Search results for ""Author Professor Raymond Tallis""

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.

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The question of free will has preoccupied philosophers for millennia. In recent years the debate has been reinvigorated by the findings of neuroscience and, for some, the notion that we have free will has finally been laid to rest. Not so, says Raymond Tallis. In his quest to reconcile our practical belief in our own agency with our theoretical doubts, Tallis advances powerful arguments for the reality of freedom. Tallis challenges the idea that we are imprisoned by laws of nature that wire us into a causally closed world. He shows that our capacity to discover and exploit these laws is central to understanding the nature of voluntary action and to reconciling free will with our status as material beings. Bringing his familiar verve and insight to this deep and most intriguing philosophical question, one that impacts most directly on our lives and touches on nearly every other philosophical problem – of consciousness, of time, of the nature of the natural world, and of our unique place in the cosmos – Tallis takes us to the heart of what we are. By understanding our freedom he reveals our extraordinary nature more clearly.

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Time’s mysteries seem to resist comprehension and what remains, once the familiar metaphors are stripped away, can stretch even the most profound philosopher. In Of Time and Lamentation, Raymond Tallis rises to this challenge and explores the nature and meaning of time and how best to understand it. The culmination of some twenty years of thinking, writing and wondering about (and within) time, it is a bold, original and thought-provoking work. With characteristic fearlessness, Tallis seeks to reclaim time from the jaws of physics. For most of us, time is composed of mornings, afternoons and evenings and expressed in hurry, hope, longing, waiting, enduring, planning, joyful expectation and grief. Thinking about it is to meditate on our own mortality. Yet, physics has little or nothing to say about this time, the time as it is lived. The story told by caesium clocks, quantum theory and Lorentz coordinates, Tallis argues, needs to be supplemented by one of moss on rocks, tears on faces and the long narratives of our human journey. Our temporal lives deserve a richer attention than is afforded by the equations of mathematical physics. The first part of the book, “Killing Time” is a formidable critique of the spatialized and mathematized account of time arising from physical science. The passage of time, the direction of time and time travel are critically examined and the relationship between mathematics and reality, and the nature of the observer, are explored. Part 2, “Human Time” examines tensed time, the reality of time as it is lived: what we mean by “now”, how we make sense of past and future events, and the idea of eternity. With the scientistic reduction of time set aside and lived time reaffirmed, Tallis digs deeper into the nature of time itself in the final part, “Finding Time”. Questions about “the stuff” of time – such as instants and intervals – about time and change, and the relationship between objective and subjective time, open on to wider discussions about time and causation, the irruption of subjectivity and intentionality into a material universe, and the relationship between time and freedom. For anyone who has puzzled over the nature of becoming, wondered whether time is inseparable from change, whether time is punctuate or continuous, or even whether time, itself, is real, Of Time and Lamentation will provoke and entertain. Those, like Tallis himself, who seek to find a place at which the scientific and humanistic views of humanity can be reconciled, will celebrate his placing of human consciousness at the heart of time, and his showing that we are “more than cogs in the universal clock, forced to collaborate with the very progress that pushes us towards our own midnight”.

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In Seeing Ourselves, philosopher and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis brings together the preoccupations of some fifty years of writing and thinking about the overwhelming mystery of ordinary human life, and goes in search of what kind of beings we are, and where we might find meaning in our lives. If, asks Tallis, we reject the supernatural belief that we are pure spirits temporarily lodged in bodies, handmade by God, and uniquely related to Him, what should we put in its place? How do we ensure, if we accept the death of God, that something within us does not also die? And if we are simply organisms shaped by the forces of evolution, with no reason to exist and with no objective value, as some scientists claim, where shall we find meaning sufficiently enduring and profound to withstand the knowledge of our own mortality and the certain loss of all that we love or value? How should we think of ourselves if we are neither fallen angels trying to enact the will of God, nor unrisen apes acting out a biological prescription? Tallis begins his quest by establishing what it is we know of our fundamental nature. Showcasing a remarkable detailed engagement with a huge range of disciplines, he examines our relationship to our own bodies, to time, our selfhood and our agency – all manifestations of the unique nature of human consciousness – and shows why human beings are like nothing else in the universe. Having revealed our nature in all its glory, Tallis then addresses what is unresolved in the human condition – our hunger for a coherent life, inwardly lit by a single sense of purpose and meaning – and the search for something that matches the profundity of religion, even to the point of accommodating the tragedy of our lives. He shows that it is the actuality of human transcendence and the needs it awakens that must be the bridge across the divide between believers and non-believers. The book is ultimately a celebration. Behind the philosophical arguments is a hunger for more wakefulness inspired by a feeling of wonder and gratitude for the mystery of the most commonplace manifestations of our humanity. Tallis’s endeavour in Seeing Ourselves is to turn up the wattage of the light in which we see our everyday world and to think more clearly about who we are. It is only when we have woken from religion and naturalism, that we will find ourselves at the threshold of an unfettered inquiry – into ourselves, the world we have built and the universe into which we have built it – and then there may be some hope for salvation.

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Time’s mysteries seem to resist comprehension and what remains, once the familiar metaphors are stripped away, can stretch even the most profound philosopher. In Of Time and Lamentation, Raymond Tallis rises to this challenge and explores the nature and meaning of time and how best to understand it. The culmination of some twenty years of thinking, writing and wondering about (and within) time, it is a bold, original and thought-provoking work. With characteristic fearlessness, Tallis seeks to reclaim time from the jaws of physics. For most of us, time is composed of mornings, afternoons and evenings and expressed in hurry, hope, longing, waiting, enduring, planning, joyful expectation and grief. Thinking about it is to meditate on our own mortality. Yet, physics has little or nothing to say about this time, the time as it is lived. The story told by caesium clocks, quantum theory and Lorentz coordinates, Tallis argues, needs to be supplemented by one of moss on rocks, tears on faces and the long narratives of our human journey. Our temporal lives deserve a richer attention than is afforded by the equations of mathematical physics. The first part of the book, “Killing Time” is a formidable critique of the spatialized and mathematized account of time arising from physical science. The passage of time, the direction of time and time travel are critically examined and the relationship between mathematics and reality, and the nature of the observer, are explored. Part 2, “Human Time” examines tensed time, the reality of time as it is lived: what we mean by “now”, how we make sense of past and future events, and the idea of eternity. With the scientistic reduction of time set aside and lived time reaffirmed, Tallis digs deeper into the nature of time itself in the final part, “Finding Time”. Questions about “the stuff” of time – such as instants and intervals – about time and change, and the relationship between objective and subjective time, open on to wider discussions about time and causation, the irruption of subjectivity and intentionality into a material universe, and the relationship between time and freedom. For anyone who has puzzled over the nature of becoming, wondered whether time is inseparable from change, whether time is punctuate or continuous, or even whether time, itself, is real, Of Time and Lamentation will provoke and entertain. Those, like Tallis himself, who seek to find a place at which the scientific and humanistic views of humanity can be reconciled, will celebrate his placing of human consciousness at the heart of time, and his showing that we are “more than cogs in the universal clock, forced to collaborate with the very progress that pushes us towards our own midnight”.

Read more less

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.

Read more less