Guy Blythman

Guy Blythman has no formal qualifications in philosophy, for reasons explained in the introduction to this book, but has been interested in the subject since his teens and now offers this volume as a means of showing that the views of an "outsider" can be just as perceptive and relevant as those of an established academic philosopher. A wide range of subjects are covered, from social issues such as euthanasia, capital punishment, abortion and sexual morality to free will, artificial intelligence, the nature of time and space, the differences between Eastern and Western philosophy, the existence or otherwise of ghosts and life on other planets, and the philosophically confusing effects of the distortion of language by modern jargon.Philosophy: A View From The Edge is radical in its approach to many of the day's foremost philosophical issues; it challenges the widely-held view that philosophers have been displaced by scientists as the principal explainers of everything, and especially the workings of the physical universe, and reinterprets the Idealist doctrine of George Berkeley to show that the role of the mind and of abstract phenomena are crucial to understanding the cosmos we live in.

An eminent scientist disappears while on an expedition to the Amazon; several of his colleagues return to the West in a trance-like state, talking of a mysterious lost civilisation who seem to have been more advanced than our own and who built a machine which, if it exists, could solve all the world's energy problems. A machine they called the Eye of the Sun God.Meanwhile ambitious young oil troubleshooter Caroline Kent accepts a posting to a refinery in the troubled South American state of Camaragua. There, she finds herself drawn into a battle of wits with ruthless drug baron Otto Viellar, who wants his products to be the country's chief source of revenue and sees International Petroleum Ltd as a threat to his interests. But in this potentially bloody and vicious struggle far more is at stake than the future of IPL Camaragua; for Viellar, too, has found out about the Eye of the Sun God, and it has other uses than peaceful ones. If it falls into his hands, it could give him the power to rule the entire world...