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