"What's life for if there's no time to play and explore?" In The Weirdness of the World (Princeton UP, 2024), Eric Schwitzgebel invites the reader to a walk on the wilder side of philosophical speculation about the cosmos and consciousness. Is consciousness entirely a material phenomenon? How much credence should we have in the existence of a world outside our minds? Are there multiple parallel universes? Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at the University of California-Riverside, constructs chains of conditional probabilities to explore the zone just beyond the edge of what we can understand, however imperfectly, given current scientific theory. He distinguishes hypothetical scenarios that are not worth taking seriously – like being a brain in a vat – from those that are just plausible enough to deserve playful, yet motivated, consideration.
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Duncan Pritchard, “Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing” (Princeton UP, 2016)
Eric Dietrich, “Excellent Beauty: The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of the World” (Columbia UP, )
Brian Epstein, “The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Leif Wenar, “Blood Oil: Tyranny, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World” (Oxford UP, 2016)
David J. Stump, “Conceptual Change and the Philosophy of Science: Alternative Interpretations of the A Priori” (Routledge, 2015)
Rivka Weinberg, “The Risk of a Lifetime: How, When, and Why Procreation May be Permissible” (Oxford UP, 2016)
Colin Klein, “What the Body Commands: The Imperative Theory of Pain” (MIT Press, 2015)
S. Matthew Liao, “The Right to be Loved” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Brian P. Copenhaver, “Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment” (Cambridge UP, 2015 )
Carlos Fraenkel, “Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World” (Princeton UP, 2015)
Nancy Bauer, “How to Do Things With Pornography” (Harvard UP, 2015)
Lisa Tessman, “Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Miriam Solomon, “Making Medical Knowledge” (Oxford, 2015)
Stephen Macedo, “Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage” (Princeton University Press, 2015)
M. Chirimuuta, “Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy” (MIT Press, 2015)
Cass Sunstein, “Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Chad Engelland, “Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind” (MIT Press, 2015)
Max Deutsch, “The Myth of the Intuitive: Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Method” (MIT, 2015)
Margaret Morrison, “Reconstructing Reality: Models, Mathematics, and Simulations” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Kevin Vallier, “Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation” (Routledge, 2014)
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