Ockham's Razor: A Season in France in Search of Meaning (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781467922852)

Ranked among Canada's leading literary journalists, Wade Davies Rowland has produced more than a dozen books on subjects ranging from television journalism and organized crime, to international environmental law, to his current concerns which include the social impact of communication technologies, the philosophy of science, and the sources of human values. His writing is often informed by his experience as a newspaper reporter and television writer and producer, and senior executive with both CTV, Canada's largest private television network and CBC, the nation's public broadcaster. It was a cumulative dissatisfaction with the quality of news programming at both networks that led him to return to writing and scholarship full-time, in an attempt to find the roots of what seemed to be an institutional bias toward mediocrity in mass media. This led, in turn, to a continuing exploration of the sources of ideas such as "quality" in the long history of moral thought. Today, Rowland is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Toronto's York University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the ethics of communication. His scholarly work has appeared in a number of academic journals including Journal of Corporate Citizenship, Journal of Corporate Ethics, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, and Social Epistemology. Rowland's first work on his departure from corporate media and return to writing was "Spirit of the Web: The Age of Information from Telegraph to Internet", which chronicles the history of communication technologies and their impact on civilization. It is currently in its third edition. In "Ockham's Razor", Rowland addresses issues of equity, justice, quality, and human dignity through a travel narrative in which the author and his family take a road trip through France which culminates in an exploration of the storied Cathar ruins in Languedoc, France. His two most recent books pursue questions of the sources of human values from different perspectives: "Greed, Inc.: Why Corporations Rule Our World" is a ground-breaking exploration of the nature of the modern business corporation and its relationship to the people it employs and the public it serves; "Galileo's Mistake" is a re-examination of the historic dispute between Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, at the dawn of the modern science.