Ockham's razor: The search for wonder in an age of doubt

by Wade Rowland

Book by Rowland, Wade

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

264 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1999

About the author

Wade Rowland is the author of more than a dozen books, including Galileo's Mistake, Spirit of the Web, and Ockham's Razor. He is a former holder of the Maclean Hunter Chair of Ethics in Communications at Ryerson University in Toronto and currently lectures in the social history of communications technologies at Trent University in Peterborough. He lives near Port Hope, Ontario, with his wife, Christine.

Reviews

[Brian Griffith · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book starts off brilliantly, with a Toronto street scene described in ways that evoke whole worlds of memory, wonder, and myth. And Rowland’s proposed intellectual adventure sounds promising – to reconnect with life as a unity of spirit through a grand family vacation to famous sites of medieval French history.

Rowland feels that the modern world has lost its sense of wonder and wholeness. Quantitative science and cost-benefit economics have reduced “value” to a margin of profit. Nothing is deemed to exist unless it can be physically measured. He wants to take his teenage kids to a world where the sacred and mundane were one, and he hopes to do this by visiting France's greatest cathedrals, its beautiful rural towns, and, strangely enough, the ruins of fortress castles where followers of the heretical Cathar sect made their last stands against the armies of Catholic orthodoxy.

According to Rowland, the dualistic Cathars (who believed that the physical world was a creation of Satan) were forerunners of modernist materialism. The scientific revolution then split spirit from matter, and ruled that only the material is real. The old sense of the universe as one wonderous spiritual unity was lost. He discusses all this with his family as they go on their dream vacation, and it soon grows familiarly pedantic.

I got confused how the hierarchical universe of the Catholic inquisitors could be viewed as so holistic. Concerning the reductionism of quantified science, it seems to me we do have some literalistic scientists who claim that nothing exists unless they can measure it. And we do have some literalistic religious people claiming that nothing can exist that’s not in the Bible. But most religious and scientific people I know assume we're still exploring the universe, and endless wonders are yet to be discovered (or maybe revealed). We have social sciences to study how we relate, evaluate, and how we can live better. I thought Ockham's razor did not so much split the universe into material vs imaginary, as to unite the heavenly and earthly into one cosmos.

All told, I'd say it was a great vacation. But the philosophical debates about what’s wrong with our perceptions sort of interfered with the perceiving.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ockham’s Razor by Wade Rowland (pp. 264)

A unique book that’s difficult to categorize. Part travelogue. Part family journal. Part philosophy. Part history. Rowland takes the long trip through France tackling some of the more out of the way locations with his wife and two children. In that journey, we get a fifth ticket that’s amazingly rich in description and ideas.

Written in 1999, Rowland embraces the culture of the small towns, takes a relaxed pace and gives deep background and of villages and culturally significant locations through France that aren’t much covered in French travel books. Incorporating Descartes, Plato, the Cathers, Galileo, Ockham and many philosophers of the ages, Rowland also explores their impacts on thought and morals of the modern as it relates to the areas’ history and changes in religious and political structures. Some of the most interesting moments are prompted by discussions with his two children. Seeing a whole new world through both mature adult eyes and fresh eyes of adults just coming of age makes for an amazing vacation - even when it isn’t yours.

It took me a year to get through this book. Every word is thought provoking and invokes rich 3D imagery and smells. If any book deserved to be made into a graphic, interactive iPad novel, this one would the first one I would put on the list. I found myself wanting to see maps, sketches, photos and the details Rowland described.

I bought this book purely on the title expecting something more academic and got something much different and incredibly compelling. The concept behind book is inspiring and I hope to be able to have a similar experience with my own children when they are older.

[Gordon · Rating 2 out of 5]

A serious disappointment. On the whole this book went down easily enough, and had a certain appeal to it - a sort of Peter Mayle with vastly greater depth and the bonus of humourous family interactions - but despite my sympathy for what the author is trying to do it didn't come across very convincingly: alternatively obvious, ridiculous and (rarely but jarringly) shrill. A few of the author's ideas specifically related to technology are also rather outdated. Keep looking.

[Nicholas Whyte]

http://nhw.livejournal.com/785416.html[return][return]A book about philosophy for a popular audience, clearly indebted to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the way it merges deep discussions with the story of a family travelogue. It's less good in that sense than Pirsig's book, where there is a definite programme of self-exploration mapped onto the journey, and where we learn more about the narrator and his son as the book goes on: Rowland is transparent in what one might almost consider as a typically Canadian characteristic; he tells us exactly who he is and who his wife and children are right at the beginning, and the learning process is shared between reader and characters in the book. Although he does allow himself some fun in the last chapter.[return][return]The discussion of various philosophers' ideas was very rich and interesting, and pitched well for a popular level. But I was also a bit unsatisfied about the moral we were intended to learn from all of this: we start off with modernism depicted very much as the villain of the piece, yet Rowland also seems to admire the medieval Cathars as the first modernists. The author's moral framework seemed frustratingly incomplete to me.

[Teri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book!! Very interesting and thought-provoking. I'd give a longer review of it, but I wouldn't know where to start. There is so much packed into the book that I find it hard to explain.

[Marc · Rating 3 out of 5]

a bit self-indulgent for my liking; the dialectic with his 2 kids was juvenile mostly; the philosophy backgrounders were useful to a philosophy neophyte like me

[Brendan Chard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Raised some interesting ideas, but overall not an attention-grabber.