Product Description
Barfield draws on sources from mythology, philosophy, history, literature, theology, and science to chronicle the evolution of human thought from Moses and Aristotle to Galileo and Keats.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 11 reviews)

An Eye Opener by G. M. Drosdowich (warwick,ny)

5 Stars
February 07, 2010
Read this twice through heart racing, underlining, jotting notes and comments in the margins, you can have a real dialogue with this book, following Barfield's difficult but kindly logic, helping you through to his expansive vision. If you have the courage for a new world, wrestle with this book.

thinking it through by H. Edelglass

5 Stars
March 05, 2009
This very fine and challenging book begins to open pathways long overdue for working with all of our realities. Historically grounded, the author leads to understandings that have been ignored in our general education.

A door to perception by A. J. M. Groot (Amssterdam, Netherlands)

5 Stars
October 21, 2008
My interest in Owen Barfield was first sparked by the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis but it has proved more lasting than either of those. When I first discovered 'Saving the Appearances' it blew wide open a door to a whole new different way of seeing the world. Especially the opening chapters, with the classic analogy of the rainbow and enlightnening passages on concepts such as 'collective representations', 'figuration' and 'participation', struck me out of the blue. There is such a world of experience that opens up once we recognize that our way of seeing, our sensual perception itself, is determined by cultural and linguistic factors as much as by anything else, and that our current, scientific way of seeing is only a relatively recent phenomenon, that may disappear as quickly as it appeared. Most of all, it encourages us to be fully conscious and fully responsible of the choices we make, most of all of the choice between an insistence on scientific 'fact' or even back towards original participation, and a move towards final participation. As others have commented, Barfield's writing is always thoroughly though through and at the same time immediately comprehensible. I would also like to add that though his thought leads eventually towards a renewed faith in Christianity, it is possible to appreciate most of this book without a Christian (or anthroposophist, for that matter) background.

excellent book by Richard Johnson (Maine, USA)

5 Stars
August 25, 2008
Saving the Appearances is a book I have meant to read for about thirty years. It is a very useful discussion of "modern" thinking, though some of the issues addressed have been "solved", at least partially by "post-modern" approaches. Nevertheless, the book is an excellent marker of the road western thought has traveled in the last fifty years.

In brief by William J. Turgeon (Eastcoast USA)

5 Stars
May 24, 2006
One of the most unduly under-appreciated books of the second half of the 20th century.

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