- Reflections of a Metaphysical Flâneur
and Other Essays
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- Author(s):
Raymond Tallis
- ISBN: 1844656667
- ISBN-13: 9781844656660
- Publication Date: 30 May 2013
- Pages: 320 (216 x 138)
- Format: Paperback
- Published Price: £14.99
- Discount Price: £11.99
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DESCRIPTION:
Join philosopher Raymond Tallis as he takes a peripatetic stroll around his local park . . . and the intricate passages of his own consciousness.
In the title essay of Reflections of a Metaphysical Flâneur, Raymond Tallis uses the motif of the stroll, the amble, to connect a series of meditations on the freedoms that only humans possess. In subsequent essays, the flâneur thinks about his brain, his relationship to the rest of the animal kingdom, his profession of medicine and about the physical world and the claims of physical science to have rendered philosophical reflection obsolete. The book is a continuation of Tallis’s endeavours to elaborate a vision of humanity that rejects religious myths while not succumbing to scientism or any other form of naturalism.
Written with the author’s customary intellectual energy and vigour these essays provoke, stimulate and challenge us to think in new ways.
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AUTHOR BIO:
Raymond Tallis trained as a doctor before going on to become Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester. He was elected 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. He has published over a dozen books of cultural criticism and philosophical anthropology including, most recently, The Kingdom of Infinite Space (2008), Aping Mankind (Acumen, 2011), and In Defence of Wonder (Acumen, 2012).
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CONTENTS:
Introduction
Reflections of a Metaphysical Flâneur
Part I: Brains, Persons and Beasts
1. Am I my Brain?
2. Was Schubert a Musical Brain?
3. Wickedness and Wit: Is it all in the brain?
4. Are Conscious Machines Possible?
5. David Chalmers's Unsuccessful Search for the Conscious Mind
6. A Conversation with My Neighbour
7. Silk
Part II: Philosophy and Physics
8. Should We Just Shut Up and Calculate?
9. You Chemical Scum, You
10. Did Time Begin with a Bang?
11. A Hasty Report from a Tearing Hurry
Part III: Philosophy and Physic
12. Medical Ethics in the Real Mess of the Real World
13. Some Reflections on Caring and Not Caring
14. Coinages of the Mind: Hallucinations
15. Becoming the Prisoners of Our Free Choices
16. The Right to an Assisted Death
Epilogue: And so to Bed
