Stephen R. L. Clark

This book is an ambitious and challenging restatement of traditional political philosophy. The first of a three-volume series, Limits and Renewals, the book is concerned with the nature of political society, particularly with the errors and faulty arguments that have been used to support a "liberal modernist" view of the state and our political system. Clark argues that political modernism, which is determinedly secular and untraditional, has been a destructive influence on religion and our understanding of community living. In order to secure a decent social order, he contends, we must rediscover our allegiance to a sacred order that is represented by, for example, family loyalties, a respect for tradition, and attention to the wider interests of the global and historical community.

It has been argued that if non-human animals had rights we should be obliged to defend them against predators. I contend that this either does not follow, follows in the abstract but not in practice, or is not absurd. We should defend non-humans against large or unusual dangers, when we can, but should not claim so much authority as to regulate all the relationships of wild things. Some non-human animals are members of our society, and the rhetoric of 'the land as a community' is an attempt, paralleling that of humanism, to create the moral ideal of Earth's Household. But wild animals should be considered as Nozick's 'independents' and have correspondingly fewer claims on our assistance than members of our society. They still have some claims, often strong ones.

In this book, Stephen R.L. Clark defends the primary faith of humankind, that there is a real world which is more than a shadow of our desires and fancies, and which can be discovered through right reason. Focusing on the way in which we can "turn aside" to the Truth from the normal delusions of self-concern, Clark offers a properly worked, Platonic metaphysics as the key to identifying that reality. This book is the final volume of Limits and Renewals, a trilogy based on the author's Stanton lectures, delivered at Cambridge between 1986 and 1989, and his Wilde lectures, delivered at Oxford in 1990.

Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life is a study of the fossils of the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. My concern is with the morals that Gould draws, with the ‘new picture of life’ that, he says, the reinterpreted Burgess animals compel. I conclude that his case is not established. (1) There may have been reasons to do with ‘fitness’ why most of the Burgess animals left no descendants, even if we cannot guess exactly what they were. (2) We do not know that our past is dotted with the kind of mass extinctions that are needed for the random evolution that he proposes. (3) Even if what happened does rest on random variation and largely random selection, it does not follow that there are no standing forms that will be constantly re‐instantiated. If Rational Life, in particular, is not special, then we have no right to think the world we experience bears any remote resemblance to a putative real world. (4) Even if there are no such forms, the fact that nothing in the state of things required us to exist is no good reason to say that No one requires us to. What Gould says does count against a simple progressivism, but not against an older and more orthodox theology. It also has implications for the Search for Extra‐Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Consistent materialists are almost bound to suggest that, if it exists at all, is no more than epiphenomenal. A correct understanding of the real requires that everything we do and say is no more than a product of whatever processes are best described by physics, without any privileged place, person, time or scale of action. Consciousness is a myth, or at least a figment. Plotinus was no materialist: for him, it is Soul and Intellect that are more real than the phenomena we misdescribe as material. Nor does he suppose that consciousness depends on language (as Stoics and modern materialists have sometimes said): wordless experience is actually superior. And much of what counts towards our present consciousness is to be discarded. It is better not to remember most of what now seems more significant to us; better to discard images; better that the intellect be than, losing any sense of separation between subject and object. The goal of the Plotinian intellectual is to join, but it is a mark of the good dancer that she is not conscious of what she does. There is therefore a strange confluence between Plotinus and modern materialists: our experience at least is transitory, deceitful, epiphenomenal, and is to be encountered when we have shed our illusions.

"Philosophical speculation and science fiction are united in this: what is now obvious is mot likely to be false, or at best a transient mode of being. In exploring future possibilities, the author introduces science fiction writers and contemporary philosophers alike to the riches of their twin traditions. What is the likely future of our species? What sort of global religious feeling is likely to prevail? How far can we go in engineering living artefacts, or our own descendants? Are we on the cusp of a new reality, in which we shall have to choose how 'human' we will remain, what seemingly obvious feelings and beliefs need to be revised or re-imagined? Is it even possible that we are living out a dream, devised by the last intelligences in the last days of the universe? What now exists seems to most of us to be obvious, or even eternal, but the truth is otherwise: even our most trusted intuitions and our most stable institutions (as they seem) could have been entirely different, and may be different again. Our ordinary life may be a dream and a delirium, as ancient philosophers thought, and our chief task is to wake up"--Publisher's description on back cover.