Coping and Beyond: Being a Surgeon's Reflections on Medicine, Science, Art, and a Life Worth Living Book

I read this for a political seminar class a while ago and just recently dipped into it again. Here's my take:

Though I don't subscribe to the total relativism of radical empiricism, I still firmly believe that a pluralistic outlook on life can best enable intellectual freedom and personal development. The only way to break from the status quo and change is by embracing difference. Focusing first on studying the differences in things will eventually result in a broader, more thorough sense of unity than a monistic approach to learning (which stresses similarities above all). This really amounts to being drawn to the unfamiliar, the unknown, and finding its working order through common connections, thus bringing it into your sphere of knowledge. A pluralistic approach to education does far more to expand one's horizons than a monistic appoach, the latter being too centralized and not permitting the mind to stray far from a generalized mean. This pluralistic approach to learning is the true meaning of a liberal education. We need James' pluralistic empiricism more than ever now in our age of television news pundits and mass media.