A thoughtful and intriguing account of the relationship between science and spirituality.
A writer offers a critique of scientific materialism coupled with an argument in favor of an ultimate reality beyond empirical confirmation.
Shute avers that people live in an “intellectually inhospitable world,” one in which “overcertainty,” an inelastic and hyperbolic confidence in one’s beliefs, serves as a prohibitive bar to philosophical progress. His principal example is the “dogma of materialist science,” a reductive interpretation of the universe that, despite its increasingly obvious theoretical failings, remains the dominant paradigm for scientists. The author raises provocative questions about the inadequacy of materialism—his discussion is especially stimulating when he considers Darwinian evolution and its limitations, a perspective considered “sacrosanct” despite its incoherencies. In place of these scientific pieties, Shute argues that an ultimate reality exists that transcends perception, a spiritual dimension to life that couldn’t possibly be fully captured by the pinched categories of scientific conceptualization. The author mines psychology, physics, and biology for evidence of these “extradimensional sources of influence on the material world” as well as various altered states of consciousness, including hypnosis and near-death experiences. Shute’s analysis is wide-ranging and ambitious—he considers intractable problems like the nature of consciousness, proposes a more searching understanding of causality than science currently provides, and suggests the reasonability of a mind that survives the death of the body. Despite these grand aims, the author is impressively cautious and restrained regarding his conclusions: “This book seeks to neither prove nor disprove the existence of any particular god, nor the truth or falsity of any particular religion. What this book hopes to do is lend credibility to the idea that an ultimate reality exists behind the doors of perception.” His critique of materialism is not original but it is persuasive, and one can’t help but be impressed by his call for an authentic skepticism, one that refuses to yield easily to facile belief or stubborn disbelief.
A thoughtful and intriguing account of the relationship between science and spirituality.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73-581683-8
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Romar Philosophical Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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