Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Barbara Herrnstein Smith is the author of Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion.

Letter
Thomas Nagel, in his review of my book Natural Reflections, mistakenly infers that I do not ‘believe in’ a ‘reality that exists largely independent of our convictions’ (LRB, 19 August). The major ontological implication of my view of cognition, however, is not that there is no independent reality but, rather, that the specific features of what we interact with as what we come to name ‘reality’...

Those who offer scientific explanations of the pervasiveness of religion in human life are usually not religious themselves, and their explanations are not intended to be compatible with the...

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