Author name: Scott

Human Instinct by Robert Winston

An ocean liner cannot turn round on a sixpence. Neither can human nature spin itself away from hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Humans are a bundle of pleistocene instincts dressed by Marks & Spencer with some clever gadgetry to hand. Robert Winston (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Winston) expertly dissects the deep human motivations that are really in […]

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Physicalism by Jaegwon Kim

The mind-body problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind-body_dichotomy) is as old as philosophy itself. Modern science proceeds with the assumption that the category of subject matter under investigation is physical. How can this accommodate consciouness and mental causation, though? These seem not to be reducible. Qualia (the ‘felt experience’ of the conscious mind, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia) seem particularly resistent. Jaegwon Kim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaegwon_Kim) offers a fresh

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A History of Modern Britain

Andrew Marr (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marr) is a much admired journalist, author and broadcaster with a talent for making serious subjects accessible. Happily, as of April 2013, he is recovering from a heart attack, and has appeared back on our television screens. When it comes to a history of modern Britain he is shrewd enough to know that yet another irenic

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Darwin's Dangerous Idea

The study of Darwinian theory has attracted many of the brightest minds and best writers during the past twenty years. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1996), Daniel Dennett http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett) attempts to integrate an enormously diverse range of research into a coherent but popularly understandable defense of neo-Darwinian thought. Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’ is clearly held forth

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