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  1. Home
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  3. Seeing Ourselves
  • Cited by 4
Publisher:
Agenda Publishing
Online publication date:
August 2023
Print publication year:
2019
Online ISBN:
9781788212328
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781788212328
Subjects:
Epistemology and Metaphysics, Philosophy
Information

Book description

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'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 and then there may be some hope for salvation.

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