In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections

Raymond Tallis trained as a doctor before going on to become Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester. He was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences for his research in clinical neuroscience. He retired from medicine in 2006 to become a full-time writer. He has published fiction, poetry and over a dozen books of cultural criticism and philosophical anthropology including, most recently, the acclaimed The Kingdom of Infinite Space (Atlantic, 2008) and Aping Mankind (Acumen, 2011).

• Acknowledgments; Overture; Chapter 1 George Moore’s Hands: Scepticism about Philosophy; Chapter 2 Zhuangzi and that Bloody Butterfly; Chapter 3 Rescuing Truth; Chapter 4 Just a Little Tune I Found in My Mouth; Chapter 5 A Smile at Waterloo Station: On the True Mystery of Memory; Chapter 6 The Myth of Time Travel; Chapter 7 Time, Tense and Physics: The Theory of Everything but …; Chapter 8 Seeing Time; Chapter 9 Call No Event Future Until it is Past; Chapter 10 On (Almost) Nothing: Concerning Spatial Points; Chapter 11 An Introduction to Incontinental Philosophy; Chapter 12 Biological Reasons for Being Cheerful?; Chapter 13 The Soup and the Scaffolding; Chapter 14 Don’t Tell Him, Pike!; Chapter 15 Okey Doke; Chapter 16 The Professor of Data-Lean Generalizations; Chapter 17 “I Kid You Not”: Knowingness and Other Shallows; Chapter 18 My Bald Head: The Ethics of Hair-Splitting; Chapter 19 Getting Consciousness to Speak Itself: The Great Unmet Challenge of Realistic Fiction; Chapter 20 Reader, I Sh***ed Him: Reflections on the Decline of the Asterisk; Chapter 21 Ian McEwan’s Saturday: Does Implausibility Matter?; Chapter 22 Literature, Philosophy and Medicine: On Anton Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6”; Chapter 23 The Mystery and the Paradox of Scientific Medicine; Chapter 24 Enhancing Humanity; Chapter 25 On Not Choosing the Alternative: Reflections on Living Longer; Chapter 26 Making Use of Death; Chapter 27 Why I am an Atheist; Coda;