I begin by clarifying Tallis’s revisionary terminology, showing how he redraws the lines of the traditional debate about free will by classifying himself as a compatibilist, when in standard terms he is an incompatibilist. I then examine what I take to be the two main lines of argument in Freedom, which I call the Mysterian Argument and the Intentionality Argument. I argue that neither can do the required work on its own, so I ask how they are supposed to combine. (...) I then argue that a commitment to the ontological priority of everydayness, of the kind suggested in chapters 5 and 6 of Freedom, might combine the arguments in such a way as to secure Tallis’s conclusion. I conclude that the argument of Freedom requires positive metaphysical commitment of a kind Tallis has yet to provide. (shrink)

This essay interrogates recent materialist monisms, be they based on contingency, eliminativism, or objective phenomenology, on account of their metaphilosophical ramifications. It is argued that certain dualities must be retained, at least nominally, in order to have any explanatory purchase and escape velocity from philosophical circularity. Dyads such as “spirit” and “matter,” “manifest” and “scientific,” “living” and “dead,” or even “illusion” and “reality” are given an immanentist reading that treats them as equal parts of the Real. Following this revisionary metaphysics (...) that reviews the meaning of such terms as optical realities, the matter–spirit couple is specifically used to explain why reality cannot appear as just one thing, even if only in virtue of the illusion of at least two things. The consequences for philosophical monisms of all types, and for anthropocentric thought in general, are then examined in the light of the ethical effects of recent attempts to explain every thing through one medium alone. (shrink)