Logos ― The Mystery of How We Make Sense of the World

Our sense-making capabilities and the relationship between our individual and collective intelligence and the comprehensibility of the world are both remarkable and deeply mysterious. Our capacity to make sense of the world and the fact that we pass our lives steeped in knowledge and understanding, albeit incomplete, that far exceeds what we are or even experience have challenged our greatest thinkers for centuries.

In Logos, Raymond Tallis steps into the gap between mind and world to explore what is at stake in our attempts to make sense of our world and our lives. With his characteristic combination of scholarly rigor and lively humor he reveals how philosophers, theologians, and scientists have sought to demystify our extraordinary capacity to understand the world by collapsing the distance between the mind that does the sense-making and the world that is made sense of. Such strategies—whether by locating the world inside the mind, or making the mind part of the world—are shown to be deeply flawed and of little help in explaining the intelligibility of the world. Indeed, it is the distance that we need, argues Tallis, if knowledge is to count as knowledge and for there to be a distinction between the knower and the known.

Tallis brings his formidable analysis to bear on the many challenges we face when trying to make sense of our sense-making. These include the idea of cognitive progress, which presupposes a benchmark of complete understanding; cognitive completion, which unites the separate strands of our understanding (from the laws of nature to our ineluctable everyday understanding of things, incorporating the meanings we live by); and the knowing subject—us—with our partial and limited viewpoint mediated by our bodies.

The book showcases Tallis’s enviable knack of making tricky philosophical arguments cogent and engaging to the non-specialist and his remarkable ability to help us see humankind more clearly. For anyone who has shared Einstein’s observation that “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility,” the book will be fascinating and insightful reading.

Raymond Tallis trained in medicine at Oxford University and at St Thomas’ Hospital London before becoming professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences for his research in clinical neuroscience and he has played a key role in developing guidelines for the care of stroke patients in the UK. From 2011–14 he was chair of Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying. He retired from medicine in 2006 to become a full-time writer. His books have ranged across many subjects—from philosophical anthropology to literary and cultural criticism—but all are characterized by a fascination for the infinite complexity of human lives and the human condition. The Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine lists him as one of the world’s leading polymaths. His most recent book, on the subject of time, Of Time and Lamentation (2017), was also published by Agenda.