Rowan Williams reviews Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things. A masterful and appreciative review, unsurprisingly.
Williams points out that so many criticisms of McGilchrist’s work reflect exactly the tendencies that McGilchrist traces and decries in his work.
He also rearticulates McGilchrist’s exceptionally helpful descriptions of thinking, truth, science, and objectivity:
Thought takes time; encountering a limit suggests new questions — including the question of whether we have thus far been asking the right questions. Thinking develops, but that does not mean that it follows a linear path towards determinatively complete representation. It must, by its very nature, manage and reflect upon its own incompleteness and the inescapability of difficulty and mystery.
I’m now over halfway through the first volume of The Matter with Things; as with Williams, I can’t recommend it highly enough.