The Raymond Tallis Reader

411 Pages·2000·42.806 MB·English

by  Michael Grant (eds.)

The Raymond Tallis Reader
Also by Raymond Tallis
BETWEEN THE ZONES (poetry)
CLINICAL NEUROLOGY OF OLD AGE (editor)
ENEMIES Of HOPE: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism
EPILEPSY IN ELDERLY PEOPLE
THE EXPLICIT ANIMAL: A Defence of Human Consciousness
FATHERS AND SONS (poetry)
INCREASING LONGEVITY: Medical, Social and Political Implications (editor)
IN DEFENCE OF REALISM
NEWTON'S SLEEP: Two Cultures and Two Kingdoms
NOT SAUSSURE: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory
ON THE EDGE 01' CERTAINTY
PSYCHO-ELECTRONICS
THE PURSUIT OF MIND (co-editor with Howard Robinson)
TEXTBOOK OF GERIATRIC MEDICINE AND GERONTOLOGY (co-editor with John Brocklehurst
and Howard Fillett)
THEORRHOEA AND AFTER
The Raymond Tallis Reader
Edited by
Michael Grant
Senior Lecturer
Rutherford College
The University of Kent
Canterbury
*
ISBN 978-0-333-77272-0 ISBN 978-0-230-28605-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230286054
Introduction and Commentaries © Michael Grant 2000
Chapters 1-16 © Raymond Tallis 2000
Reprint of the original edition 2000
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First published 2000 by
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ISBN 978-0-333-77272-0 paperback
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tallis, Raymond.
The Raymond Tallis reader / edited by Michael Grant.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-333-77271-3
1. Philosophy of mind. 2. Criticism (Philosophy) I. Grant, Michael,
1940-II. Title.
BD418.3 .T357 2000
192-dc21
00-033264
10 9 8 7 6 543 2 1
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00
Dedicated to Tim Farmiloe and Charmian Hearne, without whom
Raymond Tallis would have had neither a Reader nor readers
I am enonnously grateful to Michael Grant for his energy, enthusiasm and
painstaking care in putting together this Reader, I could not have been better read.
Raymond Tallis
May 2000
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction: Raymond Tallis and the Bewitchment of Theory ix
Part I The Explicit Animal 1
1. The Poverty of Neurophilosophy 3
2. On the Edge of Certainty 29
3. Man, the Explicit Animal 65
Part II The Nature of Language 109
4. Reference Restored 111
5. Language and Consciousness 137
Part III The Centrality of the Conscious Human Agent 143
6. Recovering the Conscious Agent 145
7. The Hope of Progress 174
Part IV The Errors of Post-Saussurean Thought 225
8. Theorrhoea contra Realism 227
9. The Mirror Stage 253
10. The Shrink from Hell 284
11. Walking and Differance 289
Part V The Two Cultures 307
12. Evidence-based and Evidence-free Generalisations 309
13. Anti-Science and Organic Daydreams 330
Part VI The Nature of Art 343
14. The Freezing Coachman 345
15. The Difficulty of Arrival 354
16. Metaphysics and Gossip 362
Index 371
vii
Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Macmillan for permission to reprint
selections from the work of Raymond Tallis; to The Times Higher Education
Supplement for permission to reprint 'The Shrink from Hell' (Reading 10); and
to Oxford University Press for permission to reprint 'Evidence-based and
Evidence-free Generalisations' (Reading 12).
I would like to acknowledge the unfailing support and encouragement of
Raymond Tallis himself during the sometimes difficult but always pleasurable
task of putting this Reader together. I would also like to acknowledge the help
and kindness of Eleanor Birne of Macmillan, and to offer my thanks to Ruth
Willats for her indispensable work on the text.
Michael Grant
Introduction:
Raymond Tallis and the Bewitchment
of Theory
Michael Grant
What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will,
rather than with the intellect.
Wittgenstein
Raymond Tallis is a man of the Enlightenment. His work represents a
reaffirmation of the values of the Enlightenment, even, one might say, of 'the
Enlightenment project'. And yet, while he would undoubtedly see the promo
tion of health, freedom, justice, tolerance and peace as a good in itself, the
reaffirmation in question is one that has been profoundly chastened by
reflection on the experience of the last two hundred years. The values to
which Tallis has committed himself are indeed those of a certain enlighten
ment, but an enlightenment stripped of the scientism and the scientistic
utopianism that have helped to give birth to the dystopian nightmares of
totalitarian regimes and succoured those who would engineer the human
soul. At the same time, the reaffirmation of what are for him values funda
mental to the purpose and meaning of human life has put him on a collision
course with the progenitors and contemporary exponents of poststructuralism
and postmodernism. He has castigated what he sees as the hypocritical com
placency of their nihilism and excoriated the low standards of their scholar
ship, while making no bones about his loathing for what he describes as the
carelessness, methodological shoddiness and out-and-out fraud that all too
often characterise their investigative procedures. The result, he insists,
disfigures a great deal of what passes for academic activity within the humani
ties departments of modern universities. This connects with another of his
major preoccupations, the clarification of what kinds of general assertion are
admissible and what kinds are not, an issue vigorously pursued in relation to
Lacan and Derrida. There is frequently, then, a polemical edge to his writing,
and against this background of controversy the force and importance of the
themes and ideas that engage him are seen to advantage. Tallis places human
consciousness at the very centre of human affairs, having the gravest reserva
tions about contemporary notions of the unconscious. He is emphatic about
the complexity of that consciousness and has insisted on its inexplicability in
terms of physical science. He is eager to reassert the role of the human agent
in individual action and the shaping of human culture and destiny. And in
his far-reaching criticisms of modern theorists of pessimism - 'the enemies of
ix