Stuart Kelly at the Guardian gives an interesting review of Raymond Tallis's new book, In Defence of Wonder and Other Philosophical Reflections
Tallis's express wish is to redeem time from physics – he might also have said, to rescue it from the exasperation of philosophers. Time, like many a little word, bundles a lot inside it. It can be reduced to a dimension in mathematics, but even then it is a dimension very unlike the other three: I can imagine rotating a cube on any of its three spatial axes, but rotating it on its temporal axis is just a piece of Doctor Who-speak. And what of the idea that any given moment in time, let's say 6 February 1970, is fretted into a problem if we think that it is in the past today, was the present on that day, and was in the future on 5 February 1970? The worry that the same thing cannot be "not yet", "now" and "no longer" underpins anxieties about tensed time from Aristotle's logical fatalism to JME McTaggart's 1908 paper "The Unreality of Time".
Read another discussion of the book at the blog adamisatcoventry.wordpress.com.
See Wes's 2010 blog post on Tallis.
-Mark Linsenmayer
I was about to like Tallis, but then found his positive review of this hysterically hyperbolic attack on cultural relativism. Ah, the simple-mindedness made me cringe.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/7221578/The-Failures-of-Cultural-Relativism
Yes, I managed to smuggle the question of relativism into this thread as well. But since to my great disappointment no philosophers have reproached me for espousing such doctrines, I guess I must shut up about it.