Insides And Outsides Interdisciplinary Perspectives On Animate Nature [Paperback]

Insides and Outsidesbrings together diverse aspects of animate nature, diverse not only in terms of animate nature itself, but in terms of areas of study. Indeed, the book lives up to the word interdisciplinary in its title. It brings together diverse academic perspectives within each chapter and across chapters, showing in each instance that scientific understandings of animate nature are  or can be  complementary to philosophical understandings. Thus insides and outsides, typically viewed as subjective vs. objective, mind vs. body, and self vs. other, are shown to be woven together in complex and subtle ways in the complexities and subtleties of animate life itself.

This book is a testament to the truly remarkable range and depth of its author, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. What comes across is the writer's profound understanding not just of what is life but what life and living are all about, what it means to be a human being, and why complementarities are foundational to life. In a global world riddled with fear, the need to comprehend us and them, self and other, the enemy within and without, is more urgent than ever.Insides and Outsidesprovides penetrating insights into the essential interdependence of living things, the power to see ourselves as others see us as the poet Robbie Burns might say, to examine the wisdom of our own conceits--and much, much more. It takes the apparently familiar inner and outer, and makes them so strange and dynamic that a new appreciation of what it means to be alive emerges. This book is a must read that, like its title, crosses disciplinary divides and urges us to examine our true, animate nature. To be and become depends on it.

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