Branches of Philosophy Podcast

An introduction and summary of "Being and Time" By Martin Heidegger 1927 Being and Time (German: Sein und Zeit) is the 1927 magnum opus of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and a key document of existentialism. Being and Time is among the most influential texts of 20th century philosophy. It had a notable impact on subsequent philosophy, literary theory and many other fields. Though controversia...

An introduction and summary of "The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its Causes" By Steven Pinker 2011Wasn't the twentieth century the most violent in history? In his extraordinary, epic book Steven Pinker shows us that this is wrong, telling the story of humanity in a completely new and unfamiliar way. From why cities make us safer to how books bring about peace...

An introduction and summary of "Seeing Things as They are: A Theory of Perception" By John R. Searle 2015This book provides a comprehensive account of the intentionality of perceptual experience. With special emphasis on vision Searle explains how the raw phenomenology of perception sets the content and the conditions of satisfaction of experience. The central question concerns the relation betwee...

An introduction and summary of "Thought in a hostile world" By Kim Sterelny2003Thought in a Hostile World is an exploration of the evolution of cognition, especially human cognition, by one of today's foremost philosophers of biology and of mind. The central idea of the book is that thought is a response to threat. Competitors and enemies make life hard by their direct physical effects. But they a...

An introduction and summary of "How infants know minds" By Vasudevi Reddy 2008Most psychologists claim that we begin to develop a “theory of mind”—some basic ideas about other people’s minds—at age two or three, by inference, deduction, and logical reasoning. But does this mean that small babies are unaware of minds? That they see other people simply as another (rather dynamic and noisy) kind of o...

An introduction and summary of "The Paradox of False Belief UnderstandingThe Role of Cognitive and Situational Factors for the Development of Social Cognition" By Julia Wolf 2021 Our ability to understand others is one of the most central parts of human life, but explaining how this ability develops remains a controversial issue, exercising psychologists and philosophers alike. Within this literat...

An introduction and summary of "The Phenomenology of Spirit” By Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1807 The Phenomenology of Spirit is the most widely discussed philosophical work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; its German title can be translated as either The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel described the work, published in 1807, as an "exposition of the coming to be of kn...

An introduction and summary of "Thinking Without Words" By José Luis Bermúdez 2007Thinking without Words provides a challenging new theory of the nature of non-linguistic thought. Many scientific disciplines treat non-linguistic creatures as thinkers, explaining their behavior in terms of their thoughts about themselves and about the environment. But this theorizing has proceeded without any clear...

An introduction and summary of "Consciousness Explained" By Daniel C. Dennett 1991In Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett reveals the secrets of one of the last remaining mysteries of the universe: the human brain. Daniel C. Dennett's now-classic book blends philosophy, psychology and neuroscience - with the aid of numerous examples and thought-experiments - to explore how consciousness has...

An introduction and summary of "The Age of AI: And Our Human Future" By Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Daniel P. Huttenlocher 2021"An A.I. that learned to play chess discovered moves that no human champion would have conceived of. Driverless cars edge forward at red lights, just like impatient humans, and so far, nobody can explain why it happens. Artificial intelligence is being put to use in spo...

An introduction and summary of "The Laws of Human Nature" By Robert Greene 2018"From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power comes the definitive new book on decoding the behavior of the people around you Robert Greene is a master guide for millions of readers, distilling ancient wisdom and philosophy into essential texts for seekers of power, understanding and mastery. No...

An introduction and summary of "The Animal Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animal Cognition" By Kristin Andrews 2020The philosophy of animal minds addresses profound questions about the nature of mind and the relationships between humans and other animals. In this fully revised and updated introductory text, Kristin Andrews introduces and assesses the essential topics, problems, and deb...

An introduction and summary of "Understanding the Representational Mind" By Josef Perner 1991A model of writing in cognitive development, Understanding the Representational Mind synthesizes the burgeoning literature on the child's theory of mind to provide an integrated account of children's understanding of representational and mental processes, which is crucial in their acquisition of our common...

An introduction and summary of "Phenomenology of Perception" By Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1945Phenomenology of Perception is a 1945 book about perception by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in which the author expounds his thesis of "the primacy of perception". The work established Merleau-Ponty as the pre-eminent philosopher of the body, and is considered a major statement of French exis...

An introduction and summary of "Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI" By Ethan Mollick 2024From Wharton professor and author of the popular One Useful Thing Substack newsletter Ethan Mollick comes the definitive playbook for working, learning, and living in the new age of AISomething new entered our world in November 2022 — the first general purpose AI that could pass for a human and do the...

An introduction and summary of "The Rise of Consciousness and the Development of Emotional Life" By Michael Lewis 2013 Synthesizing decades of influential research and theory, Michael Lewis demonstrates the centrality of consciousness for emotional development. At first, infants' competencies constitute innate reactions to particular physical events in the child's world. These "action patterns" ar...

An introduction and summary of "The Conscious Mind" By Zoltan Torey 2014 An account of the emergence of the mind: how the brain acquired self-awareness, functional autonomy, the ability to think, and the power of speech. How did the human mind emerge from the collection of neurons that makes up the brain? How did the brain acquire self-awareness, functional autonomy, language, and the ability to t...

An introduction and summary of "Perception, Hallucination, and Illusion" By William Fish 2009The idea of a disjunctive theory of visual experiences first found expression in J.M. Hinton's pioneering 1973 book Experiences. In the first monograph in this exciting area since then, William Fish develops a comprehensive disjunctive theory, incorporating detailed accounts of the three core kinds of visu...

An introduction and summary of "Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind" By Paul Churchland 1979 A study in the philosophy of science, proposing a strong form of the doctrine of scientific realism' and developing its implications for issues in the philosophy of mind. 'This is a very ambitious book. Beginning with the premise of scientific realism (explained clearly in the first six pages), C...

An introduction and summary of "Transparency and Self-knowledge" By Alex Byrne 2018 Alex Byrne sets out and defends a theory of self-knowledge-knowledge of one's mental states. Inspired by Gareth Evans' discussion of self-knowledge in his The Varieties of Reference, the basic idea is that one comes to know that one is in a mental state M by an inference from a worldly or environmental premise to t...

In this fascinating, provocative, passionate, funny, endlessly entertaining work, renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning author and scientist Jared Diamond, author of Gun, Germs, and Steel, explores how the extraordinary human animal, in a remarkably short time, developed the capacity to rule the world . . . and the means to irrevocably destroy it. We human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimp...

An introduction and summary of "Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders and the Rise of Social Engineering" By Malcolm Gladwell 2024 Twenty-five years after the publication of his groundbreaking first book, Malcolm Gladwell returns with a brand new volume that reframes the lessons of The Tipping Point in a startling and revealing light What does the heartbreaking fate of the chee...

An introduction and summary of "Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-person Perspective" By Dan Zahavi 2005 What is a self? Does it exist in reality or is it a mere social construct -- or is it perhaps a neurologically induced illusion? The legitimacy of the concept of the self has been questioned by both neuroscientists and philosophers in recent years. Countering this, in Subjectiv...

An introduction and summary of "Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI" By Yuval Noah Harari 2024 For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rush...

Soon after Charles Darwin formulated his theory of evolution, primate cognition became a major area of research. In this book, Michael Tomasello and Josep Call assess the current state of our knowledge about the cognitive skills of non-human primates. They integrate empirical findings on the topic from the beginning of the century to the present, placing this research in theoretical perspective. T...