LOPSIDED CONVERSATIONS: Collected Dialogues Vol.1
About this ebook
The nineteen dialogues included here date from 1976–82 and become increasingly philosophical, in the sense of concerned with metaphysical and kindred issues, including ontology. Indeed, so much so that we have not hesitated to include, as with volume one of the author's ‘collected essays’, an aphoristic appendix, which properly follows the last seven dialogues, all of which were originally included in a collection entitled 'The Importance of Technology to the Transcendental Future; (1981–2).
The title of this volume would seem to acknowledge the one-sided nature of many of the ‘conversations’ which take place in these dialogues, as though in deference to a teacher/pupil relationship biased towards didactic polemic and religious instruction. This is so as early as with ‘A Dualistic Integrity’ in which the participants, the characters, if you will, are simply described as ‘professor’ and ‘student’, and, the basic template once established, it was inevitable that John O'Loughlin should simply embellish and refine upon it in due course, even when there is a greater concern with characterization.
The results, though fairly predictable, speak eloquently for themselves, insofar as it was on this basis that he gradually evolved towards the aphoristic purism characteristic of his mature philosophy, and accordingly became less relativistic and much more absolutely committed to the quest for metaphysical perfection. Such perfection may not be all that evident here, in this first volume of dialogues, but it was eventually to spring from them, as to some extent evidenced by the appendix. – A Centretruths Editorial
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About the author
John O'Loughlin was born in Salthill, Galway City, the Republic of Ireland in 1952 of mixed Irish- and British-born parents of Irish descent. Following a parental split while still a child, he was taken to England by his mother and maternal grandmother (who had initially returned to Ireland after a lengthy absence with intent to stay) in the mid-50s and subsequently attended schools in Aldershot, Oakham, and, upon the death and repatriation of his Galway-born grandmother, Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, where, despite an enforced change of denomination from Catholic to Protestant in consequence of having been put into care by his mother, he attended a state school. Upon leaving Carshalton High School for Boys in 1970 with an assortment of CSEs (Certificate of Secondary Education) and GCEs (General Certificate of Education), including history and music, he moved the comparatively short distance up to London and went on to work at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in Bedford Square, where, after a lengthy period as a general clerk, he was promoted to clerical officer grade one with responsibility for booking examination venues throughout the UK. After a brief flirtation with further education at Redhill Technical College back in Surrey, where he had enrolled as a history student, he returned to his former job at the ABRSM but resigned in 1976 due to a combination of factors, including ill-health, and proceeded to dedicate himself to a literary vocation which, despite a brief spell as a computer tutor at Hornsey YMCA in the late 1980s and early '90s, he has effectively continued with ever since. His novels include Changing Worlds (1976), Cross-Purposes (1979), Thwarted Ambitions (1980), Sublimated Relations (1981), False Pretences (1981) and Deceptive Motives (1982). Since the mid-80s Mr O'Loughlin has exclusively dedicated himself to philosophy, his true literary vocation, and has penned more than sixty titles of a philosophical nature, including Devil and God - The Omega Book (1985-6), Towards the Supernoumenon (1987), Elemental Spectra (1988-9), Philosophical Truth (1991-2), Maximum Truth (1993), and, more recently, The Centre of Truth (2009), and Musings of a Superfluous Man (2011).
