A Beginner's Guide to Reality
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in A Beginner's Guide to Reality for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Product Description
Product Description
A Beginner's Guide to Reality is an introduction to philosophy for people who don't read philosophy. Jim Baggott's sources range from Aristotle to The Matrix. He examines the major developments in Western philosophical thought on the nature of reality, at each of three levels - social, perceptual and physical. (Do money, colour, or photons exist?) The book systematically investigates these levels, peeling away the assumptions we make about those parts of reality that we take for granted.
About the Author
Jim Baggott worked as an academic and in the oil industry for 11 years before setting up his own independent management consultancy practice. He was awarded the Marlow Medal by the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1989 and a Glaxo Science Writer's prize in 1992. His previous books include Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy and the Meaning of Quantum Theory, The Meaning of Quantum Theory: a Guide for Students of Chemistry and Physics and Perfect Symmetry: The Accidental Discovery of Buckminsterfullerene.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
Are you living in a dreamworld? No, you respond, perhaps rather indignantly. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Are you living in a dreamworld? No, you respond, perhaps rather indignantly. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
One should take the title serious, it is very much a beginner's guide. If you are not an absolute beginner to the field of speculation about reality you may find it a bit disappointing. Well I did. It is not actually bad. He writes a nice colloquial style, has a lot of cool references to cool films (like the Matrix, if you didn't guess from the cover art), and he ambitiously takes on the task of presenting a introductory glimpse into a field which spans sociology, psychology, various strands of philosophy: classic, analytic, and continental, and even modern physics with a big dollop of quantum mechanics.
Truly impressive to pack all of that into one book with less than 250 pages.
Why wasn't I impressed then? The book comes in three parts, starting with social reality, he works his way down to personal reality, to final reach out for the physical reality. Or actually he keeps reaching out for the unreality of it all. What looks like a intersting slide into the innermost secrets of the universe doesn't really work though, because the questions and problems raised by social reality don't actually lead to question and problems of personal reality, and the questions and problems of the consciousness don't lead up to problems of quantum mechanics. Would reversing the order have helped. I am not sure. In the end all he does is to list some of the theories and arguments generally discussed about each of the three levels of reality.
Anyway, the biggest problem is that he obviously a physicist who only feels really comfortable in the last part of the book, but even then unfortunately whenever it gets interesting and more involved he just keeps talking about the discussion rather than introducing the reader to it. I guess it would have made the book less small and easy going to try that. But then, he also simply is not the best possible explainer of complicated things. So expect to be edutained rather than educated, you may find you gained some interest in the end but unlikely to get some real insights. The danger, as with all edutainment, might be that one actually thinks one had learned something and only later discovers that one has barely scratched the surface.
Overall, as a point of first contact, it probably does a good job of introducing people to some of the concepts out there and get them interested in the discussion. If you have already made first contact, I'd suggest keep searching for something that provides a bit more intellectual nourishment.
Truly impressive to pack all of that into one book with less than 250 pages.
Why wasn't I impressed then? The book comes in three parts, starting with social reality, he works his way down to personal reality, to final reach out for the physical reality. Or actually he keeps reaching out for the unreality of it all. What looks like a intersting slide into the innermost secrets of the universe doesn't really work though, because the questions and problems raised by social reality don't actually lead to question and problems of personal reality, and the questions and problems of the consciousness don't lead up to problems of quantum mechanics. Would reversing the order have helped. I am not sure. In the end all he does is to list some of the theories and arguments generally discussed about each of the three levels of reality.
Anyway, the biggest problem is that he obviously a physicist who only feels really comfortable in the last part of the book, but even then unfortunately whenever it gets interesting and more involved he just keeps talking about the discussion rather than introducing the reader to it. I guess it would have made the book less small and easy going to try that. But then, he also simply is not the best possible explainer of complicated things. So expect to be edutained rather than educated, you may find you gained some interest in the end but unlikely to get some real insights. The danger, as with all edutainment, might be that one actually thinks one had learned something and only later discovers that one has barely scratched the surface.
Overall, as a point of first contact, it probably does a good job of introducing people to some of the concepts out there and get them interested in the discussion. If you have already made first contact, I'd suggest keep searching for something that provides a bit more intellectual nourishment.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Stand by to have your version of Reality challenged. Excellent book written in laymans terms but addresses the subject in economic (not boring), scientific and philosophical viewpoints that leave you wondering and thinking is anything real? I have bought this book for friends and relatives and sat back for the onslaught of discussion - terrific!
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I was very impressed with this book - i am not a huge reader of books but have a real interest in philosophy, and thought/thinking in general.
Jim Baggott has produced a throughly interesting read here in his book, using everyday situations and things we take for granted and very simply put them down, questioning the 'norm'.
I like his humour and personal facts he puts on the bottom of various pages, keeping u interested and wanting to read on..
I had many problems and crazy thoughts about how we live our lives, and the way the world works in general, and i thought we are not really living at all, rather just playing a role in someone elses game.. and to read this book made me smile with evey page, and i had constant 'of course' thoughts with almost every statment - to sum it up, anyone wanting a crash course on beginners philosophy will be very happy and satisfied with this fantastic little book filled with wisdom.
10/10 for sure.
Jim Baggott has produced a throughly interesting read here in his book, using everyday situations and things we take for granted and very simply put them down, questioning the 'norm'.
I like his humour and personal facts he puts on the bottom of various pages, keeping u interested and wanting to read on..
I had many problems and crazy thoughts about how we live our lives, and the way the world works in general, and i thought we are not really living at all, rather just playing a role in someone elses game.. and to read this book made me smile with evey page, and i had constant 'of course' thoughts with almost every statment - to sum it up, anyone wanting a crash course on beginners philosophy will be very happy and satisfied with this fantastic little book filled with wisdom.
10/10 for sure.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Bad Binding
The book arrived promptly and in excellent condition. I found it very interesting and took it on holiday. Read more
Published 19 months ago by David W. Shortell
The Title Sums this book up..
This book really does deliver what it says on the cover, I have been interested in spirituality, reality and metaphysics for a few years now, this book is very easy to read and... Read more
Published on 16 Oct 2009 by UnderstandThis
wonderful!
This book was so intriguing and interesting on every page... it really made the philosophical ideas very clear and accessible, and was very useful in researching my philosophy... Read more
Published on 30 Sep 2007 by Beatrice Millward
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
