The Web of Meaning

Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find our Place in the Universe

Hardcover, 464 pages

Published by New Society Publishers.

ISBN:
978-0-86571-954-5
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4 stars (1 review)

6 editions

reviewed Web of Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Definitely worth reading

4 stars

I wanted to read this book after I read some excerpts online, although I was a bit concerned that it might be "new age pablum" ... lofty musings about how everything is all connected that are ultimately inconsequential.

I found a little bit of that, but mostly I found a lucid new synthesis of ideas in a way I hadn't considered before, as well as an introduction to some non-Western philosophical traditions I hadn't yet encountered. Lent is particularly excited by the concept of li in the Neo-Confucian school originating in the Tang Dynasty. (In fact, he has a website called liology.org devoted to this).

I did almost set the book down when I got into Chapter 8, the first chapter of Part 4 ("How Should Live My Life?"). He opens with what seemed to me to be an interminable laundry list of non-Western approaches to health that I had …