Philosophy: metaphysics & ontology

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  • On the Equality of All Things

    £20.00

    What can we really know about the world around us? With clarity and lightness, physicist Carlo Rovelli guides us through the speculative depths of modern physics, unafraid to test their limits, not least because, as he suggests, there may be no final ground to reach. Electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies are not essentially different in nature from one another. They are ideas that illuminate each other. Reality, he shows, is shaped by this continuous play of reflections. From this emerges Rovelli’s central insight: the equality of all things. Like the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, who dreams he is a butterfly and wakes unsure whether he is Zhuangzi dreaming to be a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming to be Zhuangzi, Rovelli invites us to see reality anew, recognizing our knowledge is coherent but also uncertain and circular.

  • The Edges of the World

    £22.00

    We tend to think that everything important comes from the centre: from big cities, from established orthodoxies in the sciences and the arts, from the Establishment in all its forms. We think this because the centre tells us it is so, but it’s a lie. It is only at the edges that we think, innovate and thrive. This book travels to the frontiers of human culture and consciousness; to the edges of continents, of evolution, of artistic and political movements, and life itself: from a rocky precipice in the Peloponnese where the first human set foot in Europe to an ancient Egyptian temple where monotheism was invented; from St Francis, kissing lepers to the giant bird-eating mice of St Kilda.