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The Raymond Tallis Reader provides a comprehensive survey of the work of this passionate, perceptive and often controversial thinker. Key selections from Tallis's major works are supplemented by Michael Grant's detailed introduction and linking commentary. From nihilism to Theorrhoea, from literary theory to the role of the unconscious, The Raymond Tallis Reader guides us through the panoptic sweep of Tallis's critical insights and reveals a way of thinking for the twenty-first century.
The Raymond Tallis Reader provides a comprehensive survey of the work of this passionate, perceptive, and often controversial thinker. Key selections from Tallis's major works are supplemented by Michael Grant's detailed introduction and linking commentary. From nihilism to Theorrhoea, from literary theory to the role of the unconscious, The Raymond Tallis Reader guides us through the panoptic sweep of Tallis's critical insights and reveals a way of thinking for the 21st century.
In this beautifully written personal meditation on life and living, Raymond Tallis reflects on the fundamental fact of existence: that it is finite. Inspired by E. M. Forster's thought that 'Death destroys a man but the idea of it saves him', Tallis invites readers to look back on their lives from a unique standpoint: one's own future corpse. From this perspective, he shows, the world now vacated can be seen most clearly in all its richness and complexity. Blending lyrical reflection, humour and the occasional philosophical argument, Tallis explores his own post-mortem recollection and invites us to appreciate anew the precariousness and preciousness of life.
In these lively and provocative essays, philosopher, polymath and all-round intellectual heavyweight, Raymond Tallis debunks commonplace truths, exposes woolly thinking and pulls the rug from beneath a wide range of commentator whether scientist, theologian, philosopher or pundit. Tallis takes to task much of contemporary science and philosophy, arguing that they are guilty of taking us down ever narrowing conduits of problem solving that only invite ever more complex responses and in doing so have lost sight of "wonder" - the metaphysical intoxication that first gave birth to philosophy 2,500 years ago. Tallis tackles some meaty topics - memory, time, language, truth, fiction, consciousness - but always with his characteristic verve, insight and wit. These essays showcase Tallis's skill for getting to the heart of the matter and challenging us to see, and wonder, in different ways. Wonder is the proper state of humankind, and as these essays show it has no more forceful a champion than Raymond Tallis.
This work subjects the fundamental ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Barthes and their followers to an examination and demonstrates the baselessness of post-Saussurean claims about the relations between language, reality and self.
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. 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.
Neuroscience has made astounding progress in the understanding of the brain. What should we make of its claims to go beyond the brain and explain consciousness, behaviour and culture? Where should we draw the line? In this brilliant critique Raymond Tallis dismantles "Neuromania", arising out of the idea that we are reducible to our brains and "Darwinitis" according to which, since the brain is an evolved organ, we are entirely explicable within an evolutionary framework. With precision and acuity he argues that the belief that human beings can be understood in biological terms is a serious obstacle to clear thinking about what we are and what we might become. Neuromania and Darwinitis deny human uniqueness, minimise the differences between us and our nearest animal kin and offer a grotesquely simplified account of humanity. We are, argues Tallis, infinitely more interesting and complex than we appear in the mirror of biology. Combative, fearless and thought-provoking, Aping Mankind is an important book and one that scientists, cultural commentators and policy-makers cannot ignore. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by the Author.
Martin Heidegger is one of the most important as well as one of the most difficult thinkers of the last century. His masterpiece Being and Time has been described as the most profound turning point in German philosophy since Hegel. Raymond Tallis, who has been arguing with Heidegger for over thirty years, illuminates his fundamental ideas through an imaginary conversation, which is both relaxed and rigorous, witty and profound. The Conversation defines Heidegger's relevance to the philosophical agenda of the present century by illuminating his great contribution to our thinking about what it is to be a human being while identifying the weaknesses in his thought.
In Defence of Realism is a powerful indictment of the fog of bad philosophy and worse linguistics that has shrouded much contemporary literary theory and criticism. Raymond Tallis, one of the most important critics of post-Saussurean literary theory in the English-speaking world, examines the reasons often cited by critics and theorists for believing that realism in fiction is impossible and verisimilitude a mere literary ?effect.? He clearly demonstrates not only that the arguments of critics hostile to realism are invalid, but that even if they were sound, they would apply equally to anti-realist fiction, indeed to all intelligible discourse.