Sara's Reviews > Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

Absence of Mind collects several essays by novelist Marilynne Robinson, which were originally delivered as part of Yale's Terry Lectures in 2009. In them, she critiques positivism and its inheritance to many modern scientists who discount metaphysics and subjective experience in their inquiries. She particularly takes issue with those she calls "parascientists" (e.g., Dawkins, Pinker, Dennett) who reject subjective evidence in their exploration of consciousness and the nature of humanity, but do so without a thorough evaluation of metaphysical philosophy and thought. This book is exceedingly thought-provoking and very welcome to anyone peeved by the "hermeneutics of condescension" so famously employed by, particularly, Dawkins. I do not consider myself a religious person or a deist, but the condescension of discarding centuries of metaphysical thought without seriously exploring it first does indeed seem "para"-scientific and worth calling out. This was an engrossing read. Robinson's prose is sharp, dense and to the point, sometimes requiring careful rereading of a sentence here and there, because she packs a lot of ideas into each one, wasting no words. For a well-considered critique of Robinson's arguments, check out Julian Baggini's review in New Statesman.