EP 322 Brendan Graham Dempsey on Psyche and Symbolic Learning



Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about the ideas in his book Psyche and Symbolic Learning, volume 2 in his Evolution of Meaning series. The conversation covers hierarchical complexity, stage theories of development, constructivism & realism, dynamic skill theory, the Lectical Scale, ego development & consciousness, meaning systems & worldviews, cross-cultural developmental patterns, statistical distributions of developmental stages, the relationship between semantic richness & structural complexity, justification systems theory & cultural evolution, and much more.

Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer, researcher, organic farmer, and the director of Sky Meadow Institute, an organization dedicated to “promoting systems-based thinking about the things that matter most.” He graduated summa cum laude with a BA in religious studies and classical civilizations from the University of Vermont and earned his master’s from Yale University, where he studied religion and culture. He is the author of Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics and host of the Metamodern Spirituality Podcast. His primary interests include theorizing developments in culture after postmodernism, productively bridging the divide between science and spirituality, and developing sustainable systems for life to flourish. All of these lead through the paradigms of emergence and complexity, which inform all of his work.