Are You an Illusion?
eBook - ePub

Are You an Illusion?

  1. 170 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Are You an Illusion?

Book details
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

In an impassioned defence of the importance of our own thoughts, feelings and experiences, the renowned philosopher Mary Midgley shows that there's much more to our selves than a jumble of brain cells. Exploring the remarkable gap that has opened up between our understanding of our sense of self and today's science, Midgley argues powerfully and persuasively that the rich variety of our imaginative life cannot be contained in the narrow bounds of a highly puritanical materialism that simply equates brain and self.

Engaging with the work of prominent thinkers, Midgley investigates the source of our current attitudes to the self and reveals how ideas, traditions and myths have been twisted to fit in, seemingly naturally, with science's current preoccupation with the physical and material. Midgley shows that the subjective sources of thought – our own experiences – are every bit as necessary in helping to explain the world as the objective ones such as brain cells.

Are You an Illusion? offers a salutary analysis of science's claim to have done away with the self and a characteristic injection of common sense from one of our most respected philosophers into a debate increasingly in need of it.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Stephen Cave.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2023
ISBN
9781000966916
Edition
1
Topic
Philosophy
Subtopic
Philosophy History & Theory

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half Title Page
  3. Series Page
  4. Title Page
  5. Copyright Page
  6. Dedication Page
  7. Table of Contents
  8. Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition
  9. Preface
  10. Introduction: Are We Losing Ourselves?
  11. 1. Changing Relations to the Cosmos
  12. 2. Sciencephobia and its Sources
  13. 3. Transcendent Numbers: Pythagoras and Plato
  14. 4. What Explanation Is
  15. 5. Why the Idea of Purpose Won’t Go Away
  16. 6. Is Sexual Selection Natural?
  17. 7. The Search for Senselessness
  18. 8. The Beasts That Perish
  19. 9. Free Will, Not Just Free Won’t
  20. 10. How Divided Selves Live
  21. 11. Hemispheres and Holism
  22. 12. The Supernatural Aspects of Physics
  23. Conclusion: On Being Still Here
  24. Bibliography
  25. Index