This book is a trip ... It copiously details all the drugs that the US-born professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité has ingested ... There’s more in Smith-Ruiu’s psychedelic experience…than is dreamt of in strait-laced colleagues’ philosophies ... This [is an] extraordinary book, whose riches I can only hint at in this review.
A mind-stretching, almost manically polymathic meditation ... Jarringly out of tune ... Readers of a materialist bent can be forgiven for concluding that heaven is in your mind.
Smith-Ruiu skillfully threads his way between explaining the benefits of their use while not advocating for it ... A perceptive and thought-provoking book recommended for libraries with large philosophy or alternative-medicine collections.
An innovative application of philosophy to matters ineffable, intoxicating, and altogether interesting ... A layered philosophical investigation ... Although Smith-Ruiu’s discussion is, beg pardon, heady, he writes with clarity about matters such as the nature of dreams, the difficulty of accounting for 'the richness of our inner experience,' the phenomenological recognition of other minds, and the like.
