Abstract

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)