In The Hand, the first volume of his trilogy, Raymond Tallis looked at how humans have overcome the constraints of biology. The second volume, I Am, focused on two crucial aspects of the escape from being a mere organism: selfhood and agency. This, the final volume in the trilogy, argues that knowledge is unique to human beings and sufficiently important to call man 'the knowing animal'. Raymond Tallis examines the profound difference between knowledge 'That things are the case' and mere sentience. He criticises both accounts of knowledge that marginalise the consciousness of the knower and naturalistic accounts that assimilate knowledge to sense experience and, ultimately, neural activity. He argues that knowledge arises because humans are embodied subjects and not just organisms: knowing subjects know both about events in the material world which they can perceive as well as non-material 'facts'. It is because knowledge is relatively 'uncoupled' from the material world that active inquiry, reason-directed behaviour and deliberate manipulation of nature are possible.A critique of evolutionary psychology examines these phenomena and looks at the replacement of animal 'appetites' with propositional 'attitudes', at carnal knowledge and at explicit awareness of death. The various ways humans have dealt with the 'wound' opened in consciousness by knowledge - religion, art and philosophy - are also discussed. The Knowing Animal completes a trilogy that aims to revolutionise our understanding of what it is to be a human being without recourse to theology and supernatural explanations on the one hand or scientism and naturalistic explanations on the other. Features: *The question of humankind's unique ability to know things is covered in this volume and follows on from Ray Tallis' inquiry into humankind's unique 'handedness' (The Hand) and ability to reflect on itself (I Am) - he has explore our ability to know, to hold and handle things and to think of our own being. *The book provides a fascinating philosophical insight about the way humankind comes to know the things it does (as opposed to having sensations) because it (humankind) has awareness of itself. *It also provides a critique of other theories of knowledge.* The book continues Ray Tallis' argument that humans are distinctly different from animals while yet being creatures.
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Editorial Reviews
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His is a bold effort...Tallis's standpoint is absolutely the right one.
(A. C. Grayling Lancet )About the Author
Raymond Tallis is professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester and fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences
(3/19/05)
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
fascinating,
This review is from: The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth (Paperback)
This is the third book in a trilogy starting with 'The Hand' and 'I Am', and the culmination of an argument running through nearly a thousand pages in total. Perhaps the best way to approach the trilogy is by starting with two fundamental approaches to the study of Man. One is philosophy, which examines, say, self-consciousness, free will and personal identity without any reference to the historical facts of how mankind came to be the way it is, but as if Man had fallen out of the sky, so to speak. By contrast, the historical approach to Man is inescapably Darwinian, and often reductive: for all their brilliance, Matt Ridley and Steven Pinker are often crassly reductive in a way that makes philosophers uncomfortable, since they are trying to resolve philosophical problems with tools provided by science. It is not mere professional jealously that motivates the hostility of philosophers to evolutionary reductionists. It is the realisation that many fundamental aspects of Man simply cannot be accounted for scientifically. Tallis sets himself the huge challenge of bringing the historical and philosophical approaches together. As an academic doctor, he is well placed to evaluate the claims of science about Man -- both their power and their limits --, and as a remarakle polymath, who has written brilliant and funny demolitions of the moronic reductivists in the field of literary theory, he has the philosophical sophisitication to make relevant distinctions. "The Hand" is the least philosophical, and most historical, book, and may be skipped by those interested in the former aspects of the argument. It is nonetheless a fascinating elaboration of the claim that it is the development of the hand as a tool for manipulating the external world that led to the distinctive self-awareness of Man. Tallis is aware that in explaining the escape of Man from animality, one must take take as a starting point an un-self-conscious animal. The leap to Man is a difference of kind, and not merely degree, according to Tallis, and this is where his philosophical acumen and refusal to compromise with scientism comes in handy. The philosophical aspects of that self-awareness are developed in "I Am", which contains chapters on self-consciousness and personal identity that are hugely rigorous and original. Having read quite widely in the philosophical literature, I can recommend them to students as weighty contributions to those areas. The same goes for the middle chapters in "The Knowing Animal", which take the argument from illusion (sticks looking bent in water), which has been gathering dust in university libraries for decades, and reinvigorates it with new life. These chapters can only be described as inspired. This is a demanding book, but all good philosophy books are. It is also clearly written with a very light touch, and much humour and insight. (Only the chapter on free will eluded my grasp, but that may well be my fault). Tallis is a champion of the general reader, as opposed to the academic orthodoxies, and he has given the general reader (as well as the specialist) a truly extraordinary book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
How the Knower Knows,
By Mark (CT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth (Paperback)
Tallis takes the most interesting results from both phenomenology and analytic philosophy and draws bold conclusions about how humans relate to the world. This is a work by a true philosopher, aimed at the big picture, rather than an academic specialist. Outstanding, but those without a background in philosophy will find it a challenging read.
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