Quintessence of Dust by Harry Redner argues for a science of matter and philosophy of mind based on emergence through five stages. It criticises mechanistic approaches to mind and advocates a philosophic synthesis of the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.

The Humanities, the Social Sciences and the University is an intellectual history of research in the humanities and social sciences. It scrutinizes the priorities, values, objectives and publishing agendas of the modern university in order to assess the institutional pressures on research in major disciplines such as literature, history, sociology and economics. It argues that all these disciplines are currently experiencing a deep malaise – though to different degrees – due to loss of faith in the Enlightenment project, which entailed the pursuit of knowledge through reason. Extreme scepticism, promoted since the 1970s by French Theory, which regards knowledge as an instrument of power, is a major factor in this disorientation. Overall, the book concludes that though universities have grown stronger, wealthier and more powerful in the last century, the quality and seriousness of the research they typically produce are weaker and intellectually less important and the institution is in danger of losing its way. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, education and intellectual history with interests in higher education policy and academic life.

The book makes a unique contribution to civilizational theory. It traces contemporary social and political crises in Western and Eurasian societies to a process of civilizational decline initiated by war and revolution last century and now being completed by globalization.

Are you self-organizing dust that becomes alive if it is arranged in just the right way? Are you dust that had life breathed into it by "God", as the Book of Genesis says? Are you dust that links to a mind and is animated by the mind so long as the link remains functional? Well, what are you? Do you know? If you don't know, shouldn't you be trying to know? Go on, what is your quintessence? Write it down. If you can't, what does that say about you? Here's an astounding thing. Feeling types, sensing types, intuitive types and thinking types all have totally different ideas about the "dust" from which the Bible said we came. Do you understand why? Come inside and find out why you hold the beliefs you do. Your beliefs would be totally different if you had a different personality type. Doesn't that disturb you? If you were born in a different part of the world, to different parents, you would have completely different religious beliefs. Equally, if you were born with a different personality type, you would relate entirely differently to the world and believe totally different things about the nature of reality. Don't you want to rise above all these contingencies and know what the absolute, objective truth is? Why not?!

Quintessence collects Quine’s classic essays in one volume, offering a much-needed introduction to his general philosophy. The selections take up analyticity and reductionism; the indeterminacy of translation of theoretical sentences and the inscrutability of reference; ontology; naturalized epistemology; philosophy of mind; and extensionalism.

This accessible and easy-to-follow book offers a new approach to consciousness. The author’s eclectic style combines new physics-based insights with those of analytical philosophy, phenomenology, cognitive science and neuroscience. He proposes a view in which the mechanistic framework of classical physics and neuroscience is complemented by a more holistic underlying framework in which conscious experience finds its place more naturally.