Books by Professor Raymond Tallis

The question of free will has preoccupied philosophers for millennia. In recent years the debate has been reinvigorated by the findings of neuroscience and, for some, the notion that we have free will has finally been laid to rest. Not so, says Raymond Tallis. In his quest to reconcile our practical belief in our own agency with our theoretical doubts, Tallis advances powerful arguments for the reality of freedom.Tallis challenges the idea that we are imprisoned by laws of nature that wire us into a causally closed world. He shows that our capacity to discover and exploit these laws is central to understanding the nature of voluntary action and to reconciling free will with our status as material beings.Bringing his familiar verve and insight to this deep and most intriguing philosophical question, one that impacts most directly on our lives and touches on nearly every other philosophical problem - of consciousness, of time, of the nature of the natural world, and of our unique place in the cosmos - Tallis takes us to the heart of what we are. By understanding our freedom he reveals our extraordinary nature more clearly.

A bold, original and thought-provoking exploration of the nature and meaning of time. Tallis, with characteristic fearlessness, seeks to reclaim time from the jaws of physics, arguing that time as it is lived, the long narrative of our human journey, can not be told by caesium clocks and Lorentz coordinates.

Parmenides of Elea is regarded as an important Presocratic philosopher. He is famous, or notorious, for asserting that change, movement, generation and perishing are illusions arising from our senses, that past and future do not exist, and that the universe is a single, homogeneous, static sphere. This book explores the limits of Parmenides ideas.