Humanism Books

The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

David Abram

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

David Abram's writing casts a spell of its own as he weaves the reader through a meticulously researched work that gently addresses such seemingly daunting topics as where the past and future exist, the relationship between space and time, and how the written word serves to sever humans from their primordial source of sustenance: the earth.

"Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient associations with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air," writes Abram of the separation caused by the proliferation of the written word.

In writing The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram consulted an engaging collection of peoples and works. He uses aboriginal song lines, stories from the Koyukon people of northwestern Alaska, the philosophy of phenomenology, and the speeches of Socrates to paint a poetic landscape that explains how we became separated from the earth in the first place. With minimal environmental doomsaying, Abram discusses how we can begin to recover a sustainable relationship with the earth and the nonhuman beings who live among us--in the more-than-human world. --Kathryn True

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Alan Watts

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 79 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Revolutionary and Radical 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

There are many many books available today written about the non-dual philosophy or perspective. At the time this book was written, the old nonduality traditions like Zen, Dzogchen and Taoism were well-known but cloaked in the mystery of Asian or Eastern religions or philosophies. Alan Watts was one of the first to take this revolutionary and radical perspective to the West.

Alan Watts writes from a clear understanding of the nature of reality - he does this in a way that slowly lures us from our conditioned and programmed thought process into a more open and accepting stance.

He points to the fact that the illusion of "ME" being a separate entity held prisoner within a bag of skin and bones is merely a mistake in perception, a false belief given to us by unknowing and similarly-illusioned parents. He uses concepts and illustrations to guide us past the mind, past the overlay of conceptual belief, into a pure STOP, a cease of the mind, in which the true nature of beingness can be known.

The traditional Eastern philosophies were always viewed as just that - Eastern and "separate" philosophies, which applied to "those of that faith" but was not much more than a passing curiosity of those in the West. When this book came out, it was an introduction to Advaita Vedanta, a Western slant on the Eastern teachings. It talked about things which were taboo in the west, hence the title "The Book on the Taboo against knowing what you are."

And why is it Taboo? It's taboo because there is a Truth shining through the words, a freedom of being which underlies ALL religious beliefs, a seeing/knowing which is ever-present and prior to the mind and it's attempts to run away from the Truth. And who wants their long-held and treasured beliefs to be questioned?

Who really wants to know that they truly do not exist?

Editorial Review:

Modern Western culture and technology is inextricably tied to the belief in the existence of a self as a separate ego, separated from and in conflict with the rest of the world. In this classic book, Watts provides a lucid and simple presentation of an alternative view based on Hindi and Vedantic philosophy.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Julian Jaynes

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Total reviews: 141 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Fascinating and controversial speculation 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Julian Jaynes' speculations in this unusual work are both fascinating and controversial. His thesis is extremely interesting. Essentially, Jaynes speculates that until at most a few thousand years ago human beings did not possess consciousness of the kind possessed by humans today. He believes that until relatively recently, humans had a form of bicameral mind, in which one side of the brain communicated with the other by creating illusions both visual and auditory--such that people actually believed that they heard voices telling them how to behave. Such commands, originating within each person's own mind, directed behavior much as our own conscious decision-making does so today. Jaynes argues that this "bicameral mind" explains why virtually all ancient religions feature human beings speaking directly with and otherwise interacting with "gods" on more or less a regular basis--something that does not happen today, at least in most people's experience. Jaynes analyzes ancient texts, primarily the Iliad, and notes that the persons written of in such texts are directed by "gods" and do not appear to explain their actions in terms of conscious experience. Put simply, according to Jaynes ancient humans were automatons who obeyed commands deriving from within their own minds, which commands appeared to them as real external forces ("gods").

Jaynes believes that modern consciousness is just another form of learned behavior which arose because it evidently had survival value as human society became more complex, and environmental stresses occurred. Thus, humans learned more advanced behavior as opposed to the earlier "bicameral" mind. Pretty interesting speculation. I am certainly not qualified to say whether Jaynes is correct or not.

The book itself is a very hard slog and most of it is not particularly well-written, but it rewards the reader with some excellent portions of good writing and ingenious speculation. For example, Jaynes describes modern consciousness as being like a flashlight beam in a dark cellar. To the viewer, only the illuminated portion of the cellar is visible (which he likens to the conscious part of a person's mind) while most of it is dark, and unperceived. As Jaynes points out, it is impossible to be conscious of that which is not within our consciousness, which is most of our mind and behavior. According to Jaynes, ancient humans simply lacked the narrow flashlight beam, and substituted bicameralism for it. Which, of course, raises the question--just as consciousness is arguably a higher mental state than bicameralism, is there a higher mental plane than consciousness?

My layman's guess is that most of Jaynes' speculation about historical bicameralism is incorrect, but notwithstanding that, this work contains some of the most interesting analysis concerning the nature of consciousness that one is likely to find. And it is quite possible (and Jaynes makes out a good case) that ancient humans did have a significantly different form of consciousness than do modern persons. One wonders what post-conscious human beings will be like.

Editorial Review:

At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion -- and indeed our future.

The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

Elaine Scarry

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it.

Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.

When Species Meet (Posthumanities)

Donna J. Haraway

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Editorial Review:

“When Species Meet is a breathtaking meditation on the intersection between humankind and dog, philosophy and science, and macro and micro cultures.” —Cameron Woo, Publisher of Bark magazine



In 2006, about 69 million U.S. households had pets, giving homes to around 73.9 million dogs, 90.5 million cats, and 16.6 million birds, and spending over $38 billion dollars on companion animals. As never before in history, our pets are truly members of the family. But the notion of “companion species”—knotted from human beings, animals and other organisms, landscapes, and technologies—includes much more than “companion animals.”



In When Species Meet, Donna J. Haraway digs into this larger phenomenon to contemplate the interactions of humans with many kinds of critters, especially with those called domestic. At the heart of the book are her experiences in agility training with her dogs Cayenne and Roland, but Haraway’s vision here also encompasses wolves, chickens, cats, baboons, sheep, microorganisms, and whales wearing video cameras. From designer pets to lab animals to trained therapy dogs, she deftly explores philosophical, cultural, and biological aspects of animal-human encounters.



In this deeply personal yet intellectually groundbreaking work, Haraway develops the idea of companion species, those who meet and break bread together but not without some indigestion. “A great deal is at stake in such meetings,” she writes, “and outcomes are not guaranteed. There is no assured happy or unhappy ending—socially, ecologically, or scientifically. There is only the chance for getting on together with some grace.”



Ultimately, she finds that respect, curiosity, and knowledge spring from animal-human associations and work powerfully against ideas about human exceptionalism.



One of the founders of the posthumanities, Donna J. Haraway is professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of many books and widely read essays, including The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness and the now-classic essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” she received the J. D. Bernal Prize in 2000, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science.

The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

Howard Bloom

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 140 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Overrated but interesting 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

The general themes and ideas presented in this book are interesting: That we are all part of a competitive social superorganism driven by memetic transmission. However, I find his understanding of certain concepts (e.g. stress, religion, philosophy) to be extremely limited.

So while I found the book to be thought provoking, it was hard to overlook the cherry-picking of factual "evidence" and limited understanding of important concepts (see above).

Editorial Review:

The Lucifer Principle is a revolutionary work that explores the intricate relationships among genetics, human behavior, and culture to put forth the thesis that "evil" is a by-product of nature's strategies for creation and that it is woven into our most basic biological fabric. "An act of astonishing intellectual courage." -- Leon Uris; "Destined to be the Future Shock of our time." -- Spin; "A revolutionary vision of the relationship between psychology and history, The Lucifer Principle will have a profound impact on our concepts of human nature. It is astonishing that a book of such importance could be such a pleasure to read." -- Elizabeth F. Loftus, Professor of Psychology, University of Washington, and author of Memory and Eyewitness Testimony.

Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Philosophy of the Mind)

Andy Clark

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Editorial Review:

When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain-bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.

Memory, History, Forgetting

Paul Ricoeur

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative.

Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora.

A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation.

“His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—Library Journal

“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— New York Times Book Review

Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Christopher Butler

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Excellent 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Butler touches on all aspects of PM thought/aesthetics in; literature, architecture, art theory etc. and nails it right on the head.

It is fair to say, as some reviewers pointed out below, that he is certainly not a cheerleader for PM theory. He shows no mercy and points out all of the glaring contradictions of PM dogma as he sees them. (And so much the better, considering that much writing on the subject frustratingly skims over the absurd aspects of PM in favor of joining in on the lovefest).

Nevertheless, this is a very clearly written and fair-minded little document.

Editorial Review:

Postmodernism has become the buzzword of contemporary society over the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this highly readable introduction the mysteries of this most elusive of concepts are unraveled, casting a critical light upon the way we live now, from the politicizing of museum culture to the cult of the politically correct. The key postmodernist ideas are explored and challenged, as they figure in the theory, philosophy, politics, ethics and artwork of the period, and it is shown how they have interacted within a postmodernist culture.

Critique of Pure Reason (Philosophical Classics)

Immanuel Kant

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A foundation stone of modern philosophy 5 out of 5 stars.
20 of 21 people found this review helpful.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is considered one of the giants of philosophy, of his age or any other. It is largely this book that provides the foundation of this assessment. Whether one loves Kant or hates him (philosophically, that is), one cannot really ignore him; even when one isn't directly dealing with Kantian ideas, chances are great that Kant is made an impact.

Kant was a professor of philosophy in the German city of Konigsberg, where he spent his entire life and career. Kant had a very organised and clockwork life - his habits were so regular that it was considered that the people of Konigsberg could set their clocks by his walks. The same regularity was part of his publication history, until 1770, when Kant had a ten-year hiatus in publishing. This was largely because he was working on this book, the 'Critique of Pure Reason'.

Kant as a professor of philosophy was familiar with the Rationalists, such as Descartes, who founded the Enlightenment and in many ways started the phenomenon of modern philosophy. He was also familiar with the Empiricist school (John Locke and David Hume are perhaps the best known names in this), which challenged the rationalist framework. Between Leibniz' monads and Hume's development of Empiricism to its logical (and self-destructive) conclusion, coupled with the Romantic ideals typified by Rousseau, the philosophical edifice of the Enlightenment seemed about to topple.

Kant rode to the rescue, so to speak. He developed an idea that was a synthesis of Empirical and Rationalist ideas. He developed the idea of a priori knowledge (that coming from pure reasoning) and a posterior knowledge (that coming from experience) and put them together into synthetic a priori statements as being possible. Knowledge, for Kant, comes from a synthesis of pure reason concepts and experience. Pure thought and sense experience were intertwined. However, there were definite limits to knowledge. Appearance/phenomenon was different from Reality/noumena - Kant held that the unknowable was the 'ding-an-sich', roughly translated as the 'thing-in-itself', for we can only know the appearance and categorial aspects of things.

Kant was involved heavily in scientific method, including logic and mathematical methods, to try to describe the various aspects of his development. This is part of what makes Kant difficult reading for even the most dedicated of philosophy students and readers. He spends a lot of pages on logical reasoning, including what makes for fallacious and faulty reasoning. He also does a good deal of development on the ideas of God, the soul, and the universe as a whole as being essentially beyond the realm of this new science of metaphysics - these are not things that can be known in terms of the spatiotemporal realm, and thus proofs and constructs about them in reason are bound to fail.

Kant does go on to attempt to prove the existence of God and the soul (and other things) from moral grounds, but that these cannot be proved in the scientific methodology of his metaphysics and logic. This book presents Kant's epistemology and a new concept of metaphysics that involves transcendental knowledge, a new category of concepts that aims to prove one proposition as the necessary presupposition of another. This becomes the difficulty for later philosophers, but it does become a matter that needs to be addressed by them.

As Kant writes at the end of the text, 'The critical path alone is still open. If the reader has had the courtesy and patience to accompany me along this path, he may now judge for himself whether, if he cares to lend his aid in making this path into a high-road, it may not be possible to achieve before the end of the present century what many centuries have not been able to accomplish; namely, to secure for human reason complete satisfacton in regard to that with which it has all along so eagerly occupied itself, though hitherto in vain.' This is heavy reading, but worthwhile for those who will make the journey with Kant.

Editorial Review:

One of the cornerstone books of Western philosophy, here is Kant's seminal treatise, where he seeks to define the nature of reason itself and builds his own unique system of philosophical thought with an approach known as transcendental idealism. He argues that human knowledge is limited by the capacity for perception.