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On Why Science and Reason Are Necessarily Bookended by Intuition and Imagination

A book review of Iain McGilchrist’s 2021 Magnum Opus

Will Szal
4 min readOct 21, 2023
Book Covers, Perspectiva Press

I write book reviews all the time; with a good book, it is easy to find something to say. But with a great work, the task becomes nearly impossible. You find yourself wondering, “how could I say something more useful than the totality of what the work already inherently expresses?” Or, “won’t I be banalizing or flattening the work by trying to sum it up?”

After six months of trying to write a book review that rises to the occasion, I’ve concluded that I’ve failed, so I’m writing this instead.

I read these books during a four-month period. Concurrently, I read McGilchrist’s earlier work, The Master and His Emissary, and listened to over forty hours of discussion about The Matter with Things on McGilchrist’s YouTube channel.

I would warn those of you contemplating skimming the work: brain hemisphere science is perennially perverted and oversimplified.

One of the reasons that this text is so massive is that the subject demands a high degree of rigor…

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Will Szal
Will Szal

Written by Will Szal

Regenerative agriculture, alternative economics, gift culture, friendship.

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