Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Raymond Tallis Reader
The Raymond Tallis Reader provides a comprehensive survey of the work of this passionate, perceptive and often controversial thinker. Key selections from Tallis's major works are supplemented by Michael Grant's detailed introduction and linking commentary. From nihilism to Theorrhoea, from literary theory to the role of the unconscious, The Raymond Tallis Reader guides us through the panoptic sweep of Tallis's critical insights and reveals a way of thinking for the twenty-first century.
The Hand
What are the origins of human difference? As this philosophical exploration shows, the difference between human beings and other animals is the result of a complex sequence of events which began several million years ago with the evolution of the human hand.
In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections
In these lively and provocative essays, philosopher, polymath and all-round intellectual heavyweight, Raymond Tallis debunks commonplace truths, exposes woolly thinking and pulls the rug from beneath a wide range of commentator whether scientist, theologian, philosopher or pundit. Tallis takes to task much of contemporary science and philosophy, arguing that they are guilty of taking us down ever narrowing conduits of problem solving that only invite ever more complex responses and in doing so have lost sight of "wonder" - the metaphysical intoxication that first gave birth to philosophy 2,500 years ago. Tallis tackles some meaty topics - memory, time, language, truth, fiction, consciousness - but always with his characteristic verve, insight and wit. These essays showcase Tallis's skill for getting to the heart of the matter and challenging us to see, and wonder, in different ways. Wonder is the proper state of humankind, and as these essays show it has no more forceful a champion than Raymond Tallis.
Aping Mankind
Neuroscience has made astounding progress in the understanding of the brain. What should we make of its claims to go beyond the brain and explain consciousness, behaviour and culture? Where should we draw the line? In this brilliant critique Raymond Tallis dismantles "Neuromania", arising out of the idea that we are reducible to our brains and "Darwinitis" according to which, since the brain is an evolved organ, we are entirely explicable within an evolutionary framework. With precision and acuity he argues that the belief that human beings can be understood in biological terms is a serious obstacle to clear thinking about what we are and what we might become. Neuromania and Darwinitis deny human uniqueness, minimise the differences between us and our nearest animal kin and offer a grotesquely simplified account of humanity. We are, argues Tallis, infinitely more interesting and complex than we appear in the mirror of biology. Combative, fearless and thought-provoking, Aping Mankind is an important book and one that scientists, cultural commentators and policy-makers cannot ignore. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by the Author.
Freedom
Tallis brings his familiar erudition and insight to this most intriguing and important philosophical question - the nature of our freedom - one that impacts most directly on our lives and takes us to the heart of what we are.
The Kingdom of Infinite Space
In this pathbreaking book, one of Britain s most eloquent and original thinkers writes about the head, what happens in it, and how it is and is not connected to our sense of identity and consciousness. Blending science, philosophy, and humor, Raymond Tallis examines the extraordinarily complex relationship we have with our heads. His aim, as he says, is to turn readers into astonished tourists of the piece of the world that is closest to them, so they never again take for granted the head that looks at them from the mirror. Readers will delight that this is precisely what he accomplishes. The voyage begins with a meditation on the self-portrait of a mirror image, followed by a consideration ...
The Raymond Tallis Reader
The Raymond Tallis Reader provides a comprehensive survey of the work of this passionate, perceptive, and often controversial thinker. Key selections from Tallis's major works are supplemented by Michael Grant's detailed introduction and linking commentary. From nihilism to Theorrhoea, from literary theory to the role of the unconscious, The Raymond Tallis Reader guides us through the panoptic sweep of Tallis's critical insights and reveals a way of thinking for the 21st century.
Hunger
Understanding hunger is the key to understanding ourselves. While they seem the most obvious things about us, our hungers are also deeply mysterious, arising out of, and casting light on, the unique character of human consciousness. In humans, physiological need is transformed into a multitude of needs that are remote from organic necessity. Even first-level biological hunger is experienced differently in humans; and little in human feeding behaviour has any parallel in the animal kingdom.In this book, Ray Tallis takes us through the different levels of our hunger. Out of our primary appetites arise a myriad of pleasures and tastes that are elaborated in second-level hedonistic hungers creating new values. The evolution of appetite into desire opens the way to social hungers such as the hunger for acknowledgement. Awareness of death awakens a further level of hunger for something that lies beyond the pell-mell of successive experiences leading towards extinction. The art of living is the art of managing our hungers.
On the Edge of Certainty
Raymond Tallis's The Explicit Animal (1991) was a passionate attack on attempts to explain human consciousness in purely biological terms. This ground-breaking book defended the distinctive nature of human consciousness against the misrepresentations of those many philosophers and cognitive scientists who aimed to reduce it to a set of functions understood in evolutionary, neurobiological and computational terms. In his laudatory review in The Times Literary Supplement, Stephen Clark expressed the hope that Tallis would continue his explorations. On the Edge of Certainty does precisely that, investigating and clarifying the implications of the highly original view of human nature discussed in his earlier book, in order to understand the nature of truth, of language, of the mind and of the self.
Not Saussure
This work subjects the fundamental ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Barthes and their followers to an examination and demonstrates the baselessness of post-Saussurean claims about the relations between language, reality and self.
