top of page
libri impilati

Next book

LOGOS

The Mystery of How We Make Sense of the World

LOGOS
Genre:

Philosophy

Author:

Raymond Tallis

Publisher:

Agenda Publishing

Language:

English

AUTHOR BIO:

Raymond Tallis has been Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences for his research in clinical neuroscience. 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 L...

Pages:

276

Publication:

May 2018

Rights available:

All

More

DESCRIPTION:

Our sense-making capabilities and the relationship between our individual and collective intelligence and the comprehensibility of the world is both remarkable and deeply mysterious. Our capacity to make sense of the world and the fact that we pass our lives steeped in knowledge and understanding, albeit incomplete, that far exceeds what we are or even experience has challenged our greatest thinkers for centuries.

In Logos, Raymond Tallis steps into the gap between mind and world to explore what is at stake in our attempts to make sense of our world and our lives. With his characteristic combination of scholarly rigour and lively humour he reveals how philosophers, theologians and scientists have sought to demystify our extraordinary capacity to understand the world by collapsing the distance between the mind that does the sense-making and the world that is made sense of. Such strategies – whether by locating the world inside the mind, or making the mind part of the world – are shown to be deeply flawed and of little help in explaining the intelligiblity of the world. Indeed, it is the distance that we need, argues Tallis, if knowledge is to count as knowledge and for there to be a distinction between the knower and the known.

Tallis brings his formidable analysis to bear on the many challenges we face when trying to make sense of our sense-making. These include the idea of cognitive progress, which presupposes a benchmark of complete understanding; cognitive completion, which unites the separate strands of our understanding (from the laws of nature to our ineluctable everyday understanding of things, incorporating the meanings we live by); and the knowing subject – us – with our partial and limited viewpoint mediated by our bodies.

The book showcases Tallis’s enviable knack of making tricky philosophical arguments cogent and engaging to the non-specialist and his remarkable ability to help us see humankind more clearly. For anyone who has shared Einstein’s observation that “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility”, the book will be fascinating and insightful reading.


CONTENTS:

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?

REVIEWS:

"Not least among his virtues is the unacademic elegance of his prose."  – Edward Feser, Times Literary Supplement "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" – Philosophy Now "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 Warwick

More

MEDIA:

bottom of page