Raymond Tallis is professor emeritus of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester. In addition to being a leading figure in British medicine, he is also a prolific writer on philosophical subjects and has also published volumes of poetry, plays, and novels. He is perhaps best known for his critiques of postmodernism in books such as Not Saussure, Theorrhoea and After and for his book Why the Mind is Not a Computer: A Pocket Dictionary on Neuromythology, which criticizes the assumptions made in much of the research on artificial intelligence.

Tallis’s most recent work has included a trilogy of books entitled The Hand; I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being and The Knowing Animal that, like much of his philosophical writing, attempt to supply an anthropology that acknowledges what is distinctive about human being. In 2007, he published Unthinkable Thought: The enduring significance of Parmenides, on the influential pre-Socratic philosopher, and his latest volume, published earlier this year, The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head discusses the amazing attributes of the human head, the brain notwithstanding.