Böcker av Professor Raymond Tallis

Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram through a City is a work of joyful wonder inspired by the encounter between the philosopher of the title and one of the world's most beautiful cities. The memoir is anchored in the enchanting 22 tram journey linking the author's flat in Prague with the Castle. The city is unpacked in a torrent of sharp-eyed observations, reflections, and speculations, seasoned with mischievous humour. An attempt to encompass the magic, history, culture, and tragedy of Prague is interwoven with reflections on the enigmas of the human mind, of memory and forgetfulness, of knowledge and ignorance, and our strange nature as embodied subjects. The story of the meeting of a mind and a city widens and deepens into a celebration of the mystery of the world and of the human creatures who have constructed it.

The question of free will has preoccupied philosophers for millennia. In recent years the debate has been reinvigorated by the findings of neuroscience and, for some, the notion that we have free will has finally been laid to rest. Not so, says Raymond Tallis. In his quest to reconcile our practical belief in our own agency with our theoretical doubts, Tallis advances powerful arguments for the reality of freedom.Tallis challenges the idea that we are imprisoned by laws of nature that wire us into a causally closed world. He shows that our capacity to discover and exploit these laws is central to understanding the nature of voluntary action and to reconciling free will with our status as material beings.Bringing his familiar verve and insight to this deep and most intriguing philosophical question, one that impacts most directly on our lives and touches on nearly every other philosophical problem - of consciousness, of time, of the nature of the natural world, and of our unique place in the cosmos - Tallis takes us to the heart of what we are. By understanding our freedom he reveals our extraordinary nature more clearly.

In Seeing Ourselves, humanist philosopher and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis goes in search of what kind of beings we are, and where we might find meaning in our lives. If we reject religion, asks Tallis, what should we put in its place? How do we ensure, if we accept the death of God, that something within us does not also die? And where do we find meaning if, as some scientists claim, we are simply organisms shaped by the forces of evolution, with no reason to exist and with no objective value? Tallis begins his quest by establishing what it is we know of our fundamental nature. He examines our relationship to our own bodies, to time, our selfhood and our agency - all manifestations of the unique nature of human consciousness - and shows why human beings are like nothing else in the universe. Having revealed our nature in all its glory, he then addresses what is unresolved in the human condition - our hunger for meaning and purpose - and the search for something that matches the profundity of religion. He shows that it is the actuality of human transcendence and the needs it awakens that must be the bridge across the divide between believers and non-believers. The book is ultimately a celebration. Behind the philosophical arguments is a hunger for more wakefulness inspired by a feeling of wonder and gratitude for the mystery of the most commonplace manifestations of our humanity. Tallis's endeavour in Seeing Ourselves is to illuminate how we see our everyday world and to think more clearly about who we are. It is only when we have woken from dogmatic religion and scientistic naturalism, he argues, that we will find ourselves at the threshold of an unfettered inquiry - into ourselves, the world we have built and the universe into which we have built it - and then there may be some hope for salvation.

Parmenides of Elea is regarded as an important Presocratic philosopher. He is famous, or notorious, for asserting that change, movement, generation and perishing are illusions arising from our senses, that past and future do not exist, and that the universe is a single, homogeneous, static sphere. This book explores the limits of Parmenides ideas.