A new epistemology, "The Knotted Road" examines the root of the age-old divisions between religion and science, empiricism and skeptism, the philosophic and the artistic. A call for a new valuation that synthesizes humanity's contradictions, The Knotted Road is a radical philosophic work on the cutting edge of our increasingly entropic society.

James Cummins is a five time author, and winner of the Canadian Authors' Association BookTelevision Emerging Writer Award for 2009. His previous books have included a history of Electronica music (Ambrosia: About a Culture) and his co-authoring of the autobiography of House music inventor Jesse Saunders. He is an investigative journalist for U Magazine in Jordan with a degree in philosophy from Concordia University in Montreal where he currently resides. He is also a composer of classical music and playwright, and is originally from Edmonton, Alberta.

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Knowledge when divorced of the ground or context which bears it becomes restrictive. Wisdom itself is not modular: to transplant it from the place and time in which it was born to a foreign context is to court disaster and injustice.

Today, some believe that exporting democracy and the Western way of life furthers our security. Yet others argue that to export democracy justifies sacrificing it at home, at least temporarily. Science opposes religion; the East defies the West; and politically, you must be on the right, or on the left to exist. There is no middle ground; the synthesis escapes us.

In his new book, Mr. Cummins describes for us a paradigm in which our knowledge systems and our understanding of the world whether through science or metaphysics, are reactive composition sets, like soap bubble images of a genetrix or spanning set, reflecting the world on its boundary. This boundary experience we mistake for knowledge; and the reflection image on its surface, we mistake for reality. The soap bubble floats by, and bursts later into nothingness. The conception of these composition and creation sets is a novel contribution to the body of philosophical works. Through them, we have a new looking glass into the objective and the subjective; and the oscillating causal relation between the two sets and the mediating Perspective lays the groundwork for a new epistemology.

More importantly, this deconstruction of knowledge exhibits its formation process and in so doing, unearths some of the fallacies inherent in our valuation of knowledge systems. By providing a framework for harmonizing the distinct comparative bodies of knowledge, "The Knotted Road" offers a paradigm in which to explore the validity of the metanarratives of the times. Today, when media is controlled and education standardized, when religion and state have the use of communication technology at their disposal: then this becomes especially relevant to the survival of democracy and the retreat of autocratic rule. As ideological conflicts break out between the Western and Eastern hemispheres, the need for autonomous thinking citizens on both sides of the Atlantic has never been so great.

Emery Moreira, Editor, 8th House Publishing