Branches of Philosophy Podcast

An introduction and summary of "Consciousness Revisited Materialism Without Phenomenal Concepts" By Michael Tye 2011 Four major puzzles of consciousness philosophical materialism must confront after rejecting the phenomenal concept strategy. We are material beings in a material world, but we are also beings who have experiences and feelings. How can these subjective states be just a matter of matt...

An introduction and summary of "The Edge of Sentience Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI" By Jonathan Birch 2024 This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? W...

An introduction and summary of "The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life" By Nick Lane 2015 To explain the mystery of how life evolved on Earth, Nick Lane explores the deep link between energy and genes. The Earth teems with life: in its oceans, forests, skies and cities. Yet there’s a black hole at the heart of biology. We do not know why complex life is the way it i...

An introduction and summary of "Life As No One Knows ItThe Physics of Life's Emergence" By Sara Imari Walker 2024 What is life? This is among the most difficult open problems in science, right up there with the nature of consciousness and the existence of matter. All the definitions we have fall short. None help us understand how life originates or the full range of possibilities for what life on...

An introduction and summary of "Industrial Society and Its Future" By Ted Kaczynski 1995 Industrial Society and Its Future, also known as the Unabomber Manifesto, is a 1995 anti-technology essay by Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber". The manifesto contends that the Industrial Revolution began a harmful process of natural destruction brought about by technology, while forcing humans to adapt to machine...

An introduction and summary of "The Mirror of the World Subjects, Consciousness, and Self-Consciousness" By Christopher Peacocke 2014Christopher Peacocke presents a philosophical theory of subjects of consciousness, together with a theory of the nature of first person representation of such a subject of consciousness. He develops a new treatment of subjects, distinct from previous theories, under...

An introduction and summary of "Feeling & KnowingMaking Minds Conscious" By Antonio Damasio 2021 From one of the world’s leading neuroscientists: a succinct, illuminating, wholly engaging investigation of how biology, neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence have given us the tools to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness“One thrilling insight after another ... Damasio has s...

An introduction and summary of "Discipline and PunishThe Birth of the Prison" By Michel Foucault 1975 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is a 1975 book by French philosopher Michel Foucault. It is an analysis of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the changes that occurred in Western penal systems during the modern age based on historical documents from France. The grisly spec...

An introduction and summary of "Seeing and VisualizingIt's Not what You Think" By Zenon W. Pylyshyn 2003 In Seeing and Visualizing, Zenon Pylyshyn argues that seeing is different from thinking and that to see is not, as it may seem intuitively, to create an inner replica of the world. Pylyshyn examines how we see and how we visualize and why the scientific account does not align with the way these...

An introduction and summary of "Organisms, Agency, and Evolution" By D. M. Walsh 2015 The central insight of Darwin's Origin of Species is that evolution is an ecological phenomenon, arising from the activities of organisms in the 'struggle for life'. By contrast, the Modern Synthesis theory of evolution, which rose to prominence in the twentieth century, presents evolution as a fundamentally mole...

An introduction and summary of "The Mind's Construction: The Ontology of Mind and Mental Action" By Matthew Soteriou 2013 Philosophers working on the ontology of mind have highlighted various distinctions that can be drawn between the ways in which different aspects of our minds fill time. For example, they note that whereas some elements of our mental lives obtain over time, others unfold over ti...

An introduction and summary of "Consciousness, Attention, and Conscious Attention" By Carlos Montemayor, Harry Haroutioun Haladjian 2015 A rigorous analysis of current empirical and theoretical work supporting the argument that consciousness and attention are largely dissociated. In this book, Carlos Montemayor and Harry Haladjian consider the relationship between consciousness and attention. The...

An introduction and summary of "Mental Representation and Consciousness: Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Representation and Reference" By Eduard Marbach 1993 Conditions of the possibility of Experience ... must mean nothing else than all that which lies immanently in the essence of Experience ... and therefore belongs to it indispensably. The essence of Experience that phenomenological analys...

An introduction and summary of "Think Again The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know" By Adam Grant 2021 We need to spend as much time rethinking as we do thinking. Why do we refresh our wardrobes every year, renovate our kitchens every decade, but never update our beliefs and our views? Why do we laugh at people using computers that are ten years old, but yet still cling to opinions we formed ten...

An introduction and summary of "On Myself, and Other, Less Important Subjects" By Caspar Hare 2009 Caspar Hare makes an original and compelling case for "egocentric presentism," a view about the nature of first-person experience, about what happens when we see things from our own particular point of view. A natural thought about our first-person experience is that "all and only the things of which...

An introduction and summary of "The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience" By David Papineau 2021 What are the materials of conscious perceptual experience? What is going on when we are consciously aware of a visual scene, or hear sounds, or otherwise enjoy sensory experience? In this book David Papineau exposes the flaws in contemporary answers to this central philosophical question and defends a new...

An introduction and summary of "How the Body Shapes the Mind"By Shaun Gallagher 2006 How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment t...

An introduction and summary of "How Religion Evolved And Why It Endures" By Robin Dunbar 2022 A fascinating analysis of the evolution of religion from the internationally renowned evolutionary psychologistWhen did humans develop spiritual thought? What is religion's evolutionary purpose? And in our increasingly secular world, why has it endured? Every society in the history of humanity has lived w...

An introduction and summary of "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" By Nassim Nicholas Taleb 2007 The Black Swan is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, Antifragi...

An introduction and summary of "Mechanisms and Consciousness Integrating Phenomenology with Cognitive Science" By Marek Pokropski 2021 This book develops a new approach to naturalizing phenomenology. The author proposes to integrate phenomenology with the mechanistic framework that offers new methodological perspectives for studying complex mental phenomena such as consciousness. While mechanistic...

An introduction and summary of "Actual Consciousness" By Ted Honderich 2014 What is it for you to be conscious? There is no agreement whatever in philosophy or science: it has remained a hard problem, a mystery. Is this partly or mainly owed to the existing theories not even having the same subject, not answering the same question? In Actual Consciousness, Ted Honderich sets out to supersede duali...

An introduction and summary of "Extending the Extended MindFrom Cognition to Consciousness" By Pii Telakivi 2023This book argues that conscious experience is sometimes extended outside the brain and body into certain kinds of environmental interaction and tool use. It shows that if one accepts that cognitive states can extend, one must also accept that consciousness can extend. The proponents of E...

An introduction and summary of "Darwin's Dangerous IdeaEvolution and the Meanings of Life" By Daniel C. Dennett 1996In Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life Daniel C. Dennett argues that the theory of evolution can demystify the miracles of life without devaluing our most cherished beliefs. From the moment it first appeared, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural sel...

An introduction and summary of "Waking Up A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion" By Sam Harris 2015For the millions of Americans who want spirituality without religion, Sam Harris’s latest New York Times bestseller is a guide to meditation as a rational practice informed by neuroscience and psychology. From Sam Harris, neuroscientist and author of numerous New York Times bestselling books, Waki...

An introduction and summary of "War in the Age of Intelligent Machines" By Manuel DeLanda 1991In the aftermath of the methodical destruction of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, the power and efficiency of new computerized weapons and surveillance technology have become chillingly apparent. For Manuel DeLanda, however, this new weaponry has a significance that goes far beyond military applications...