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I am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-person Being

I am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-person Being

by RaymondTallis (Author)

  • Used

    Paperback 2004

    $29.70
Synopsis

In The Hand, the first volume of his trilogy, Raymond Tallis looked at how humans have avoided the constraints of biology. I Am focuses on two crucial aspects of the escape from being a mere organism: selfhood and agency. These are seen as originating in what Tallis calls the Existential Intuition - the sense 'That I am this' - within the human body. The nature and origin of the Existential Intuition is described in outline and it is related to the certainty of his own existence that Descartes established through his Cogito argument. The primary reference point for the sense 'That I am this' is the body. Raymond Tallis describes the logical and existential necessity of embodiment and the complex relationships we have to our bodies such as being, using, having, suffering and knowing. He goes on to argue that bodily continuity and psychological connectedness through memory both require the Existential Intuition in order to underpin an enduring self.Moreover, the self-realising intuition 'that I am this' creates a new point of departure in the physical world enabling persons to be the origins of their acts and to establish a vantage point from which they are able to influence the course of events. I Am is full of fascinating insights into the nature of personal identity and offers an entirely new way of reconciling human freedom with the deterministic universe in which humans act. Key Features: *Addresses fundamental philosophical questions. *Approaches these questions from a novel view point. *Reconciles Darwinism with Humanism. *A major attempt to redefine what it is to be a human being and the scope of human possibility.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 320
 Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 04 Jun 2004
ISBN 10: 0748619518
ISBN 13: 9780748619511

Media Reviews
Raymond Tallis is a man unusual in modern medicine. His career has been devoted to caring for, studying, and advancing the health of older people in society. But while working as a Professor of Geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, he has developed a parallel career - as a philosopher, critic, poet and novelist - largely unknown to his clinical brotherhood and sisterhood. Indeed, important though his medical work has been, it is likely that his philosophy, and especially his philosophical anthropology will leave a particularly indelible mark on human affairs. -- Richard Horton He is a splendid exception to the helpless specialisation of our age, being a professor of gerontology who writes clear and useful philosophy. More crucially though, he aims his philosophy at a target that needs it terribly, namely the confused and lazy-minded scientism that blocks our attempts to talk sense about human consciousness. -- Mary Midgley Raymond Tallis is a man unusual in modern medicine. His career has been devoted to caring for, studying, and advancing the health of older people in society. But while working as a Professor of Geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, he has developed a parallel career - as a philosopher, critic, poet and novelist - largely unknown to his clinical brotherhood and sisterhood. Indeed, important though his medical work has been, it is likely that his philosophy, and especially his philosophical anthropology will leave a particularly indelible mark on human affairs. He is a splendid exception to the helpless specialisation of our age, being a professor of gerontology who writes clear and useful philosophy. More crucially though, he aims his philosophy at a target that needs it terribly, namely the confused and lazy-minded scientism that blocks our attempts to talk sense about human consciousness.
Author Bio
Raymond Tallis is Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. Over the last 15 years he has published extensively outside the field of medicine. There have been three books which mount a critique of post-structuralist theory: Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-saussurean Literary Theory (Macmillan, 2nd edn, 1995), In Defence of Realism (Arnold & University of Nebraska Press, 2nd edn, 1998) and Theorrhoea and After (Macmillan, 1998). He has also published four books in the philosophy of mind: The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness (Macmillan, 1991), The Pursuit of Mind (co-edited with Howard Robinson, Carcanet, 1991), Psycho Electronics (Ferrington, 1994) and On the Edge of Certainty and Other Essays (Macmillan, 1999). Further books include Newton's Sleep: The Two Cultures and the Two Kingdoms (Macmillan, 1995), Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism (Macmillan, 1997) and A Conversation with Martin Heidegger (Macmillan (Palgrave), 2002). An anthology of his theoretical writing - The Raymond Tallis Reader, edited by Michael Grant - was published by Macmillan (Palgrave) in 2000. He was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters (hon causa) at the University of Hull in 1997 for his non-medical writings and the degree of Doctor of Letters (hon causa) at the University of Manchester in 2003 for 'contributions to literary theory and our understanding of human consciousness'. The Knowing Animal is the final volume in the trilogy of books for EUP which began with The Hand and continued with I Am.