Bøker av Professor Raymond Tallis

Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram through a City is a work of joyful wonder inspired by the encounter between the philosopher of the title and one of the world's most beautiful cities. The memoir is anchored in the enchanting 22 tram journey linking the author's flat in Prague with the Castle. The city is unpacked in a torrent of sharp-eyed observations, reflections, and speculations, seasoned with mischievous humour. An attempt to encompass the magic, history, culture, and tragedy of Prague is interwoven with reflections on the enigmas of the human mind, of memory and forgetfulness, of knowledge and ignorance, and our strange nature as embodied subjects. The story of the meeting of a mind and a city widens and deepens into a celebration of the mystery of the world and of the human creatures who have constructed it.

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.

In Seeing Ourselves, humanist philosopher and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis goes in search of what kind of beings we are, and where we might find meaning in our lives. If we reject religion, asks Tallis, 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 where do we find meaning if, as some scientists claim, we are simply organisms shaped by the forces of evolution, with no reason to exist and with no objective value? Tallis begins his quest by establishing what it is we know of our fundamental nature. 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, he then addresses what is unresolved in the human condition - our hunger for meaning and purpose - and the search for something that matches the profundity of religion. 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 illuminate how we see our everyday world and to think more clearly about who we are. It is only when we have woken from dogmatic religion and scientistic naturalism, he argues, 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.

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 and showcases his 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 "e;the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility"e;, the book will be fascinating and insightful reading.

A bold, original and thought-provoking exploration of the nature and meaning of time. Tallis, with characteristic fearlessness, seeks to reclaim time from the jaws of physics, arguing that time as it is lived, the long narrative of our human journey, can not be told by caesium clocks and Lorentz coordinates.

Parmenides of Elea is regarded as an important Presocratic philosopher. He is famous, or notorious, for asserting that change, movement, generation and perishing are illusions arising from our senses, that past and future do not exist, and that the universe is a single, homogeneous, static sphere. This book explores the limits of Parmenides ideas.