A book that aims to show readers how they arrive at their conceptions, which aren’t always as complete as they might think.
This third book of a philosophical trilogy by Towner (Process of Knowledge, 2001, etc.) explores the constructions, visualizations and limitations of human knowledge.
Towner tackles a dense, nuanced topic in a way that’s simultaneously inventive and relatable, which is no small feat. In his introductory chapter, he gently lays the groundwork about the potentially overwhelming subject of how humans perceive and ultimately shape their reality. He supports each subsequent chapter with extensively researched examples and vivid, clarifying metaphors; for example, he uses the analogy of the transformation of wood into charcoal to illustrate how knowledge helps us to track the transformations of objects. Without knowledge, Towner argues, the different stages of wood would seem to exist independently of one another; instead, knowledge allows us to understand that burning is a transformational process. Towner’s precisely worded treatise also uses the example of how computers process and display information: Humans can build machines to hold “reality in perspective” and “we can understand how the machine works”; a human similarly assembles and constructs knowledge about reality and builds on previous experiences. Most intriguingly, Towner proposes that closed circuits of human knowledge can create impenetrable worldviews, which gives rise to a false sense of “completion.” His division of human reality into the three basic categories—physical, behavioral and ideal—provides an excellent overall framework. The book doesn’t have the pop-cultural swagger of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988), nor does it embrace a Foucault-like academic extremism. But the highly intellectual tenor of the work makes it suitable for academics and other readers interested in how we form and navigate our way through a constantly changing environment.
A book that aims to show readers how they arrive at their conceptions, which aren’t always as complete as they might think.Pub Date: May 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0761854838
Page Count: 278
Publisher: University Press of America
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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