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A review by philofox
The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions by Alex Rosenberg
3.5
This very much falls in my "frustrating books" category. On the one hand, I tend not to agree with a lot of Rosenberg's first-order positions. I'm not a radical eliminativist about meaning or content (or even folk psychology for that matter), I err against reductionism in biology (although I think it's more plausible than the former), I'm a compatibilist, and so on.
In general I think this is downstream of metaphilosophical orientation: Rosenberg has a strong, straightforwardly realist metaphysics. At least notionally, our best natural science gives us the content of this metaphysics. Insofar as the Sellarsian manifest image doesn't match that metaphysics, too bad. By contrast, I think this way of approaching things is way too metaphysical in a pejorative sense, ironically one that relies far too much on pre-scientific intuitions rather than the details of our best science. I tend to be much more skeptical of this kind of "strong" metaphysics, in a way that weirdly makes me sympathetic to both a more Carnap-esque position and some of the more "continental" critiques of metaphysics (I think Heidegger and Deleuze are at least onto something with ontotheology and the image of thought, respectively, for example).
However, all this being said, the critiques of the book in the middlebrow media when it came out were so bad that I felt compelled to come to Rosenberg's defense. This led to us having a pretty interesting correspondence for a few years.
I will also give the book credit for really following its premises through, it makes for a great exercise to wrestle with.
In general I think this is downstream of metaphilosophical orientation: Rosenberg has a strong, straightforwardly realist metaphysics. At least notionally, our best natural science gives us the content of this metaphysics. Insofar as the Sellarsian manifest image doesn't match that metaphysics, too bad. By contrast, I think this way of approaching things is way too metaphysical in a pejorative sense, ironically one that relies far too much on pre-scientific intuitions rather than the details of our best science. I tend to be much more skeptical of this kind of "strong" metaphysics, in a way that weirdly makes me sympathetic to both a more Carnap-esque position and some of the more "continental" critiques of metaphysics (I think Heidegger and Deleuze are at least onto something with ontotheology and the image of thought, respectively, for example).
However, all this being said, the critiques of the book in the middlebrow media when it came out were so bad that I felt compelled to come to Rosenberg's defense. This led to us having a pretty interesting correspondence for a few years.
I will also give the book credit for really following its premises through, it makes for a great exercise to wrestle with.