Links to the files of which follow the remarks below:–
I first got the idea of writing a collection of dialogues in 1978 from reading the French philosopher Diderot, one of the great masters in the genre, and the result, several weeks later, was four fairly lengthy philosophical dialogues, which enabled me to continue developing the dualistic theories begun the previous year (1977) and included in both Between Truth and Illusion (which contains my first ever philosophical dialogue) and The Illusory Truth.Their subject-matter ranges from book collecting as an art and the morality of films to the influence of astrology on writers and retrospective perspectives on history, and although they tend, on the basis of didactic disquisition rather than mere conversation, to be a touch one-sided, they are at least broad enough to be of some interest to the general reader. – John O'Loughlin.
John O’Loughlin was born in Salthill, Galway, the Republic of Ireland, of Irish- and British-born parents in 1952. Following a parental split partly due to his mother's Aldershot origins (her father, a Presbyterian from Donegal, had served in the British Army), he was brought to England by his mother and grandmother (who upon the death of her Aldershot-based husband had initially returned to Ireland after a lengthy marital absence from Athenry) in the mid-50s and, having had the benefit of private tuition from a Catholic priest, subsequently attended St. Joseph's and St. George's RC schools in Aldershot, Hants, and, with an enforced change of denomination from Catholic to Protestant in consequence of having been sent to a children's home by his mother upon the death and repatriation of his ethnically-protective grandmother, he went on to attend first Barrow Hedges Primary School in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, and then Carshalton High School for Boys. Upon leaving the latter in pre-GCSE era 1970 with an assortment of CSEs (Certificate of Secondary Education) and GCEs (General Certificate of Education), including history and music, he moved to London and went on, via two short-lived jobs, to work at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music in Bedford Square, where, with some prior experience himself of having sat and passed (with merit) a Gd.4 ABRSM piano exam, he eventually became responsible for booking examination venues. After a brief flirtation with further education at Redhill Technical College back in Surrey, where he had enrolled to do English and History A Levels, he returned to his former job in the West End but, due to a combination of personal factors, left the Associated Board in 1976 and began to pursue a literary vocation which, despite a brief spell as a computer and office-skills tutor at Hornsey YMCA in the late '80s and early '90s, he has steadfastly continued with ever since. His novels include Changing Worlds (1976), Fixed Limits (1976), Logan's Influence (1980), Sublimated Relations(1981), and False Pretences (1982). Since the mid-80s John O'Loughlin has dedicated himself almost exclusively to philosophy, which he regards as his true literary vocation, and has penned several titles of a philosophical nature, including Devil and God (1985–6), Towards the Supernoumenon(1987), Elemental Spectra (1988–9), Philosophical Truth (1991–2) and, more recently, The Best of All Possible Worlds (2008), The Centre of Truth (2009), Insane but not Mad (2011), and Philosophic Flights of Poetic Fancy (2012).
