Customer Reviews

Paradigm Wars: Worldviews for a New Age

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This is a book that will inspire a paradigm shift in your own thinking. I discovered this book while conducting a recent search for academic works in the field of the philosophy of parapsychology. I've read each of the recent (past 20 years or so) books in this genre and this one is the best by far. It is thorough, comprehensive, interesting to say the least, and well written. This is now the book I recommend to friends and acquaintances more than any other.

If a book is judged by the impact it has on the way you view and understand the world and thus the impact it has on your life, it's the best book I've read since Plato's 'Republic' and Raymond Moody's 'Life After Life' in college.

Let me put it this way; for the week after I bought it I literally could not put it down except for obligatory commitments and for sleeping. I even continued reading while eating my meals!

In short, buy it, read it and I promise you it will be the best money you've ever spent to expand your horizons.

Paradigm Wars is an amazing book that is not for the fainthearted or closedminded. You will not pick it up, read it through in a few sittings and feel as though you have gotten all you want. You will go back again and again. For example, imagine what a chapter entitled "Galactic Destiny" might contain that could stretch your imagination and blow your mind.

Mark Woodhouse has managed to produce a work that exists somewhere between academic and pop genres, which provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of major topics of the New Age in an extremely readable style. Each chapter can actually stand alone as an individual book, if one were so inclined, and this reader was delighted to see the length and depth of the topics. If that were not enough, there are 35 pages of footnotes as a junping off place for further investigation.

With over thirty years of academic achievement, Dr. Woohouse has the credentials to be taken very seriously in an arena that is so often misrepresented and misunderstood. As a philosopher he presents divergent points of view and then presents his own conclusions. Readers may agree or not. That's not the point. Presenting current thinking is what he has done so well. That the paradigm amy change tomorrow is not only probable but expected.

This reader, for one, is looking forward to a sequel and, in the meantime, sharing Paradigm Wars with people I am guesing are ready for it. Not everyone is.

Well researched, with just the right amount of open-mindedness and skpeticism. However, at the end of the book, I was taken aback by what appeared to be a full-scale defense of the thesis that UFOs are really flying saucers with little green men inside. I kept re-reading this section of the book to see if this was a joke. It appears not to be. Anyone who has seen a crop circle will stand in awe of its majesty and mystery, but to go from that to belief in little green guys is too much of a leap from me. But, then again, maybe I am a dummy, and I didn't fully understand this part.

All in all, though, a very worthwhile read.

Well, I'd love to read a good book by that title and one might even copy the blurb texts and the table of contets of Woodhouse's book - all its weaknesses are in the fine print, so to say. The paradigm wars the title refers to are meant to take place between "traditional" (mechanistic, etc.) science and "new age" (holistic, etc.) world views, which present levels of complexity not available to the traditional approaches. No doubt such a war takes place presently... (1) It's an obvious problem that the "new" paradigm is conceptualized as being open and unfinished - together with the author's desire to appropriate all nice and interesting recent scientific developments for his side, one may at times wonder what the "new paradigm" is and what limits it necessarily must have. (2) Woodhouse limits is attention more or less to academic debate - but that's not primarily where the wars are being fought. (Does he think it really matters? The climate in academic institutions may depend on quite a number of factors beside rational arguments...) The bullets fly right in our everyday life situatios - when we see our physician and argue about a treatment (which may or may not be paid by health insurance depending on the influence that "traditional scientists" (aka drug manufacturers and their lackeys) have on the insurance firm). It also takes place in firms striving for enhanced effectiveness in the form of the question "will it be possible to make our employees work harder - or should we consider something new altogether?". And it takes many more forms one does not even find mentioned in this book. (3) On the fronts of these wars I know, the situation looks rather bleak for new approaches. traditional doctrines are well entrenched and have lots of powerful allies - economic shorttermism advocating "tried and true" measures, traditional health providers, genetic engineering firms, religious institutions producing cult scares from time to time, etc. If you advocate divergent paradigms, you need a lot of patience - and you're also faced with some serious problems Woodhouse does not mention. Let me point here only to the fact that while publicly recognized "sciences" have something like a memory in terms of libraries and institutional continuity, "new age thought" all to often starts all over again, repeats its standard arguments and, in sum, doesn't get anywhere for lack of such a continuity, for lack of references one could build on. Altogether, I'm sorry for the money and for the time I spent on this book. Still, someone should write a better one... - it's a worthy project, just a faulty implementation.

While presenting a fairly comprehensive examination of the issues which highlight the weaknesses and limitations of the traditional Neutonian/Cartesian worldview, Dr. Woodhouse searches for a new worldview that can provide answers to a broader spectrum of reality, including the paranormal. Unfortunately, in the process he pays mere lip service to existing worldviews that already offer such answers (e.g., the judeo-christian worldview). It seems as though he is searching for an alternative explanation, being unwilling to accept the implications of existing ones.

I am happy with my order, the book arrived on time and was exactly as it was described. I recommend ordering books from them.

Dr. Woodhouse explores our common paradigms, and offers brilliantly laid out views which we can adopt in the future. He writes to the common person, searching for an understanding of some of the worlviews and problems in society today. It is truly a eye-opening, and mind-expanding read that will leave you dizzy at the vastness of the scope it covers. Truly magnificent.

Woodhouse gives a terrific distillation of the human
condition. Reviewing fields such as transpersonal
psychology, the "new physics," and parapsychology; as
well as such topics as abortion, reincarnation, gender
wars, NDEs, OBEs, environmental damage, and the challenges
facing education, Mark frees us from narrow perspectives,
and offers a comprehensive-transcedental paradigm (compiled
from the works of the brilliant philosopher Ken Wilber)
known in transpersonal psychology as "THE GREAT CHAIN OF
BEING". An excellent contribution that is greatly needed
in our troubled times.

The book is confusing, and full of psuedo-scientific goobly gook. He loves dropping names of famous scientists, and mis-interpreting their work. Frequent use of meaningless terminology. Such as " goddess energy," "Great Chain of Being" etc.