No man is an island

Bit of Kant, bit of Kierkegaard, bit of motorcycle maintenance. That’s one take on The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford’s philosophical polemic about how virtual reality is impinging on real reality. Actually, his targets in this book are Descartes and John Locke, with whom, he reckons, the rot started when it comes to thinking about the human person as a cerebral calculating machine, divorced from his own body and from the world around him. But he’s got it in for corporate capitalism, too, and its manipulation of our attention by hijacking every communal space — aural and visual — to get us to buy things.

Perhaps I’m not quite winning you round here to this book, which I really, really like, and really, really want you to read. Let me try again. Crawford is worried about the way we are becoming divorced from the material world around us — and from other people.