"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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Quassim Cassam, "Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Susanna Schellenberg, "The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, and Evidence" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Christian List, "Why Free Will is Real" (Harvard UP, 2019)
Camisha Russell, "The Assisted Reproduction of Race" (Indiana UP, 2018)
Nicholas Shea, "Representation in Cognitive Science" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Mary Kate McGowan, "Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm" (Oxford UP, 2019)
James Doyle, "No Morality, No Self: Anscombe's Radical Skepticism" (Harvard UP, 2018)
Mollie Gerver, "The Ethics and Practice of Refugee Repatriation" (U Edinburgh Press, 2018)
Jill Stauffer, "Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard" (Columbia UP, 2015)
T. J. Kasperbauer, "Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes Towards Animals" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Michael Hannon, "What is the Point of Knowledge? A Function-First Epistemology" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing
Elizabeth Schechter, "Self-Consciousness and Split Brains: The Mind's I" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Guy Axtell, "Problems of Religious Luck: Assessing the Limits of Reasonable Religious Disagreement" (Lexington, 2019)
Ethan Mills, "Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nagarjuna, Jayarasi, and Sri Harsa" (Lexington Books, 2018)
Jonathan Birch, "The Philosophy of Social Evolution" (Oxford UP, 2017)
Henry S. Richardson, "Articulating the Moral Community: Toward a Constructive Ethical Pragmatism" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Maria Kronfeldner, "What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept" (MIT Press, 2018)
Samuel Schindler, "Theoretical Virtues in Science: Discovering Reality Through Theory" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Carrie Figdor, "Pieces of Mind: The Proper Domain of Psychological Predicates" (Oxford UP, 2018)
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