Overture
1. Seeing the sense-making animal
2. Logos: a very short history
3. Deflating the mystery 1: putting the world inside the mind
4. Deflating the mystery 2: logos as bio-logos
5. The necessary subjectivity of the subject
6. Thatter: knowledge
7. Senselessness at the heart of sense
8. Towards a complete comprehension of the world?
Coda
Raymond Tallis trained in medicine at Oxford University and at St Thomas’ Hospital London before becoming Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences for his research in clinical neuroscience and he has played a key role in developing guidelines for the care of stroke patients in the UK. From 2011–14 he was Chair of Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying. He retired from medicine in 2006 to become a full-time writer. His books have ranged across many subjects – from philosophical anthropology to literary and cultural criticism – but all are characterised by a fascination for the infinite complexity of human lives and the human condition. The Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine lists him as one of the world’s leading polymaths.
A book for anyone baffled by the world and our place in it. Tallis
is an engaging guide through the fog.
*Tom McClelland, University of Cambridge*
Raymond Tallis is one of the most thoughtful of self-confessed
unbelievers. In a sequence of publications, he has demonstrated his
grasp of complicated ideas, and his ability to communicate and
criticise them with enviable clarity and even-handed good humour
... His aim is 'to remove some of the barriers to seeing the
mystery of our capacity to make sense of things'. In this, he
succeeds admirably ... Written for the general reader with 'a
sub-philosophical frame of mind', this study will repay reading
more than once — and then again.
*John Saxbee, Church Times*
Tallis calls for an end to the unfruitful antagonism perceived to
exist between the human dimension of knowledge and the hard facts
of objective reality. It is only by accepting the reality of both,
and by paying more attention to the dynamic interplay between them,
that we are able to make sense of things ... This book requires
careful, thoughtful reading, and readers who already have some
familiarity with the debate concerning knowledge will have an
easier time. That said, it offers a substantial new direction in a
pretty hot area of philosophy. In particular, Tallis’s critiques of
the extremes are well-considered. If this is in your area of
interest, then this book is more than worth its purchase price.
*Philosophy Now*
Much of this elegant, self-deprecating and often witty book will
give great pleasure to many theologians ... despite the occasional
theological wince, I found much to relish here.
*Robin Gill, Theology*
An erudite tour through the history of ideas and knowing ... of
great help to junior undergraduates ... and the literate reader
intent on pursuing some of the murkier depths of epistemology.
*Michael Marsh, European Society for the Study of Science and
Theology News & Reviews*
It only helps that [Tallis] is a polymath, not an academic
philosopher. Formally trained in medicine, he is well informed
about science, and thus not intimidated by it, as too may academic
philosophers are. Not least among his other virtues is the
unacademic elegance of his prose.
*Edward Feser, Times Literary Supplement*
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