Works by Raymond Tallis
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- Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity.Raymond Tallis -2011 - Routledge.In a devastating critique Raymond Tallis exposes the exaggerated claims made for the ability of neuroscience and evolutionary theory to explain human consciousness, behaviour, culture and society. While readily acknowledging the astounding progress neuroscience has made in helping us understand how the brain works, Tallis directs his guns at neuroscience’s dark companion – "Neuromania" as he describes it – the belief that brain activity is not merely a necessary but a sufficient condition for human consciousness and that consequently our everyday (...) behaviour can be entirely understood in neural terms. With the formidable acuity and precision of both clinician and philosopher, Tallis dismantles the idea that "we are our brains", which has given rise to a plethora of neuro-prefixed pseudo-disciplines laying claim to explain everything from art and literature to criminality and religious belief, and shows it to be confused and fallacious, and an abuse of the prestige of science, one that sidesteps a whole range of mind–body problems. The belief that human beings can be understood essentially in biological terms is a serious obstacle, argues Tallis, to clear thinking about what human beings are and what they might become. To explain everyday behaviour in Darwinian terms and to identify human consciousness with the activity of the evolved brain denies human uniqueness, and by minimising the differences between us and our nearest animal kin, misrepresents what we are, offering a grotesquely simplified and degrading account of humanity. We are, shows Tallis, infinitely more interesting and complex than we appear in the mirror of biologism. Combative, fearless and always thought-provoking, _Aping Mankind _is an important book, one that scientists, cultural commentators and policy-makers cannot ignore. (shrink)
- Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being.Raymond Tallis -2019 - Edinburgh University Press.A philosophical examination and celebration of the human hand.No categories
- Freedom. An impossible reality.Raymond Tallis -2022 -Human Affairs 32 (4):474-507.No categories
- Aping Mankind.Raymond Tallis -2016 - Routledge.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. (shrink)
- Freedom: an impossible reality.Raymond Tallis -2021 - Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing.Tallis brings his familiar erudition and insight to this most intriguing and important philosophical question - the nature of our freedom - one that impacts most directly on our lives and takes us to the heart of what we are.
- Michelangelo's Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence.Raymond Tallis -2010 - Yale University Press.How to point : a primer for Martians -- What it takes to be a pointer -- Do animals get the point? -- People who don't point -- Pinning language to the world -- Pointing and power -- Assisted pointing and pointing by proxy -- The transcendent animal : pointing and the beyond.
- Seeing ourselves: reclaiming humanity from god and science.Raymond Tallis -2020 - Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing.In Seeing Ourselves, philosopher and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis goes in search of what kind of beings we are, and where we might find meaning in our lives. Showcasing a remarkably detailed engagement with a huge range of disciplines, Tallis shows the unique nature of human consciousness.No categories
- Of time and lamentation: reflections on transience.Raymond Tallis -2017 - Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing.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. (shrink)
- In Defence of Realism.Raymond Tallis -1988 - Hodder Education.
- The explicit animal: a defence of human consciousness.Raymond Tallis -1991 - Basingstoke [England]: Macmillan Academic and Professional.There has been an extraordinary resurgence of interest in the enigma of human consciousness among neuroscientists, psychologists, and professional philosophers. Much work is aimed at accommodating consciousness within the currently dominant physicalist world picture. This book is a comprehensive and sometimes impassioned attack to "biologize" consciousness by explaining its origin in evolutionary terms and identifying mental phenomena with brain processes; to "computerize" it by identifying mind with the supposed computational activity of the brain; and to empty or eliminate it by (...) denying the reality of qualia. Raymond Tallis's critique concludes with a long look at man--"the explicit animal"--that makes the irreducible mystery of human consciousness impossible to overlook or deny. (shrink)
- Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory.Raymond Tallis -2016 - Springer.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.
- Why the Mind Is Not a Computer: A Pocket Lexicon of Neuromythology.Raymond Tallis -2004 - Thorverton UK: Imprint Academic.Taking a series of key words such as calculation, language, information and memory, Professor Tallis shows how their misuse has lured a whole generation into...
- Logos: the mystery of how we make sense of the world.Raymond Tallis -2018 - Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing.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. He reveals how thinkers have sought to demystify our 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.No categories
- The kingdom of infinite space: a portrait of your head.Raymond Tallis -2008 - New Haven: Yale University Press.Facing up to the head -- The secreting head -- Being my head -- The head comes to -- Airhead : breathing and its variations -- Communicating with air -- Enjoying and suffering my head -- Communicating without air -- Notes on the red-cheeked animal : the geology of a blush -- The watchtower -- The sensory room -- Having and using my head -- Head traffic : eating, vomiting and smoking -- Head on head : notes on kissing -- (...) Headgear -- Caretaking my head -- In the wars -- The dwindles -- Knowing (and not knowing) my head -- Head and world -- The thinking head -- Epilogue: Heading off. (shrink)
- Enemies of hope: a critique of contemporary pessimism.Raymond Tallis -1997 - New York: St. Martin's Press.Perceptive, passionate, and often controversial, Raymond Tallis's latest debunking of Kulturkritik delves into a host of ethical and philosophical issues central to contemporary thought, raising questions we cannot afford to ignore. After reading Enemies of Hope , those minded to misrepresent mankind in ways that are almost routine among humanist intellectuals may be inclined to think twice. By clearing away the "hysterical humanism" of the present century this book frees us to start thinking constructively about the way forward for humanity (...) in the next. (shrink)
- On the edge of certainty: philosophical explorations.Raymond Tallis -1999 - New York: St. Martin's Press.In earlier work, Raymond Tallis defends the distinctive nature of human consciousness against the misrepresentations of many philosophers and cognitive scientists who aimed to reduce it to a set of functions understood in evolutionary, neurobiological, and computational terms. This book continues to investigate these implications of human nature advanced in his earlier works for our understanding of the nature of truth, of language, of the mind, and of the self.
- The knowing animal: a philosophical inquiry into knowledge and truth.Raymond Tallis -2005 - Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Completes a trilogy that aims to revolutionise our understanding of what it is to be a human being without recourse to theology and supernatural explanations on the one hand or scientism and naturalistic explanations on the other.
- I Am: An Inquiry Into First-person Being.Raymond Tallis -2005 -Appraisal 5.No categories
- Round Table: Science vs Philosophy?Mary Midgley,David Papineau,Raymond Tallis,Lewis Wolpert &Anja Steinbauer -2000 -Philosophy Now 27:34-38.No categories
- Why minds are not computers (continued).Raymond Tallis -2004 -The Philosophers' Magazine 28 (28):60-60.
- Summers of discontent: the purpose of the arts today.Raymond Tallis -2014 - London: Wilmington Square Books. Edited by Julian Spalding.Summers of Discontent goes to the heart of the arts. It's an examination of why artists create them in the first place and why we all feel the need for them. Tallis thinks the arts spring from our inability as humans fully to experience our experiences; from our hunger for a more rounded, more complete sense of the world. Tallis's thesis is original and fresh, down-to-earth and life-enhancing. It will inspire anyone who feels the creative urge today, or anyone who (...) wants to understand why and how the arts enrich their lives and those of others. (shrink)
- The Pursuit of mind.Raymond Tallis &Howard Robinson (eds.) -1991 - Manchester: Carcanet.
- Art (and Philosophy) and the Ultimate Aims of Human Life.Raymond Tallis -2006 -Philosophy Now 57:7-9.
- A Cure for Theorrhea.Raymond Tallis -1989 -Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 3 (1):7-39.FROM PRAGUE TO PARIS: A CRITIQUE OF STRUCTURALIST AND POST?STRUCTURALIST THOUGHT by J. G. Merquior New York: Methuen, 1986. 286 pp., $12.95 (paper).
- A critique of neuromythology.Raymond Tallis -1991 - In Raymond Tallis & Howard Robinson,The Pursuit of mind. Manchester: Carcanet. pp. 86--109.
- A conversation with Martin Heidegger.Raymond Tallis -2002 - New York: Palgrave.Martin Heidegger is one of the most important as well as one of the most difficult thinkers of the last century. 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.
- A Conversation with my Neighbour.Raymond Tallis -2012 -Philosophy Now 88:48-49.No categories
- A Hasty Report From A Tearing Hurry.Raymond Tallis -2012 -Philosophy Now 90:48-49.
- An Introduction To Incontinental Philosophy.Raymond Tallis -2011 -Philosophy Now 85:48-49.No categories
- A Small Explosion FromA (Relatively) Quiet Atheist.Raymond Tallis -2014 -Philosophy Now 103:52-53.No categoriesExport citation
Bookmark - Causes As (Local) Oomph.Raymond Tallis -2014 -Philosophy Now 100:48-49.No categoriesExport citation Bookmark
- Carpal Knowledge.Raymond Tallis -2001 -Philosophy Now 33:24-27.
- Draining The River.Raymond Tallis -2013 -Philosophy Now 95:48-49.No categories
- Evidence-based and Evidence-free Generalisations: a Tale of Two Cultures.Raymond Tallis -1999 - In David Fuller & Patricia Waugh,The Arts and Sciences of Criticism. Oxford University Press.Export citation Bookmark
- Epimethean Imaginings: Philosophical and Other Meditations on Everyday Light.Raymond Tallis -2014 - Routledge.These essays, written in the spirit of Goethe’s Epimetheus who "traces the quick deed to the dim realm of form-combining possibilities", display the depth and breadth of Tallis’s fascination with our lives. Whether discussing philosophical "hardy perennials" like time, or a mundane artefact like ink, Tallis challenges us to think differently about who we are and why we are. The first part of the book – Analysis – dives into the deep-end to explore some of the big questions in philosophy: (...) perception, knowledge and belief; time; the relationship between mathematics and reality; and probability and causation. The middle section – Tetchy Interludes – takes a wry look at some aspects of contemporary art; stupidity (including the author’s own); and Christmas. The third part – Celebration – is more experimental in both its subject matter and treatment. It celebrates the complexity of ordinary, everyday consciousness by contemplating the miracle of speech, artefacts that have transformed our lives (and what they reveal about our cognition) such as the wheel, the sail, and ink; and ‘snapshots’ of the author’s own consciousness on an ordinary day, of past consciousness, as captured in historical memory. Notwithstanding their diversity in theme and style, these essays share the common aim of discovering and celebrating the submerged riches in the "quick deeds" of our everyday lives and perceptions. (shrink)Export citation Bookmark
- Emergency Reflections on Political Philosophy.Raymond Tallis -2014 -Philosophy Now 105:48-49.No categories
- Hunger.Raymond Tallis -2008 - Routledge.Understanding hunger is the key to understanding ourselves. While they seem the most obvious things about us, our hungers are also deeply mysterious, arising out of, and casting light on, the unique character of human consciousness. In humans, physiological need is transformed into a multitude of needs that are remote from organic necessity. Even first-level biological hunger is experienced differently in humans; and little in human feeding behaviour has any parallel in the animal kingdom.In this book, Ray Tallis takes us (...) through the different levels of our hunger. Out of our primary appetites arise a myriad of pleasures and tastes that are elaborated in second-level hedonistic hungers creating new values. The evolution of appetite into desire opens the way to social hungers such as the hunger for acknowledgement. Awareness of death awakens a further level of hunger for something that lies beyond the pell-mell of successive experiences leading towards extinction. The art of living is the art of managing our hungers. (shrink)
- Human freedom as a reality-producing illusion.Raymond C. Tallis -2003 -The Monist 86 (2):200-219.This is a good time for determinists. One hundred and fifty years of Darwinian thought have undermined belief in the exceptional status of human beings. Biological reductionism is in the ascendant. One of its most recent manifestations—evolutionary psychology, which has been widely influential both within and beyond academe—argues that individual behaviour and even social institutions are expressions of genes, the vast majority of which are common to humans and the higher primates. The implicit, largely unconscious, principles that inform gene-determined human (...) behaviour are rooted in their survival value; and the entity whose survival is served is not the conscious organism but the genome itself. Since the actual reasons for our actions are beyond our ken, they are not truly voluntary. Yet more radical attacks on the notion of human freedom have come from neuroscience: ever more sophisticated and seemingly complete accounts of the human mind in terms of the functioning of our brains, appear to embed even higher level awareness in the material world. (shrink)
- 8 Identity and the mind.Raymond Tallis -2010 - In Giselle Walker & Elisabeth Leedham-Green,Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 21--184.
- Ideas and Scholarship in Philosophy.Raymond Tallis -2014 -Philosophy Now 104:48-49.Export citation Bookmark
- In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections.Raymond Tallis -2012 - Routledge.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. (shrink)No categories
- Increasing Longevity: Medical, Social and Political Implications.Raymond Tallis -1998 - Royal College of Physicians.
- Justifying the Search.Raymond Tallis -2003 -Philosophy Now 40:34-35.
- My brain made me do it, your honour.Raymond Tallis -2011 -The Philosophers' Magazine 55 (55):31-41.It is evident that every moment of our life we depend on having some kind of brain in working order. But it does not follow from this that we are a brain in working order.
- Machine generated contents note: Introduction; 1.Raymond Tallis -2010 - In Giselle Walker & Elisabeth Leedham-Green,Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.Export citation Bookmark
- Mathematics & Reality.Raymond Tallis -2014 -Philosophy Now 102:50-51.Export citation Bookmark
- Newton's sleep: the two cultures and the two kingdoms.Raymond Tallis -1995 - New York: St. Martin's Press.The most distinctive activities of humankind and the source of its greatest achievements are the scientific investigation of the world and the creation of art. Newton's Sleep examines their complementary roles in contemporary life and defends both against those who assert that science is spiritually empty and inherently dangerous and that art is trivialised by a lack of social mission.
- On Being (Roughly) Here.Raymond Tallis -2015 -Philosophy Now 106:46-47.No categories
- On Being Thanked By A Paper Bag.Raymond Tallis -2015 -Philosophy Now 107:48-49.No categories
- On Waiting.Raymond Tallis -2013 -Philosophy Now 96:48-49.No categories
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David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Area Editors:
David Bourget
Gwen Bradford
Berit Brogaard
Margaret Cameron
David Chalmers
James Chase
Rafael De Clercq
Ezio Di Nucci
Esa Diaz-Leon
Barry Hallen
Hans Halvorson
Jonathan Ichikawa
Monte Johnson
Michelle Kosch
Øystein Linnebo
Paul Livingston
Brandon Look
Manolo Martínez
Matthew McGrath
Michiru Nagatsu
Susana Nuccetelli
Giuseppe Primiero
Jack Alan Reynolds
Darrell P. Rowbottom
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