The Epilogue of The Passion of The Western Mind by Richard Tarnas presents a set of provocative claims about how Tarnas sees the zeitgeist shifting. I will attempt to summarise some of his main points here as a basis for discussion of the theme of paradigm shift, the famous idea popularized by TS Kuhn in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
A paradigm is a framework of meaning, a set of ideas that constitutes a person's worldview. Kuhn famously argued that examples of paradigm shift are from the geocentric to the heliocentric cosmologies, and from the Newtonian-Euclidian concept of space to Einsteinian relativity. Similarly, the shift from Biblical creationism to Darwinian evolution, or from traditional logical rationality to the depth psychology claims of unconscious instinct as driver of behaviour, constitute major paradigm shifts. Kuhn’s argument was that people in an obsolete paradigm are so identified with their false ideas that they are simply incapable of seeing the obvious truth in the new vision.
In pointing to a ‘reintegration of our culture, a new possibility of the unity of consciousness’ (415), Tarnas defines the modern paradigm as the set of ideas historically framed by the thought of Copernicus, Kant and Descartes. This troika of great modern thinkers constituted the modern worldview in terms of cosmology and the theory of reality and knowledge. Tarnas says the Copernican revolution, by opening the vista of a vast and impersonal universe, was decisive in the disenchantment of the natural world, “a primordial event, world-destroying and world-constituting.” Descartes responded to this modern shock by emphasizing the self as distinct and separate from the external world that it seeks to understand and master. Kant consolidated this modern vision by his theory that only experience is real, and all knowledge is interpretation. For modernity, the world is devoid of spiritual purpose, without intrinsic meaning. The soul is not ‘at home in the modern cosmos’. The world is a construct, contextual and theory-soaked. The troika of estrangers cast humans as aliens, with matter and spirit radically separated. So Tarnas compares modern philosophy to an obsessive-compulsive repeatedly tying and untying his shoelaces because he never gets it quite right, “while in the meantime Socrates and Hegel and Aquinas are already high in the mountains on their hike, breathing the bracing alpine air, seeing new and unexpected vistas.” (421)
Let us see how well Tarnas can justify this dismissive comment about the modern worldview.
He says the power of modernity focuses on control of nature through interpretation that is “concretely predictive, mechanistic, structural… systematically cleansed of all spiritual and human qualities.” The immense power of modern control has produced technological abundance, but Tarnas asks if it comes at the price of loss of soul, the loss of knowledge of a reality beyond human subjectivity? He discusses this claim in analyzing the thought of Carl Jung, who he says followed Kant in developing a theory of archetypes as patterns of human projection, but later moved to a view of archetypes as ‘patterns of meaning that inhere in both psyche and matter’ (425). Tarnas explores this idea through the work of Grof, who saw the history of civilization through the metaphor of individual life, from oceanic embryo through painful birth and individuation through to recognition of a higher cosmic unity. Hence the Biblical archetype, expulsion from paradise and experience of the universe as indifferent, pointing towards a final reconciliation of nature and spirit, is a model for individual life.
Tarnas argues that the modern subject-object epistemology is metaphor for the moment of individuation, a powerful but risky stage leading towards higher wisdom. “Repudiation of any intrinsic meaning or purpose in nature, demand for a univocal, literal interpretation of a world of hard facts, ensure the construction of a disenchanted and alienating world view.” (431) Tarnas sees this modern claim as intrinsically wrong and oppressive, bringing the return of the repressed in the underworld of the psyche – “the Cartesian-Kantian condition evolves into a Kafka-Beckett like state of existential isolation and absurdity.” (432)
In proposing a “more sophisticated and comprehensive epistemological perspective”, Tarnas identifies as forebears Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, Emerson and Steiner. His key comment is that the common thread in these thinkers was “the fundamental conviction that the relation of the human mind to the world was ultimately not dualistic but participatory…Nature becomes intelligible to itself through the human mind.” (433) Rather than nature as a separate material object to be mastered, we ourselves are channeling nature in our thought as imagination directly contacts the creative process within nature. The world’s truth reveals itself within and through the human mind, reflecting the universe’s unfolding meaning. In this participatory epistemological framework, conjecture and myth arise from something far deeper than a purely human source, from a wellspring of nature itself, a kinship with the cosmos.
Tarnas sets this kinship vision as a paradigm, in Kuhn’s terms, that cannot be measured against the criteria of modernity, lacking common measure or value as standard of comparison. Only as this paradigm resonates with the collective psyche will it gain traction, once the prison of modernity reaches a crisis of tension and an inspired Promethean genius comes along and is graced with an inner breakthrough to a new vision that gives the scientific mind a new sense of being cognitively connected. An example is Newton’s illumination of the theory of gravity as a divine revelation ‘I think thy thoughts after thee!’. Once the old paradigm loses its numinosity and is felt as ‘oppressive, limiting, opaque’, a new paradigm can emerge as a liberating birth into a new, luminously intelligible universe.
“A new philosophical paradigm, whether that of Plato, Aquinas, Kant or Heidegger, … reflects the experience of a global experiential gestalt.” (439) The contemporary world is ‘breaking through… out of what Blake called its ‘mind-forged manacles’ to rediscover its intimate relationship with nature and the larger cosmos.” (440)
For Tarnas to set the problem as between ‘the autonomous rational human self’ and ‘primordial unity with nature’ is far from a simple claim. If such ‘unity’ defies logical analysis and evidential criteria, it could well open a path to irrationality. Yet, Tarnas suggests this unity is emerging in “the growing recognition of an immanent intelligence in nature, in the broad popularity of the Gaia hypothesis... an epochal shift .. a sacred marriage between …the alienated masculine and the …ascending feminine…The deepest passion of the western mind is to reunite with the ground of its own being…the telos,…to reconnect with the cosmos.” (443)
Tarnas concludes that Western thought is not simply an imperialist plot, but a noble part of a great dialectic, an evolving process of thought that has prepared the way for its own self-transcendence through opening to the feminine. This argument is a highly provocative challenge to the logic of modern rationality. By starting with a cosmic intuition it opens a path for a mystical sense of unity.
The theme of channeling Gaia as the goddess of nature is one that has emerged more strongly in the science of planetary homeostasis as an explanation of global heating and its likely consequences. Tarnas himself takes this intuitive method forward in his next book, Cosmos and Psyche, where he sets our planetary reality in the cosmic framework of the solar system and its rhythms, a highly disconcerting approach for people used to scientific evidential criteria.
I personally think that Tarnas has opened core questions for human identity with this discussion of the paradigm shift required to address the modern planetary crisis. In asking that philosophy seek to think nature, the western concept of autonomy is thrown into radical doubt. Tarnas cites Heidegger as one thinker who has opened such a challenge to the modern paradigm, presenting a participatory rather than autonomous worldview.
This participatory agenda can be used to assess a range of current ideas. For example, I am now reading The Vanishing Face of Gaia – A Final Warning by James Lovelock. It presents a compelling logic against Tarnas’s suggestion of paradigm shift, but is incomprehensible for those mired in the logic of control. Yet Lovelock seems to suggest that the logic of control condemns its adherents to the fate of a frog in a warming pot, lacking the vision to jump out as its instinctive responses lead it to wait until it is too late.
Robert Tulip
-
In total there are 2 users online :: 0 registered, 0 hidden and 2 guests (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
Most users ever online was 1000 on Sun Jun 30, 2024 12:23 am
Tarnas on Paradigm Shift
#79: Feb. - March 2010 (Non-Fiction)
- Robert Tulip
-
- BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
- Posts: 6502
- Joined: Tue Oct 04, 2005 9:16 pm
- 18
- Location: Canberra
- Has thanked: 2730 times
- Been thanked: 2666 times
- Contact:
- Lawrence
-
- Senior
- Posts: 351
- Joined: Tue Sep 09, 2008 9:58 pm
- 15
- Location: Florida
- Has thanked: 68 times
- Been thanked: 53 times
Re: Tarnas on Paradigm Shift
Robert,
That was as splendid a piece of analysis as I have ever read. I'm not sure Tarnas even knew that is what he was saying, but after you have expressed it thus, I believe that is what he was trying to say. I hope you will post it on Amazon comments and send a copy to Mr. Tarnas. If I were he, I would be thrilled to have someone understand what I was writing as completely, objectively, and thoroughly as you have his book.
That was as splendid a piece of analysis as I have ever read. I'm not sure Tarnas even knew that is what he was saying, but after you have expressed it thus, I believe that is what he was trying to say. I hope you will post it on Amazon comments and send a copy to Mr. Tarnas. If I were he, I would be thrilled to have someone understand what I was writing as completely, objectively, and thoroughly as you have his book.
-
-
Eligible to vote in book polls!
- Posts: 25
- Joined: Sun Jan 31, 2010 8:01 am
- 14
- Location: Washington DC
- Has thanked: 3 times
- Been thanked: 2 times
- Contact:
Re: Tarnas on Paradigm Shift
Robert,
You sir, as are the rest of the posters, are swiming in the deep end of the pool, while I splash about in the one for kiddies.
Paradigm shift.
Tarnas, from what I have read, believes that one is occuring. I think that much is obvious to most people. This is, if you use the definition of pardigm as a framework for interperting the world, has been happening for the past 50 years at least. Paradigm change has a long gestation period.
My interpertation is the archetypes that have provided the anchors for the past 2000 years are dimming. They are unchangeable as Forms, rather is the world is moving away from them as part of an unending cycle.
I believe the Forms remain, it is the windows we look out to observe them are slowly, perhaps like a cylinder, changing. Beauty remains Beauty, the instances have changed. Each Form is a spoke in a wheel. Each spoke returns to the same hub.
You sir, as are the rest of the posters, are swiming in the deep end of the pool, while I splash about in the one for kiddies.
Paradigm shift.
Tarnas, from what I have read, believes that one is occuring. I think that much is obvious to most people. This is, if you use the definition of pardigm as a framework for interperting the world, has been happening for the past 50 years at least. Paradigm change has a long gestation period.
My interpertation is the archetypes that have provided the anchors for the past 2000 years are dimming. They are unchangeable as Forms, rather is the world is moving away from them as part of an unending cycle.
I believe the Forms remain, it is the windows we look out to observe them are slowly, perhaps like a cylinder, changing. Beauty remains Beauty, the instances have changed. Each Form is a spoke in a wheel. Each spoke returns to the same hub.
Return to “The Passion of the Western Mind - by Richard Tarnas”
Jump to
- General Discussion
- ↳ Religion & Philosophy
- ↳ Current Events & History
- ↳ Science & Technology
- ↳ Arts & Entertainment
- ↳ Everything Else
- Non-Fiction Books
- ↳ The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - by Mark Manson
- ↳ What non-fiction book should we read and discuss next?
- ↳ Non-Fiction General Discussion
- ↳ Authors: Tell us about your NON-FICTION book!
- Fiction Books
- ↳ The Handmaid's Tale - by Margaret Atwood
- ↳ What fiction book should we read and discuss next?
- ↳ Short Story Discussions
- ↳ Fiction General Discussion
- ↳ Authors: Tell us about your FICTION book!
- Special Forums
- ↳ What are you currently reading?
- ↳ A Passion for Poetry
- ↳ Author's Lounge
- ↳ Creative Writing
- The Archives
- ↳ Archived Book Discussion Forums
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2022-2023
- ↳ Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow - by Yuval Noah Harari
- ↳ The Day of the Triffids - by John Wyndham
- ↳ The Hidden Life of Trees - by Peter Wohlleben
- ↳ How the World Really Works - by Vaclav Smil
- ↳ Slaughterhouse-Five - by Kurt Vonnegut
- ↳ How to Read the Constitution -- and Why - by Kim Wehle
- ↳ Big Time: Stories - by Jen Spyra
- ↳ Meditations - by Marcus Aurelius
- ↳ Divided We Fall - by David French
- ↳ Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce... - by Steven Pinker
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2020-2021
- ↳ Crime and Punishment - by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- ↳ The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars - by Jo Marchant
- ↳ Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know - by Adam Grant
- ↳ Books do Furnish a Life - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Another Country - by James Baldwin
- ↳ Dracula - by Bram Stoker
- ↳ Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents - by Isabel Wilkerson
- ↳ To Kill a Mockingbird - by Harper Lee
- ↳ A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic - by Peter Wadhams
- ↳ The Rosie Project: A Novel - by Graeme Simsion
- ↳ The Righteous Mind - by Jonathan Haidt
- ↳ The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles C. Mann
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2018-2019
- ↳ American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good - by Colin Woodard
- ↳ July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century - by Arthur C. Clarke
- ↳ The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution - by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett
- ↳ Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong - by James W. Loewen
- ↳ The Last Unicorn - by Peter S. Beagle
- ↳ Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped - by Garry Kasparov
- ↳ 1984 - by George Orwell
- ↳ Finding Purpose in a Godless World - by Ralph Lewis (Foreword by Michael Shermer)
- ↳ Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind - by Yuval Noah Harari
- ↳ The Time Machine - by H. G. Wells
- ↳ Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis - J. D. Vance
- ↳ We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy - by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2016-2017
- ↳ Astrophysics for People in a Hurry - by Neil deGrasse Tyson
- ↳ The Master and Margarita - by Mikhail Bulgakov
- ↳ A People's History of the United States - by Howard Zinn
- ↳ Darwin's Dangerous Idea - by Daniel Dennett
- ↳ 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - by Jules Verne
- ↳ A Short History of Nearly Everything - by Bill Bryson
- ↳ Uncle Tom's Cabin - by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- ↳ God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction - by Dan Barker, foreword by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging - by Sebastian Junger
- ↳ The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition - by Ernest Hemingway
- ↳ Up From Slavery - by Booker T. Washington
- ↳ Soul Identity - by Dennis Batchelder
- ↳ On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt - by Richard Carrier
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2014-2015
- ↳ The Martian - by Andy Weir
- ↳ Good Thinking: What You Need to Know to be Smarter, Safer, Wealthier, and Wiser - by Guy P. Harrison
- ↳ The Post-American World: Release 2.0 - by Fareed Zakaria
- ↳ Go Set a Watchman: A Novel - by Harper Lee
- ↳ Flowers for Algernon - by Daniel Keyes
- ↳ Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief - by Lawrence Wright
- ↳ Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark - by Carl Sagan with Ann Druyan
- ↳ King Henry IV, Part 1 (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series) (Pt. 1) - by William Shakespeare
- ↳ Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart: Rewriting the Ten Commandments for the Twenty-first Century - by Lex Bayer and John Figdor
- ↳ Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism - by Richard Carrier
- ↳ Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus – by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- ↳ The Big Questions: Philosophy - Simon Blackburn
- ↳ Science Was Born of Christianity: The Teaching of Fr. Stanley L. Jaki - by Stacy Trasancos
- ↳ The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom - by Jonathan Haidt
- ↳ A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book One - by George R. R. Martin
- ↳ Tempesta's Dream: A Story of Love, Friendship and Opera - by Vincent B. "Chip" LoCoco
- ↳ Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty - by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2012-2013
- ↳ The Drowning Girl - by Caitlin R. Kiernan
- ↳ The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin on the Siberian Taiga - by Sylvain Tesson
- ↳ The Complete Heretic's Guide to Western Religion: The Mormons - by David Fitzgerald
- ↳ A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - by James Joyce
- ↳ The Divine Comedy - by Dante Alighieri
- ↳ The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Dubliners - by James Joyce
- ↳ My Name Is Red - by Orhan Pamuk
- ↳ The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? - by Jared Diamond
- ↳ The Man Who Was Thursday - by G. K. Chesterton
- ↳ The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined - by Steven Pinker
- ↳ Lord Jim - by Joseph Conrad
- ↳ The Hobbit - by J. R. R. Tolkien
- ↳ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - by Douglas Adams
- ↳ Atlas Shrugged - by Ayn Rand
- ↳ Thinking, Fast and Slow - by Daniel Kahneman
- ↳ World War Z - by Max Brooks
- ↳ Evolutionary Psychology - by Robin Dunbar, Louise Barrett, John Lycett
- ↳ Moby Dick; or, the Whale - by Herman Melville
- ↳ A Visit from the Goon Squad - by Jennifer Egan
- ↳ Lost Memory of Skin: A Novel - by Russell Banks
- ↳ The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - by Thomas S. Kuhn
- ↳ Hobbes: Leviathan: Revised student edition - by Thomas Hobbes
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2010-2011
- ↳ The House of the Spirits - by Isabel Allende
- ↳ Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens - by Christopher Hitchens
- ↳ The Falls: A Novel (P.S.) by Joyce Carol Oates
- ↳ Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection - by D.M. Murdock
- ↳ The Glass Bead Game: A Novel - by Hermann Hesse
- ↳ A Devil's Chaplain - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ The Hero with a Thousand Faces - by Joseph Campbell
- ↳ The Brothers Karamazov - by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- ↳ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - by Mark Twain
- ↳ The Moral Landscape - by Sam Harris
- ↳ The Decameron - by Giovanni Boccaccio
- ↳ The Road - by Cormac McCarthy
- ↳ The Grand Design - by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow
- ↳ The Evolution of God - by Robert Wright
- ↳ The Tin Drum - by Gunter Grass
- ↳ Good Omens - by Neil Gaiman
- ↳ Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions - by Dan Ariely
- ↳ The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel - by Haruki Murakami
- ↳ ALONE: Orphaned on the Ocean - by Richard Logan & Tere Duperrault Fassbender
- ↳ Don Quixote - Translated by Edith Grossman
- ↳ Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain - by Oliver Sacks
- ↳ Diary of a Madman and Other Stories - by Nikolai Gogol
- ↳ The Passion of the Western Mind - by Richard Tarnas
- ↳ The Left Hand of Darkness - by Ursula K. Le Guin
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2008-2009
- ↳ The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism - by Howard Bloom
- ↳ Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - by Lewis Carroll
- ↳ Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle - by Chris Hedges
- ↳ The Sound and the Fury - by William Faulkner
- ↳ The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions - by Neil Gaiman
- ↳ The Selfish Gene - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ When Good Thinking Goes Bad - by Todd C. Riniolo
- ↳ House of Leaves - by Mark Z. Danielewski
- ↳ American Gods: A Novel - by Neil Gaiman
- ↳ Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved - by Frans de Waal
- ↳ The Enormous Room - by E.E. Cummings
- ↳ The Picture of Dorian Gray - by Oscar Wilde
- ↳ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything - by Christopher Hitchens
- ↳ The Name of the Rose - by Umberto Eco
- ↳ Dreams From My Father - by Barack Obama
- ↳ Paradise Lost - by John Milton
- ↳ Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism - by Kevin Phillips
- ↳ The Secret Garden - by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- ↳ Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists - by Dan Barker
- ↳ The Things They Carried - by Tim O'Brien
- ↳ The Limits of Power - by Andrew Bacevich
- ↳ Lolita - by Vladimir Nabokov
- ↳ Orlando - by Virginia Woolf
- ↳ On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not - by Robert Burton
- ↳ 50 reasons people give for believing in a god - by Guy P. Harrison
- ↳ Walden - by Henry David Thoreau
- ↳ Exile and the Kingdom - by Albert Camus
- ↳ Our Inner Ape - by Frans de Waal
- ↳ Your Inner Fish - by Neil Shubin
- ↳ No Country for Old Men - by Cormac McCarthy
- ↳ The Age of American Unreason - by Susan Jacoby
- ↳ Ten Theories of Human Nature - by Leslie Stevenson & David Haberman
- ↳ Heart of Darkness - by Joseph Conrad
- ↳ The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature - by Stephen Pinker
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2006-2007
- ↳ A Thousand Splendid Suns - by Khaled Hosseini
- ↳ The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil - by Philip Zimbardo
- ↳ Responsibility and Judgment - by Hannah Arendt
- ↳ Godless in America: Conversations With an Atheist - by George A. Ricker
- ↳ Interventions - by Noam Chomsky
- ↳ Religious Expression and the American Constitution - by Franklyn S. Haiman
- ↳ Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future - by Bill McKibben
- ↳ The God Delusion - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal - by Jared Diamond
- ↳ The Woman in the Dunes - by Abe Kobo
- ↳ Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction - by Eugenie Scott
- ↳ The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals - by Michael Pollan
- ↳ I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54 - by Robert Graves
- ↳ Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon - by Daniel Dennett
- ↳ A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East - by David Fromkin
- ↳ The Time Traveler's Wife - by Audrey Niffenegger
- ↳ The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason - by Sam Harris
- ↳ Ender's Game - by Orson Scott Card
- ↳ The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - by Mark Haddon
- ↳ Value & Virtue in a Godless Universe - by Erik J. Wielenberg
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2004-2005
- ↳ The March: A Novel - by E.L. Doctorow
- ↳ The Ethical Brain - by Michael Gazzaniga
- ↳ Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism - by Susan Jacoby
- ↳ Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - by Jared Diamond
- ↳ The Battle for God - by Karen Armstrong
- ↳ The Future of Life - by Edward O. Wilson
- ↳ What is Good? The Search for the Best Way to Live - by A.C. Grayling
- ↳ Civilization and It's Enemies: The Next Stage of History - by Lee Harris
- ↳ Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space - by Carl Sagan
- ↳ How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God - by Michael Shermer
- ↳ Looking For Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain - by Antonio Damasio
- ↳ Archived Book Discussions 2002-2003
- ↳ Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right - by Al Franken
- ↳ The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - by Matt Ridley
- ↳ The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - by Stephen Pinker
- ↳ Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder - by Richard Dawkins
- ↳ Atheism: A Reader - edited by S. T. Joshi
- ↳ Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century - by Howard Bloom
- ↳ The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History - by Howard Bloom
- ↳ Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies - by Jared Diamond
- ↳ Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark - by Carl Sagan
- ↳ Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West - by Dee Alexander Brown
- ↳ Future Shock - by Alvin Toffler
Quick Links
Donations
Help BookTalk.org thrive!
Your donation ensures our committment to quality book discussions
As an Amazon Associate BookTalk.org earns from qualifying purchases.