"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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Muhammed Ali Khalidi, “Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
Helene Landemore, “Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many” (Princeton UP, 2012)
Tadeusz Zawidzki, “Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition” (MIT Press, 2013)
Simon Keller, “Partiality” (Princeton UP, 2013)
Michael Marder, “Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life” (Columbia UP, 2013)
Jody Azzouni, “Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a Common Language Arises and Persists” (Oxford UP, 2013)
Carlos Montemayor, “Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time” (Brill, 2012)
Thom Brooks, “Punishment” (Routledge, 2012)
Berit Brogaard, “Transient Truths: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Propositions” (Oxford UP, 2012)
Christopher Hookway, “The Pragmatic Maxim: Essays on Peirce and Pragmatism” (Oxford UP, 2012)
Julia Tanney, “Rules, Reasons and Self-Knowledge” (Harvard UP, 2012)
Kimberley Brownlee, “Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience” (Oxford UP, 2012)
Helen Longino, “Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality” (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
Philip Pettit, “On The People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
Meir Hemmo and Orly Shenker, “The Road to Maxwell’s Demon: Conceptual Foundations of Statistical Mechanics” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
Cheryl Misak, “The American Pragmatists” (Oxford UP, 2013)
Jesse J. Prinz, “The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience” (Oxford UP, 2012)
Roslyn Weiss, “Philosophers in the Republic” (Cornell UP, 2012)
Beth Preston, “A Philosophy of Material Culture: Action, Function, and Mind” (Routledge, 2012)
Clayton Littlejohn, “Justification and the Truth-Connection” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
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