Apologies to regular readers of this blog for my loss of blogging mojo lately. I guess what with weekly posts at Anglican Media and a monthly article in Eternity magazine I have been reaching my output limit. In other news, a book that Tom Frame and I have co-authored on the 39 Articles is hitting the presses soon - and should be out in a couple of months.
I am a huge fan of author Marilynne Robinson, whose novels Home and Gilead were for me the discoveries of 2008/9. But Robinson is an extraordinary essayist, too.
Her latest offering Absence of Mind is a brilliant and profound reflection on the 'problem of mind' which seems to feature strongly in what she calls 'parascientific' literature - by which she means the writings of Dawkins, Pinkers, Dennett and co. Robinson calls them on their reductionistic accounts of human thought - do not the history of art, literature and music tell against them at every point?
It is an immensely subtle book, and I see I am going to have to re-read it. Nuts. But her basic thesis is something like this:
Those who claim to dismiss the mind/body dichotomy actually perpetuate it when they exclude the mind's self-awareness from among the data of human nature. p. 118
Ponder that.
6 comments:
Don't worry about the blog silence mike, perhaps it will be like Robinsons output. What was it, twenty years to write Gilead...worth every day
Hi Michael,
the 39 articles... is it going to be in English? (That lay people like myself can actually read?)
EG: Some locals were over-emphasising personal 'revelations' they thought they were having. So I dived into the articles to try and argue the sufficiency of scripture as an Anglican doctrine. I emailed them the pertinent clauses, and they kind of just said: "What?"
Thanks for the recommendation. I wasn't aware of this new one. Just discovered MR last year. Brilliant.
Michael, your relative blogging silence makes me feel better about my own, which it maybe should not.
About the problem of mind, have you read Thomas Nagel on the subject? His perspective could not be less Christian, and his respect for the sciences is not in question, so if one is after some independent input on the pathologies of the parascientific literature (a nice phrase) he's a good person to try. It helps that he is not actually that interested in parascientific literature, but does think that as a professional philosopher he should engage with wider discourse.
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