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The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World - Kindle edition by McGilchrist, Iain . Health, Fitness & Dieting Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Review

'It's very simple: this is one of the most important books ever published. And, yes, I do mean ever. It is a thrilling exposition of the nature of reality, and a devastating repudiation of the strident, banal orthodoxy that says it is childish and disreputable to believe that the world is alive with wonder and mystery ... No one else could have written this book. McGilchrist's range is as vast as the subject - which is everything - demands. He is impeccably rigorous, fearlessly honest, and compellingly readable. Put everything else aside. Read this now to know what sort of creature you are and what sort of place you inhabit.'

—Professor

Charles Foster, Oxford University, author of Being a Beast and Being a Human

'A work of remarkable inspiration and erudition, written with the soul and subtlety of a poet, the precision of a philosopher, and the no-nonsense grounding of a true scientist. In its pages, neuropsychology comes into conversation with philosophy, physics with poetry ... McGilchrist is the most generous and talented of writers: his fluid account, brilliantly and beautifully argued—and meticulously researched—brings us along with him, step by step, until we too can discern the horizons of a reconfigured world. McGilchrist's appreciation of ambiguity and paradox only enhances the clarity and vitality of his thought. This is a book of surpassing, even world-historical ambition, and—still more rare—one that delivers on its promise.'

—Professor

Louis Sass, Distinguished Professor, Rutgers University, author of Madness & Modernism

'We badly need that now-almost-vanishingly rare personage, the true polymath. In Iain McGilchrist, in the nick of time, we have one. In this book, he draws quite magnificently on his post-disciplinary erudition precisely to explain how very much we are losing ... it is nothing less than a work of genius, diagnosing our dire predicament in full, and offering a way, instead.'

—Professor

Rupert Read, Professor of Philosophy, University of East Anglia, author of This Civilisation is Finished and Parents for a Future

'A magnificent achievement ... The Matter with Things confirms the author's status as a leading contemporary polymath. With rarely matched clarity as well as deep learning, McGilchrist demonstrates not just that there is more to the world than matter, but also that there is more to matter itself than grasped by the shallow materialisms of our age.'

—

Rupert Shortt, Von Hügel Institute, University of Cambridge, author of Outgrowing Dawkins

'I loved

The Master and his Emissary: this is even deeper.'

—Professor

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, NYU, author of The Black Swan

'In 2009 Iain McGilchrist published

The Master and His Emissary, a densely researched and entirely thrilling examination of the difference between the two kinds of thinking typical of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Now comes his new book, The Matter with Things (Perspectiva Press), which takes that basic idea much further and demonstrates, with an immense range of learning and beautifully clear prose, how important it is to be aware of the whole and not merely the parts, how analysis should come after insight and not before it, how right-hemisphere thinking, with its openness to experience, is a better guide to reality than the narrowly focused, rule-based way the left hemisphere regards the world ...I have spent a decade absorbing the vision of McGilchrist's previous book; I shall be happy to spend the rest of my life with this one, and still be learning things when I get to the end.'

—

Philip Pullman, Book of the Year, New Statesman

'This is the most extraordinary book. It's got evidence on every page of a mind that is stocked so richly and has meditated so long and so clearly on the most important subject we can face. I can't recommend it enough: it's an astonishing book, that will change many, many people's lives.'

—

Philip Pullman, speaking at the How To Academy, 9 November 2021

'Though not quite yet a household name, Iain McGilchrist is leading a quiet but far-reaching revolution in the understanding of who we are as human beings, one with potentially momentous consequences for many of the preoccupations - from ecology and health care to economics and artificial intelligence - that weigh on our present and darken our future ... McGilchrist turns to the resources at our disposal ... to encourage us to 'reconceive our world, our reality', to 'learn again to see'... this means engaging at length and at a high level of abstract argument with competing philosophical theories of truth, rationality, knowledge, perception and being. For philosophically-trained readers, those at least who would adhere to Friedrich Waismann's conviction that "at the heart of any philosophy worth the name is vision", this central thread of the book is deeply satisfying ... Though

The Matter With Things contains much detailed and rigorous argument, it is, as its author says at the outset, less an argument properly speaking than a plea for openness to what reality, once our taste for precision and exploitation is set aside, can teach us ... a hugely ambitious vision without parallel in contemporary thought.'

—Professor

Ronan Sharkey, Faculty of Philosophy, Institut Catholique de Paris, writing in The Tablet

'This book is an event. McGilchrist has written an astonishing, comprehensive work, of a kind the world has barely seen since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries... I'd urge readers - unreservedly - to get and read

The Matter with Things. The basic truth of McGilchrist's vision is of FUNDAMENTAL importance for our time. It sheds a profound light on ... so many literally vital questions. If it were widely heeded, then perhaps, even at this late hour, our civilisation's merry march to a brutal suicide might be halted. For this book is that most valuable of possible books: it is a work of genius, diagnosing our dire predicament pretty much in full; and (following Lao Tzu) offering a way, instead.'

—

Rupert Read, Professor of Philosophy, University of East Anglia, writing in Philosophical Investigations

'It is worth emphasising how rigorous, wide-ranging and well-evidenced McGilchrist's work is. His polymathic mind is on full display in

The Matter with Things ... an extraordinary achievement, beautifully produced, clearly written, and peppered with good-quality illustrations.'

—

Nick Spencer, Senior Fellow and Director of Research at the Theos Foundation, writing in Prospect