New ideas that will challenge readers and expand their horizons.
Battler’s unified theory of everything, from the fundamental laws of physics to consciousness and free will.
Though Battler offers a wide view of universal structures—ranging from the development of organic life, the nature of forces, and the underlying nature of consciousness, thought and the mind—there’s a marked difference here from many similar books. Battler takes a more philosophical, phenomenological approach—a twist that adds some interesting ideas to the mix. However, this phenomenological aspect isn’t that of classic phenomenologists, such as Husserl, but of his predecessors, namely Schelling and Hegel, the latter playing a strong role in Battler’s sections on the mind. Central to Battler’s thesis is what he calls ontobia—“the property of being that reveals its existence through motion, space, and time.” His book starts with an overview of philosophers who dealt with natural science, including Aristotle, Leibniz, Newton and Kant, as well as Spinoza, Locke and Teilhard de Chardin—welcome additions to the usual list of philosophers. The book’s second part looks at the idea of force through scientific theories related to quantum physics, the Big Bang and then back again through the Big Crunch. In the third section, Battler then turns his attention toward the organic world, particularly the fields of chemistry and biology, with an emphasis on evolution. Finally, in the fourth section, man arrives as Battler considers the development of consciousness, with references to many well-known thinkers, including Penrose, Searle and Sheldrake, to name a few. For a book of moderate size, the thoroughness is impressive, and even when his ideas run against the grain, the well-argued philosophical combat will satisfy inquisitive readers.
New ideas that will challenge readers and expand their horizons.Pub Date: May 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484008850
Page Count: 322
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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