Jim Flynn, an Otago University
emeritus professor and international expert on IQ and human intelligence, is on
a mission. He wants to change how we think about the modern world and our place
in it.
In The
Torchlight List, published in 2010, he argued that reading great literature
can change your life by providing a working knowledge of history and the human
condition – and could be better than a university education.
In
his new book Fate & Philosophy: A Journey through Life’s Great Questions (Awa Press, $33) he looks at the tough moral choices human beings
face every day, and the answers provided by
philosophers and scientists over the centuries. His message: make your own
decisions about what you believe, and resist subconscious conditioning
inherited from parents, religion and other influences.
‘There is,’ he writes, ‘great
satisfaction in questioning what you believe. Understanding ethics will cure
you of wanting some authority to tell you what is right and wrong.
Understanding science will inoculate you against a whole legion of nonsense,
from astrology to the Bermuda Triangle to whether people can use psychic powers
to bend spoons. Understanding religious experience will inoculate you against
childish concepts of god.’
Flynn also examines groundbreaking scientific
developments in brain research and the discovery of dark matter in the
universe. Will this new knowledge render philosophy – the very idea that we can
determine our own fate – obsolete?
The Torchlight List and Fate & Philosophy
are the first two books in Flynn’s Modern World trilogy, which he says
will provide the tools for fully understanding and participating in
contemporary life. The third is due next year.
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