Cognitive scientist, psychologist, lecturer at the University of Toronto.
Contemporary · Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Install John's frameworks in Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add adamtpang/summon.guide
/plugin install vervaekeInstalls 4 skills from John, plus the rest of summon.guide. Source on GitHub.
Vervaeke is Canadian and has spent his academic career at the University of Toronto, where he has taught in the Psychology department and the Cognitive Science programme since 1994. His scholarly work sits at the meeting point of cognitive science, philosophy, and the psychology of religion, and he has been recognised repeatedly for teaching rather than only for research, including the Students' Administrative Council and Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students Teaching Award in 2001 and the Ranjini Ghosh Excellence in Teaching Award in 2012.
His research programme centres on relevance realization, an account of how a finite mind selects what matters from a combinatorially explosive world. The problem is a version of what artificial intelligence calls the frame problem: no rule can specify which rules to apply, yet human beings navigate open situations continuously. Vervaeke argues that relevance realization is not a rule or an algorithm but a self-organizing process that shapes a person's salience landscape, and that it can be trained. Around this he has built related work on general intelligence, mindfulness, metaphor, and wisdom. In 2019 he released Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, a fifty part lecture series published free on YouTube, which traces the historical and cognitive roots of what he calls the meaning crisis, from the axial age through Christianity, the scientific revolution, and the collapse of the frameworks that connected people to meaning. It reached an audience far outside the university and is the work he is best known for. A second series, After Socrates, followed, focused on moving from dialectic into dialogos and on the cultivation of wisdom through practice. He co-authored the open access book Zombies in Western Culture with Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic in 2017, using the zombie figure to examine cultural alienation and the loss of shared frameworks.
Vervaeke's contribution is to treat wisdom as a subject for cognitive science rather than for sentiment. By defining the meaning crisis in terms of specific cognitive machinery, and by distinguishing four irreducible kinds of knowing, he gave a generation of readers a vocabulary for a problem they could feel but not name. His insistence on an ecology of practices, where practices are chosen so they correct each other's failure modes, has been widely adopted by people building contemplative and educational programmes.
Frameworks distilled from John’s life, packaged as Claude Code skills. Each skill is invoked with a slash command and grounded in the primary biographies listed under References.
/vervaeke:vervaekeWork out which of the four kinds of knowing your problem actually lives in, then train what becomes salient rather than trying harder.
Source: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (lecture series) by John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, lecture series
/vervaeke:four-kinds-of-knowingPropositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory. Naming which one a problem lives in explains why the advice you were given does not work.
Source: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (lecture series) by John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, lecture series
/vervaeke:relevance-realizationYou cannot check every option and no rule tells you which rules to use. What you notice is a trainable process, not a fixed fact about you.
Source: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (lecture series) by John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, lecture series
/vervaeke:ecology-of-practicesEvery practice has a failure mode. Choose a small set that correct each other rather than one technique you hope is sufficient.
Source: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (lecture series) by John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, lecture series
Install in Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add adamtpang/summon.guide
/plugin install vervaekeBring John’s frameworks into your terminal. One install registers every guide’s skills.
Each Claude Code skill above is grounded in a specific passage of a specific book. These are the primary sources we drew from for John.
“We are suffering from a wisdom famine in the West.”
Their voice on summon.guide is grounded in:
Other guides
