We have “a power that…points us toward our true destiny,” which is to realize “the better selves we are meant to be.” John Cottingham is referring to the soul, that which, within us, would have us “reach toward the transcendent”.
This Brit’s In Search of the Soul “is an uplifting book,” lawliberty.org observes. “It takes only a few hours to read…and the payoff is considerable.” It is a “humane book,” catholicreviews.org agrees: it “is what a modern spirituality could look like.” “His ideal readers,” Commonweal Magazine imagines, are those “who would like to be cured of unbelief.” And it’s true that he would have the reader “adopt a theistic framework,” FareForward remarks, “to hope and even believe in its truth, even in the absence of a demonstrative or probabilistic argument in its favour.”
A philosopher and scholar, Cottingham, as an author, “has spent years perfecting the art of explaining difficult philosophical concepts to the non-specialist reader,” lawliberty.org points out; he authored his first book [about Descates] three-dozen years ago. It’s as fellow philosopher and author Clare Carlisle says of this newest book, it’s “[a]s fresh and thoughtful as it is erudite, it is beautifully written and elegantly argued.”
In Search of the Soul: A Philosophical Essay
By John Cottingham
Princeton University Press, 2020
