Death of the Soul - Softcover

William Barrett

Softcover

ISBN 10: 038517327X ISBN 13: 9780385173278

Publisher: Anchor, 1987

Synopsis

Traces the development of philosophical thought from the seventeenth century to today, and explores why questions of the soul figure so little in the minds of present-day technocratic intellectuals

About this title

From the Publisher:

Barrett's newest study explores philosophy's most fundamental question: Does the human soul exist? Tracing the relationship of philosophy to the scientific and spiritual worlds, this book illuminates the ever-widening gap between theory and life and explains why the soul seems so unimportant to today's technocratic intellectuals.

From Publishers Weekly:

Ever since Descartes saw nature as a vast, interlocking machine and science banished the soul, philosophers have been uncomfortable with this materialistic outlook. Barrett (Irrational Man here looks at the way in which various thinkers have attempted to put the human soul or self in the forefront of their visions of reality. He discusses Leibniz's energized universe of monads, or individual souls, Hegel's blueprint for self-realization as part of the unfolding of the "world spirit" and the existentialists' belief that anxiety and death are personal problems each of us must wrestle with. Unconvinced by modern descriptions of the mind as a computer, Barrett debunks Alan Turing's claim that a future computer could write first-rate poetry; he also refutes behaviorism and Wittgenstein. This short book engages the reader in an open-ended dialogue with major Western thinkers on the central questions of the soul, death and consciousness.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Anchor
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 038517327X
• ISBN 13: 9780385173278
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 173