Here’s the false dilemma: either we stand to the world as disinterested spectators such that the

world is totally independent of our interested understanding of it, while being fully
comprehensible in its own terms by a disinterested understanding, or we stand to the world
such that it can be no more than the totality of our interested understanding of it, and such
that it is fully comprehensible in terms of that interested understanding. Either the world chops
itself up into things such as rocks, and trees, and electrons, which work by laws regardless of
the differentiated interest we happen to take in things, or the world is chopped up by us into
trees, and rock, and electrons, and their consequent laws, because of the differentiated interest
we happen to have in things. Both positions are mistaken, according to Cooper, and we need
not be forced to choose one of them.

The book’s author, David E. Cooper, is one of the most outstanding philosophers of recent
times. It’s hard to think of another figure who better combines erudition with rigor of thought
and argument. I cannot imagine any other living philosopher whose knowledge extends, so
easily and confidently, across analytical philosophy, continental philosophy, and Eastern
philosophy.

Senses of Mystery is a concise and more practically illustrated version of the position presented
in denser academic form in Cooper’s The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and
Mystery(2002). What is offered here is a Big Idea, and it is the result of a lifetime’s philosophical
reflection.