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Reality's Fugue
Reconciling Worldviews in Philosophy, Religion, and Science
Synopsis
Science, religion, philosophy: these three categories of thought have organized humankind's search for meaning from time immemorial. Reality's Fugue presents a compelling case that these ways of understanding, often seen as competing, are part of a larger puzzle that cannot be rendered by one account of reality alone.
This book begins with an overview of the concept of reality and the philosophical difficulties associated with attempts to account for it through any single worldview. By clarifying the differences among first-person, third-person, and dualist understandings of reality, F. Samuel Brainard repurposes the three predominant ways of making sense of those differences: exclusionist (only one worldview can be right), inclusivist (viewing other worldviews through the lens of one in order to incorporate them all, and thus distorting them), and pluralist or relativist (holding that there are no universals, and truth is relative). His alternative mode of understanding uses Douglas Hofstadter's metaphor of a musical fugue that allows different "voices" and "melodies" of worldviews to coexist in counterpoint and conversation, while each remains distinct, with none privileged above the others. Approaching reality in this way, Brainard argues, opens up the possibility for a multivoiced perspective that can overcome the skeptical challenges that metaphysical positions face.
Engagingly argued by a lifelong scholar of philosophy and global religions, this edifying and accessible exploration of the nature of reality addresses deeply meaningful questions about belief, reconciliation, and being.
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What Reviewers Are Saying
"For the student or teacher of cross-cultural philosophy and theology, and even the scientist, mathematician, and psychologist, Dr. Brainard's work offers a fresh, penetrating interdisciplinary approach to studying the nature and products of human awareness. In a clear and rigorous manner, this work weaves together the themes of reality, consciousness, and existence with various frameworks of interpretation, challenging us to rethink our referential fields and the meanings we attach to terms such as 'objective,' 'subjective,' 'universal,' 'particular,' 'atom,' and 'void.'"
-Stephanie Theodorou, coeditor of Animal Experience: Consciousness and Emotions in the Natural World "This book invites you into the music of the world religions and the richness of timeless philosophical questions. Rather than siding with one answer or another, Brainard combines them together, each one dancing with the others like melodies in a classical fugue. The interplay of all the perspectives, he suggests, creates a new and richer level of awareness. Come join the dance . . ."
-Philip Clayton, author of In Quest of Freedom: The Emergence of Spirit in the Natural World "Brainard presents a series of compelling arguments concerning the nature of reality and, more importantly, the connections between reality and awareness. In doing so, he engages with several important philosophical problems-among them Cartesian dualism, free will, and the problem of evil."
-Ian Alexander Cuthbertson, Reading Religion