Ockhams Razor: A Search For Wonder In An Age Of Doubt

As we approach the millennium, people seem to be searching for meaningful dialogues and answers to their most pressing issues. Wade Rowland is a former CBC journalist who offers a provocative and philosophical look at the middle ages, its systems of thought and views of reality. In so doing he touches on themes of architecture, philosophers, art and assumptions we make about reality in Ockham's Razor: A Search for Wonder in an Age of Doubt. In the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould and John Raulston Saul, Rowland's reasoned observations are a much-needed tonic in this age of preposterous claims and rash and meaningless human constructs.

A search for human values and meaning at the millennium, Ockham`s Razor is a brilliant travel narrative that mixes philosophical speculation with commentary about the food, architecture and art of France. From Plato, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to Descartes, Magritte and the Internet, Wade Rowland examines some of our deepest assumptions about the nature of reality and our relationship to the world. In the summer of 1997, Rowland, an expert on technology and the new media, and in many respects disillusioned with the hyper-reality of North American culture, took his family to visit medieval historical sites throughout Southern France as a way of searching for authenticity. In Ockham`s Razor he speculates on the world view of the middle ages, a highly evolved system of thought and perception radically different from our own, and argues that efficiency is an engineering goal that reduces human beings to material objects. Such debasement causes human alienation, which is the defining condition of our age. This is very much a book for our age. (1999)