The Review of Metaphysics

The intellectual sources of this book are many, varied, and impressive in their scope. But the spirit of the book seems most naturally akin to the long tradition of holistic evolutionary cosmology, from Friedrich Schelling to Samuel Alexander, Bergson, Whitehead, and Teilhard de Chardin (and now even, apparently, Thomas Nagel). Citing the latter's turn toward a teleological conception of evolution in which human consciousness is the supervenient stage, Wood maintains that the cosmos itself manifests no sharp boundaries or distinctions between what is apparently physical, material, biological, psychological, or ultimately spiritual. It can be best understood instead as "the World (the 'Whole') coming, in time, to a conscious awareness of itself." The task of metaphysics is to defend this speculative cosmology, sorting out and displaying the temporal relationships between these domains of "seeing" or experience, describing their evolutionary emergence from one to the other in increasingly complex arrangements, while resisting the bifurcating and destructive dialectic both of reductionism and simplistic materialism on one hand, and of deconstruction(ism) and relativizing antifoundationalism on the other.

The fundamental fallacy of these caustic (but only partial and limited) rival modes of explanation is what each invariably denies, overlooks, or omits, namely, the recognition of (and provision of room for) "interiority" or the inwardness of Being. The outwardly observable physical cosmos itself, and the varied "furniture" of this universe, we might observe, simply "has no insides," exhibiting only external mechanical relatedness. Neurophysiology based upon such truncated modes of thought, for example, cannot prove valid if it first germanders out of all consideration some of the most interesting and important features of neurocognitive experience that beg for explanation.

This brief work consists of an introductory overview of this perspective, followed by four chapters on neuropsychology, the concept or notion of Being, what Professor Wood terms the "bipolarity" of human awareness, and a concluding chapter entitled "The Universe has an Inside," which provides a succinct summary of his evolutionary cosmology. All four chapters originated in lectures or presentations given by their author over several years, including three terms as president of the North Texas Philosophical Society. Three of these lectures were subsequently published, including one in this journal.

Wood grounds his work in the organic holism of ancient Greek cosmology, for which his principal resources are Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas. This is certainly more than sufficient, but there are other allied and friendly authorities whose voices are either missing or perhaps (given this author's scholarly reach and erudition) tacitly presupposed in his graceful, summative philosophical perspective. R. G. Collingwood, for example, whose Idea of Nature traced the century's long competition between the organic and mechanistic-materialistic worldviews, showed how the profound insights of ancient Greek cosmology were once again [End Page 863] reasserting their authenticity in the contemporary era (precisely as Professor Wood does in these essays). My own esteemed teacher, the late British idealist philosopher Errol E. Harris, repeatedly espoused a modern, holistic (and organic) cosmology grounded in the natural sciences, along the lines that Wood defends in this treatise, in which Mind is likewise, in a very real evolutionary sense, "the World come to consciousness of Itself." Harris's highly regarded work Nature, Mind and Modern Science (1954) is cited in the author's bibliography.

What distinguishes Wood's approach to speculative cosmic holism from these many other companionable and supporting conceptions is his derivation of Indwelling (the interiority of Being) from his own phenomenological analysis of "seeing," aided by the philosophical musings of the later Heidegger. He is highly critical, by contrast, of the limitations inherent in superficial representational or "picture-thinking" of materialist neurological accounts of Mind, like those of Daniel Dennett and Patricia and Paul Churchland, that claim explanatory adequacy and yet miss (or deliberately ignore) so much that a phenomenological bracketing discloses. Something like the phenomenological psychology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the author believes, is far closer to providing an adequate pathway toward...