Death of the Soul
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.70 (680 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 038517327X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 173 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-10-01 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Jim said Tough going for me. This review won't be as informed as the other ones hereso here it is from a guy who is not a student of philosophy and who just came across this book randomly. For me it was a hard read. It's heavy on philosophic terms and names. It would greatly help to be at least somewhat familiar with the philosophers referred to.If I got the gist right, it's about how leading thinkers have perceived and defined the human condition over the years. If I'm. William Barrett's Last Book "Death of the Soul" is a nice essay on modern philosophy and how it went off track. The book highlights one of the central paradoxes of modern culture: namely, that modern science is one of the glories of the creative human mind and has decisively shaped our civilization, yet modern scientistic philosophers deny the power or even the reality of mind, preferring to see humans as agglomerations of sense data or behaviors, and not as free, rati. Neat little book! grapabo At first glance, it seems like science fiction: can human programmers create a computer that could exceed human capacity to think? But as the question is presented in this book, the question is not a matter of how far computer technology will go, but is a matter of how tenuously human consciousness has held up in comparison, after the wake of a scientific revolution dating back to the 17th century. Beginning with Descartes and ending with ea
Barrett (Irrational Man here looks at the way in which various thinkers have attempted to put the human soul or self in the forefront of their visions of reality. . Unconvinced by modern descriptions of the mind as a computer, Barrett debunks Alan Turing's claim that a future computer could write first-rate poetry; he also refutes behaviorism and Wittgenstein. He discusses Leibniz's energized universe of monads, or individual souls, Hegel's blueprint for self-realization as part of the unfolding of the "world spirit" and the existentialists' belief that anxiety and death are personal problems each of us must wrestle with. From Publishers Weekly Ever since Descartes saw nature as a vast, interlocking machine and science banished the soul, philosophers have been uncomfortable with this materialistic outlook. This short book engages the reader in an open-ended dialogue with major Western thinkers
Death of the Soul