Seeking Meaning and Making Sense

by John Haldane

Overview

Collection of short essays that range across philosophy, politics, general culture, morality, science, religion and art, focusing on questions of meaning, value and understanding.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781845408046
Publisher:	Andrews UK
Publication date:	03/06/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	850 KB

About the Author

John Haldane is Professor of Philosophy, Head of the School of Philosophical and Anthropological Studies at the University of St. Andrews, and Fellow of the royal Society of Arts. He is an editor of the International Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Routledge).

Editorial Reviews

"This volume provides further evidence that John Haldane is our finest contemporary philosophical journalist. No other recent figure has written as elegantly or as insightfully about the contemporary landscape of ethics, religion and the post-modern search for meaning. And surely no one other than Professor Haldane could use such materials as the Toy Story films and the British pantomime to gently instruct us about such weighty matters as Pope Gregory the Great's revolutionary teaching on religion and representational art."

David Solomon

"Professor Haldane's essays are serious in the way that the great writers of the Scottish Enlightenment were serious. He asks what it means to be human in the twenty-first century, and what ethical obligations our idea of humanity imposes on us. They are provocative in the best, and only useful, sense of the word: inviting the reader to consider and respond to his arguments. Their range is wide, extending from a disquisition on the morality of stem-cell research to a very funny parody of 'The Da Vinci Code'."

Alan Massie

"As humans, we are constantly seeking meaning and attempting to make sense of the word, a process in which John Haldane is fully engaged. ... Lucid and stimulating [his essays] range accessibly. ... Haldane's final reflections are suitably humble, when he notes that making sense is available business and that seeking meaning in tails presupposing some objective standards as well as admitting human fallabillity. Hence, the most modest position is one that 'postulates a destination without assuming that be on the right road towards it, or that having set out we must arrive'. It is hard to disagree."

From the Publisher

"There is a breadth to this collection that is highly impressive ... accessibility to an educated daily newspaper reading public is seemingly effortlessly achieved, without avoiding difficult concepts or argumentative precision. In this respect he is not unlike his great Scottish Enlightenment predecessors."

New Blackfriars (vol. 90 issue 1027) - John D. O'Connor

"Seeking Meaning and Making Sense [is] a series of 20 essays on philosophy that add up to an argument for the human usefulness of thinking methodically about cosmology, society, ethics, religion and art... Haldane's interests are wide, embracing popular culture, from the Exorcist to John Buchan, and taking in native thinkers from the Scottish Enlightenment ... [and] he is adept at relating the slippery field of aesthetics to a wider world view. ... These essays are entertaining [and] possess a flavour of humanity, openness, urbanity, and an underlying infectious optimism in taking the cosmos to be intelligible and ethics as possible."

The Tablet - Christopher Howse

"Haldane, we may say, has assumed not only the mantle of a Public Intellectual but of a Catholic Public Intellectual, an altogether rarer breed. . . His spirit of reform and renewal calls upon his compatriots to appreciate the richness of their nation's intellectual heritage."

The European Legacy - Rajnath Bhat

"The public intellectual and the philosopher-journalist, although they might appal their snootier academic colleagues, are very much back in vogue — and John Haldane, as hard-working as any of them, is in the vanguard.... In Seeking Meaning and Making Sense Haldane is essentially sounding a counterblast to the massed ranks of nihilists and postmodernists who have poured scorn on the very notion of seeking out life's meaning.... The bulk of Haldane's book is dedicated to showing how an ability to 'deliberate and act in accord with reasons — to find meaning' is 'part of the human form of life', and one that, despite much talk of the death of metaphysics, remains in rude health... There are many riches contained within its pages, however and, even when his philosophical fuse is evidently becoming very short indeed, Haldane sustains a suitably urbane and respectful tone."

The Catholic Herald - Jonathan Wright

There is a breadth to this collection that is highly impressive ... accessibility to an educated daily newspaper reading public is seemingly effortlessly achieved, without avoiding difficult concepts or argumentative precision. In this respect he is not unlike his great Scottish Enlightenment predecessors.

John D. O''Connor