Circling Round Explicitness

Raymond Tallis is Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. Over the last 15 years he has published extensively outside the field of medicine. There have been three books which mount a critique of post-structuralist theory: Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-saussurean Literary Theory (Macmillan, 2nd edn, 1995), In Defence of Realism (Arnold & University of Nebraska Press, 2nd edn, 1998) and Theorrhoea and After (Macmillan, 1998). He has also published four books in the philosophy of mind: The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness (Macmillan, 1991), The Pursuit of Mind (co-edited with Howard Robinson, Carcanet, 1991), Psycho Electronics (Ferrington, 1994) and On the Edge of Certainty and Other Essays (Macmillan, 1999). Further books include Newton's Sleep: The Two Cultures and the Two Kingdoms (Macmillan, 1995), Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism (Macmillan, 1997) and A Conversation with Martin Heidegger (Macmillan (Palgrave), 2002). An anthology of his theoretical writing - The Raymond Tallis Reader, edited by Michael Grant - was published by Macmillan (Palgrave) in 2000. He was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters (hon causa) at the University of Hull in 1997 for his non-medical writings and the degree of Doctor of Letters (hon causa) at the University of Manchester in 2003 for 'contributions to literary theory and our understanding of human consciousness’. The Knowing Animal is the final volume in the trilogy of books for EUP which began with The Hand and continued with I Am.

• Overture: making explicitness explicitPart I The unholy trinity1. Looking in the mirror: a vision of the unholy trinity 1.1 Introducing the unholy trinity 1.2 The blob 1.3 The beast 1.4 The bloke 1.5 Further reflections on being a reflection2. From things to persons: “emergence” as a non-explanation 2.1 Getting from the thing to the person 2.2 The appeal to emergence 2.3 Emergence from what? “Everything is made of atoms” 1 the evaporation of atoms 2.4 Emergence from what? “Everything is made of atoms” 2: an empty truism? 2.5 Emergence within the material world 2.6 A brief look at the emergence of organisms 2.7 Concluding thoughts3. The received idea of the brain as the brewery of explicitness 3.1 The myth of “easy” problems of consciousness 3.2 Brain and consciousness: the standard story 3.3 Naturalizing intentionality 1: causal theories of perception 3.4 Naturalizing intentionality 2: tracking theory 3.5 Taking the strain off the brain 1: paninformationalism 3.6 Taking the strain off the brain 2: panpsychism 3.7 The seductive metaphor of representation 3.8 Collapsing the mind: functionalism 3.9 Concluding reflections4. What-is as how much: cutting measurement down to size 4.1 Metaphysics under siege from science 4.2 Problems with physics as metaphysics 4.3 Back to the beginning: measurement 4.4 Measurement and the marginalization of phenomenal experience 4.5 The heart of measurement: units 4.6 The problematic relationship between measurement and consciousness 4.7 The measurement problem 4.8 Probability and possibility in quantum mechanics 4.9 Towards quantum idealism 4.10 From quantum idealism to mathematical idealism 4.11 ConclusionPart II First-person explicitness: circling round the self5. Ambodiment: the marriage between (that) it is and (that) I am 5.1 My body and I: the necessity for embodiment 5.2 Our mode of being in space 5.3 My body as the primordial object “in the weighty sense” 5.4 Ontological democracy: my body and other objects 5.5 A sideways glance at intercorporeality 5.6 The miracle of the embodied subject: the twofold revelation of a world and itself 5.7 Concluding thoughts6. Selfhood 6.1 Introducing the self 6.2 Denying the self 6.3 An autocidal tendency in contemporary philosophy 6.4 Welcoming back the self 6.5 The slimmed down self: the subject as the owner of experiences 6.6 Fattening the self: the unities revisited 6.7 The external scaffolding of the self 6.8 The embodied self 6.9 The inconstant self 6.10 The interrupted self 6.11 Making ourselves 6.12 Concluding thoughts7. Agency: explicitness in action 7.1 The reality of agency 7.2 Ordinary agency 7.3 The ambodied subject as agent 7.4 The point of agency 7.5 What-is and what-ought 7.6 Concluding thoughtsPart III Thought and possibility8. Free-floating explicitness: thinking about thinking 8.1 Introducing the thinking animal 8.2 Unwiring thoughts 8.3 The phenomenology of thought 8.4 “Inside” my head 8.5 Tokens and types 8.6 The expanding realm of pure explicitness: non-existent objects 8.7 Further thoughts on thinking about thoughts 8.8 A postscript on enactivism and embodied cognition9. Pure explicitness: possibility (and probability) 9.1 Thought and possibility 9.2 Possibility and actuality 9.3 Possibility and probability 9.4 Naturalizing probability 9.5 The brain: not a Bayesian engine 9.6 Concluding thoughtsPart IV Circling round what-is10. What-is, conceived as “reality” and “truth” 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Appearance as a veil 10.3 Primary and secondary qualities 10.4 Relational versus intrinsic properties 1 10.5 A glance at the givenness of the given 10.6 Relational versus intrinsic properties 2 10.7 The interactive nature of any given 10.8 How we overlook the interactive nature of what we count as “the given” 10.9 Radical doubt: mediation implies hallucination 10.10 Beyond doubt: reality as something lived 10.11 Reality and truth 10.12 Inconclusive conclusionsCoda: (In) Conclusion

This book gathers together and extends the many implications of Tallis’s core insight that the waning of Western culture’s humanism derives from its science-led failure to recognize how essential the non-eliminable and non-reducible human consciousness is to any and all claims to knowledge. If read understandingly by the intelligentsia of both our hard and soft sciences, it would lay a basis for a scientific revolution of the most humane and human sort.