Seeing Ourselves

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.

• PrefacePart 1 Overture1. Humanism and Anti-HumanismPart 2 Our Human Being2. Against Naturalism: Neither Ape Nor Angel3. The Embodied Subject: Organisms and Persons 4. Human Being: In and Out of Time 5. The Elusive, Inescapable Self6. The Mystery of Human Agency7. Humanity Against Finitude: Transhumanist DreamsPart 3 Flourishing Without God8. "The Sky Is Empty"9. Meaning and Purpose 10. Reclaiming OurselvesEpilogue: An Inconclusion

In this marvellous book, Raymond Tallis trains his keen intellect on issues central to our understanding of what it is to be human – issues too often side-stepped by contemporary thinkers. He provides powerful insights into the nature of being human and exposes the shortcomings of approaches that limit understanding to any one conceptual orientation. He shows how the adoption of a ‘science of human nature’ has the unsettling effect of fitting the phenomena to the method, thereby reducing the topics of inquiry to mere shadows of themselves. Tallis is a very important thinker and this is a very important book.”