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Seven Brief Lessons on Magic
Is magic real? Could anything be real that can’t be quantified or scientifically investigated? Are qualities like love, beauty, and goodness really just about hormones and survival? Are strangely immaterial things, like thought and personhood, fully explainable in scientific terms? Does nature itself have any intrinsic value, mysterious presence, or transcendent horizon? Once we ask these questions, the answer is pretty of course science can’t give us a complete picture of reality. Science is very good at what it is good at, but highly important aspects of human meaning are simply outside of science’s knowledge range. So how might we better relate scientific facts to qualitative mysteries? How might we integrate our powerful factual knowledge with wisdom about the higher meaning of things? This book defines magic as the real qualities and mysteries of the world that science just can’t grasp. It looks at how we came to put magic in the box of subjective make-believe. It explores how we might get it out of that box and back into our understanding of reality.
84 pages, Paperback
Published September 18, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 26, 2022
Before reading this book, if you had asked me whether I believed in magic, I would’ve said “no” or that I only believed in it in some metaphorical way. But given Tyson’s definition in this book, and his ensuing explanation and argument, not only do I now say I believe in magic, I now believe it is essential in order to understand anything else! What a wonderfully rich and insightful little book! Comes with an even richer bibliography that mines out these ideas further. Highly recommend!
August 10, 2023
Very helpful and interesting book from a more historic/philosophical perspective on magic in an age of science. He lays out four theories of magic, two historic and two modern and unpacks the implications of all four and follows them to their logical end.
According to Tyson, no all poets are not liars! Rather they “imaginatively articulate things that, in some manner, are really there”, those magical truths “beyond the ken of science”.
According to Tyson, no all poets are not liars! Rather they “imaginatively articulate things that, in some manner, are really there”, those magical truths “beyond the ken of science”.
March 18, 2024
This book provided some very helpful categories for thinking about the relationship between the supernatural and the modern world. I’m not sure what to make of his use of Platonism as an overarching category and I think that could have been explained better, especially with relation to Aquinas’s appropriation of hylomorphism. I’m also slightly confused by his use of Kierkegaard and I don’t think the subjective/objective binary is all that helpful. I’ll have to return to this one after I’ve got a better hold on metaphysics.
November 27, 2023
"Are we going to say that the deep magic of the metaphysics of love is merely an entertaining fantasy? Are we going to presume that, really, love is an internal interpretive gloss on the meaningless facts of material objects and socio-biological necessity?"
November 13, 2024
Read excerpts for class
December 14, 2022
In this clear and engaging little work, Australian scholar Paul Tyson argues that our life-world is close to spiritual, social, and environmental destruction because humans have lost the basic notion that creation is enchanted. Tyson outlines the four basic approaches toward magic, explains how the magic-less approach is woven into the materialist dogma of today, and then offers a path toward unity and meaning in a contemporary, Christian Platonist metaphysic.
The four approaches to magic are the animist approach (i.e. the world itself - all plants, animals, and features of the land - is divine, the realm of gods and goddesses); the Platonist approach (i.e. the world is infused with meaning and material things commune with immaterial forms); the Supernatural approach (i.e. the modern Cartesian project of separating nature, which is the neutral stuff of material existence, from supernature, which is the Divinity "above" nature with which intelligent humans may commune via their minds); and, the anti-magic approach of scientism (i.e. the fruit of supernaturalism, removing God from the cosmos since what is observable - material reality - contains no meaning in and of itself, but is only worth as much as human minds ascribe to it).
This book is full of keen observations and important insights. One notion Tyson points out is that, despite the fact that the scientism of our age categorically denies the existence of magic, we've never been so engaged with it! Indeed, not only do books by C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and J. K. Rowling fly off the shelves each year, but our very understanding of technology and society is magical; for example, I don't forage for mushrooms in the forests behind my stables if I want mushrooms for lunch; I drive a car (which I didn't make and can only barely explain) to the store and buy a package of mushrooms. This I expect to find and expect to obtain if I place this piece of plastic with my name on it onto the gray box near the cashier people. Not only that, but, even if I fully accept the materialist framework, noting that all culture and processes are explainable by chemical analysis, I still want to be loved, to be good, to be responsible. All scientists meekly admit that life without these very human sources of meaning is absurd or worthless. All of this is magic. It's all enchantment from a realm we cannot fully explain, and yet we're so fragmented, so cut off from the true Source of magic.
Here is where a Platonist metaphysic steps in. Plato helps us to see how all is imbued with divine light, participating in the Good, and capable of bearing meaning apart from us arbitrarily deciding what is valuable and what isn't. Platonism can teach us to see the light which has always been there but has been ignored or covered up by modernity. If the Good once again guides us, if wisdom is the highest good and not profit or pleasure, then communities can deal with the myriad problems of our postmodern world without bowing down to the elites and globalists who only operate with a magic-less agenda.
The four approaches to magic are the animist approach (i.e. the world itself - all plants, animals, and features of the land - is divine, the realm of gods and goddesses); the Platonist approach (i.e. the world is infused with meaning and material things commune with immaterial forms); the Supernatural approach (i.e. the modern Cartesian project of separating nature, which is the neutral stuff of material existence, from supernature, which is the Divinity "above" nature with which intelligent humans may commune via their minds); and, the anti-magic approach of scientism (i.e. the fruit of supernaturalism, removing God from the cosmos since what is observable - material reality - contains no meaning in and of itself, but is only worth as much as human minds ascribe to it).
This book is full of keen observations and important insights. One notion Tyson points out is that, despite the fact that the scientism of our age categorically denies the existence of magic, we've never been so engaged with it! Indeed, not only do books by C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and J. K. Rowling fly off the shelves each year, but our very understanding of technology and society is magical; for example, I don't forage for mushrooms in the forests behind my stables if I want mushrooms for lunch; I drive a car (which I didn't make and can only barely explain) to the store and buy a package of mushrooms. This I expect to find and expect to obtain if I place this piece of plastic with my name on it onto the gray box near the cashier people. Not only that, but, even if I fully accept the materialist framework, noting that all culture and processes are explainable by chemical analysis, I still want to be loved, to be good, to be responsible. All scientists meekly admit that life without these very human sources of meaning is absurd or worthless. All of this is magic. It's all enchantment from a realm we cannot fully explain, and yet we're so fragmented, so cut off from the true Source of magic.
Here is where a Platonist metaphysic steps in. Plato helps us to see how all is imbued with divine light, participating in the Good, and capable of bearing meaning apart from us arbitrarily deciding what is valuable and what isn't. Platonism can teach us to see the light which has always been there but has been ignored or covered up by modernity. If the Good once again guides us, if wisdom is the highest good and not profit or pleasure, then communities can deal with the myriad problems of our postmodern world without bowing down to the elites and globalists who only operate with a magic-less agenda.
June 8, 2022
A fascinating and illuminating book on enchantment and de-enchantment of the world, very helpful as I've been thinking through these things.
It lost one star for me because of the author's careful pluralism, if you believe the platonic view, then don't act like it doesn't matter what other you have.
It lost one star for me because of the author's careful pluralism, if you believe the platonic view, then don't act like it doesn't matter what other you have.
December 27, 2019
Just excellent! A compression and simplification of much that Tyson wrote in De-Fragmenting Modernity. I would recommend this as an introductory text to a worldview course.
January 29, 2020
What a remarkable, elegant book. If only more authors knew how to write with such wit, substance, and clarity in less than 100 pages.
August 19, 2020
my review can be found here
https://www.thecenterforsophiological...
https://www.thecenterforsophiological...
December 9, 2020
This one sang and I hummed along, the tune simultaneously invoking the individual and universal to two-step tango through the forest immeasurable.
November 29, 2021
Concise, dense, a lovely taxonomy of theories of magic and robust defence of Christian/magical Platonism.
December 31, 2024
It was a difficult read, and the title felt like a misnomer.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews