EGGHEAD CHOICE – Crack open for a hard boiled think

Anyone out there pretty much wedded to Enlightenment ideals? I hope so. Sadly, in recent decades these have come under attack from a whole slew of irrationalisms. Cults, quackery, gurus, hysterical panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo, pre-modernists and post-modernists, medieval theocrats and New Age mystics. They’re all here trying to drag us back […]

This is a hugely controversial thesis (1996) from Samuel P. Huntington. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington). His argument is that the fundamental source of conflict in the future will not primarily be ideological or economic but rather cultural. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future, he contends. Every fresh news story, particularly to do with

At Sunday School in The Channel Isles about 150 years ago I was taught to sing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful‘ the opening verse of which is: ‘All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all’. Mrs Phillips, our teacher, didn’t mention the

This is a thoroughly researched history of the drug trade showing that all the efforts of governments and law enforcement are futile against global trafficking and desperation to escape the nightmare which is human experience. Spanning five centuries and several continents in a sweeping portrait of addiction, The Pursuit of Oblivion (2001) traces the history

Philosophical scepticism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_skepticism) comes in a variety of flavours and strengths and is strongly represented in the classical period. It is time well spent to pick out the various strands. The best recent rebuttal I’ve read is from the pen of public intellectual and prolific author Anthony (‘A.C.’) Grayling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._C._Grayling) in a 1985 publication ‘The Refutation of Scepticism‘. Put

This book is a landmark achievement in anthropology and evolutionary biology from the polymath Jared Diamond. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Diamond) It is no less than a wholescale assessment of human existence. How did we evolve to dominate so many other species and what is the long term future for a creature that shares 98% of its genes with chimpanzees?

This book is a one volume introduction to Western intellectual history. Richard Tarnas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Tarnas) takes us on a journey from the Greeks to postmodernism. The contemporary world of postmodern thought, according to Tarnas, is caught “between the inner craving for a life of meaning and the relentless attrition of existence in a cosmos that our rational

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

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