"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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Michael Lynch, “In Praise of Reason” (MIT Press, 2012)
Charlotte Witt, “The Metaphysics of Gender” (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Karen Stohr, “On Manners” (Routledge, 2011)
Uriah Kriegel, “The Sources of Intentionality” (Oxford UP, 2011)
Allen Buchanan, “Better than Human: The Promise and Perils of Enhancing Ourselves” (Oxford UP, 2011)
Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
John Christman, “The Politics of Persons: Individual Autonomy and Socio-historical Selves” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
Crawford (Tim) Elder, “Familiar Objects and their Shadows” (Cambridge UP, 2011)
Robert Audi, “Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State” (Oxford UP, 2011)
Peter Ludlow, “The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics” (Oxford UP, 2011)
Fabienne Peter, “Democratic Legitimacy” (Routledge, 2011)
Troy Jollimore, “Love’s Vision” (Princeton UP, 2011)
Jason Brennan, “The Ethics of Voting” (Princeton UP, 2011)
Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Savoring Disgust: The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics” (Oxford UP, 2011)
Elizabeth Anderson, “The Imperative of Integration” (Princeton UP, 2010)
Susan Schneider, “The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction” (MIT Press, 2011)
Sanford Goldberg, “Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology” (Oxford UP, 2010)
Robert Pasnau, “Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671” (Oxford UP, 2011)
Gerald Gaus, “The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bound World” (Cambridge UP, 2010)
Eric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011)
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