Why is belief so hard to shake? Despite our best attempts to embrace rational thought and reject superstition, we often find ourselves appealing to unseen forces that guide our destiny, wondering who might be watching us as we go about our lives, and imagining what might come after death. In this lively and masterfully argued […]
The Belief Instinct by Jesse Bering Read More »
Latvian-born Oxford historian Isaiah Berlin (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin) was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. He was an activist of the intellect who marshalled vast erudition and eloquence in defence of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political plurality. The essays in The Crooked Timber of Humanity expose the links between
The Crooked Timber of Humanity by Isaiah Berlin Read More »
In the winter of 1417 the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini made a great discovery. In an abbey in Germany he came across a manuscript of a long-lost classical poem, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”). This event is vividly described by the renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Greenblatt) in The Swerve. The author sees
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What happens when we accept that everything we feel, think, and experience stems not from an immaterial soul but from electrical and chemical activity in our brains? That is the question at the heart of this 2013 book by Patricia Churchland (http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/pschurchland/index_hires.html), one of the pioneers of neurophilosophy. In a narrative detailing her own personal and
Touching a Nerve by Patricia Churchland Read More »
European thought begins with the Greeks. Scientific and philosophic thinking,the pursuit of truth and the grasping of unchanging principles of life, is a historical development, an achievement; and, as Bruno Snell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Snell) writes in The Discovery of the Mind, nothing less than a revolution. The Greeks did not take mental resources already at their disposal and
The Discovery of the Mind by Bruno Snell Read More »
This is a fine introduction to the philosophy of a highly influential German thinker from the first part of last century – Max Scheler (Max Scheler (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)) and (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Scheler) Check if this title is in stock at your local library by consulting the online catalogue here Home | South Lanarkshire Libraries (sllclibrary.co.uk)
Guardian of Dialogue by Michael D. Barber Read More »
This is an elegant and wonderfully lucid introduction to the philosophy of science. 288 pages in Open University Press paperback edition. ISBN 978-0335201099
What is this thing called science? by Alan Chalmers Read More »
You can imagine the scene. They’ve gone up to the top of Tinto Hill on an evening full of expectation. Thrilling expectation, because that night is going to be The End of The World. The chosen ones (among whom they are counted in the number) are to be taken to a heavenly place in a
Living at the End of the World by Marina Benjamin Read More »
The physical and natural sciences investigate how the world is, its contents and relations between them. Why, though, is there anything rather than just nothing? This is a perenniel question and many thinkers cite this fact to suggest that it is really unanswerable. It may be able to be framed grammatically, yet could still be
Why does the world exist? by Jim Holt Read More »
