a recent book, Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind: What Mental Abnormalities Can Teach Us About Religions.

In this episode, we focus on their book. We start by covering some of the concepts that they explore in the book, like ecumenical naturalism and purpose-driven continuity theory. We talk about the continuity between religious cognition, normal cognition and mental disorders, and what happens when mental disorders manifest in a religious context. We also discuss mental disorders more generally, and ask if they are illnesses, and if they are cultural. We tackle the issue of by-product, adaptation, and cultural group selection approaches to religion. We then go through the mental disorders covered in the book. We start with a condition that is also experienced by normal people: hallucinatory voices. We then talk about depression, Obsessive-compulsive disorder, and autism. Finally, we discuss if we really need to study people’s beliefs to understand religious phenomena, and end with how the framework laid-out in the book can be applied to studying terrorism, and in a clinical context.

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