Indice: Acknowledgements. Introduction. Pt. 1. Visions of rationality: 1. The sources of thought 2. Knowledge considered as weed-killer 3. Rationality and rainbows 4. The shape of disillusion 5. Atomistic visions: the quest for permanence 6. Memes and other unusual life-forms. Pt. 2. Mind and body: the end of apartheid: 7. Putting our selves together again 8. Living in the world 9. The strange persistence of fatalism 10. Chessboards and presidents of the immortals 11. Doing science on purpose 12. One world, but a big one 13. A plague on both their houses 14. Being scientific about our selves. Pt. 3. In what kind of world?: 15. Widening responsabilities 16. The problem of humbug 17. Individualism and the concept of Gaia 18. Gods and goddesses: the role of wonder 19. Why there is such a thing as a society 20. Paradoxes of sociobiology and social Darwinism 21. Mythology, rhetoric and religion. Notes. Index
