Review by Stephen Dawson
Reposted from Reading Religion, February 25, 2019
Jeffrey J. Kripal’s The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge is an important, wonderfully rich book. He organizes his discussion in five substantive chapters, bookended by a brief prologue and epilogue. Kripal describes these chapters as essais, a sly homage to Montaigne who developed the essai form as a “trial” or “test” of his opinions, a form of critical inquiry into the truth of human life and nature by way of the experience of one person. The Flip embraces the normative position that individual human experience, fired in the kilns of culture, history, science, and religion, provides the best—and really the only—avenue for engaging consciousness. Understood in this way, it is no stretch to say that The Flip is an extension and development of William James’s idea of radical empiricism. [ . . .]
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