A C Grayling
All You Need To Know
The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness
By Antonio Damasio
William Heinemann 386pp £20 order from our bookshop
Consciousness is, in one way, the easiest and most obvious thing in the world to understand, for anyone capable of thinking about it is intimately conscious of being conscious – we live with our noses pressed hard up against our own consciousness, which attends every moment of our aware experience and thought; and similarly, the consciousness of others is lambent in their faces and behaviour, and we each have a rich and highly nuanced knowledge of how to read and respond to those lambencies. Their presence and our understanding of them constitute the ordinary stuff of everyday social interaction.
At the same time, consciousness is by far the most perplexing mystery facing philosophy and the neurological sciences. It is such a difficult problem that for a long time philosophers put off thinking about it, and scientists ignored it entirely. Some, in the tradition of Descartes, still think that it
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'There is a difference between a doctor who writes medical treatises and a doctor who writes absurdist fiction. Do we want our heart surgeon to be an anti-realist?'
Joanna Kavenna peruses Iain Bamforth's 'Scattered Limbs: A Medical Dreambook'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trust-me-philosopher
How did Uwe Johnson, the German writer who was friends with Hannah Arendt and Max Frisch, end up living out his days in the town of Sheerness, Kent?
https://literaryreview.co.uk/estuary-german
You only have a week left to take advantage of our February offer: a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/