Branches of Philosophy Podcast

An introduction and summary of "The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us about the Nature of Human Thought" By Peter Carruthers 2015 The Centered Mind offers a new view of the nature and causal determinants of both reflective thinking and, more generally, the stream of consciousness. Peter Carruthers argues that conscious thought is always sensory-based, relying on the resour...

Shaun Gallagher offers an account of psychopathologies as disorders of the self. The Self and its Disorders develops an interdisciplinary approach to an 'integrative' perspective in psychiatry. In contrast to some integrative approaches that focus on narrow brain-based conceptions, or on symptomology, this book takes its bearings from embodied and enactive conceptions of human experience....

An introduction and summary of "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" By Nick Bostrom 2014 The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains. If machine brains one day come to surpass hum...

An introduction and summary of "The Evolution of Consciousness: Representing the Present Moment" By Paula Droege 2022 The Evolution of Consciousness brings together interdisciplinary insights from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and cognitive science to explain consciousness in terms of the biological function that grounds it in the physical world. Drawing on the novel analogy of a...

An introduction and summary of "Self and World" By Quassim Cassam 1997 Self and World is an exploration of the nature of self-awareness. Quassim Cassam challenges the widespread and influential view that we cannot be introspectively aware of ourselves as objects in the world. In opposition to the views of many empiricist and idealist philosophers, including Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein,...

An introduction and summary of "On the Genealogy of Morality" By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1887 On The Genealogy of Morals is made up of three essays, all of which question and critique the value of our moral judgments based on a genealogical method whereby Nietzsche examines the origins and meanings of our different moral concepts. The first essay, "'Good and Evil,' '...

An introduction and summary of "The Evolution of Agency Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans" By Michael Tomasello 2022 A leading developmental psychologist proposes an evolutionary pathway to human psychological agency. Nature cannot build organisms biologically prepared for every contingency they might possibly encounter. Instead, Nature builds some organisms to function as f...

An introduction and summary of "Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology" By Jean-Paul Sartre 1943 First published in French in 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant is one of the greatest philosophical works of the twentieth century. In it, Sartre offers nothing less than a brilliant and radical account of the human condition. The English philosopher and noveli...

An introduction and summary of "Principles of Synthetic Intelligence PSI: An Architecture of Motivated Cognition" By Joscha Bach 2009 From the Foreword:"In this book Joscha Bach introduces Dietrich Dorner's PSI architecture and Joscha's implementation of the MicroPSI architecture. These architectures and their implementation have several lessons for other architectures and m...

An introduction and summary of "Perception First Form of Mind" By Tyler Burge 2022 In Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge develops an understanding of the most primitive type of representational mind: perception. Focusing on its form, function, and underlying capacities, as indicated in the sciences of perception, Burge provides an account of the representational content and form...

An introduction and summary of "Consciousness and the Social Brain" By Michael S. A. Graziano 2013 What is consciousness and how can a brain, a mere collection of neurons, create it? In Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano lays out an audacious new theory to account for the deepest mystery of them all. The human brain has evolved a complex circuit...

An introduction and summary of "Difference and Repetition" By Gilles Deleuze 1968 Difference and Repetition was Deleuze's principal thesis for the Doctorat D'Etat alongside his secondary, historical thesis, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. The work attempts a critique of representation. In the book, Deleuze develops concepts of difference in itself and repetition for itself,...

An introduction and summary of "Folk Physics for Apes: The Chimpanzee's Theory of how the World Works" By Daniel J. Povinelli 2000 From an early age, humans know a surprising amount about basic physical principles, such as gravity, force, mass, and shape. We can see this in the way that young children play, and manipulate objects around them. The same behavior has long been observed...

An introduction and summary of "The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes" By Donald Hoffman 2022 Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. From examining why fashion designers c...

An introduction and summary of "Being No One The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity" By Thomas Metzinger 2004 According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a &qu...

An introduction and summary of "Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy" By Manuel DeLanda 2002 Manuel DeLanda's Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy rapidly established itself as a landmark text in contemporary continental thought. DeLanda here draws on the realist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to the domain of philosophy of science. As well as contemporary philosophical insight...

An introduction and summary of "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" By Ludwig Wittgenstein 1921 The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (widely abbreviated and cited as TLP) is the only book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that was published during his lifetime. The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality, and t...

An introduction and summary of "Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters" By Steven Pinker 2021 In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding - and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that discovered vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, quack cures and conspiracy...

An introduction and summary of "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception" By James J. Gibson 1979 This book, first published in 1979, is about how we see: the environment around us (its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures); where we are in the environment; whether or not we are moving and, if we are, where we are going; what things are good for; how to do things (to...

An introduction and summary to "Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory" By Uriah Kriegel 2009 Some mental events are conscious, some are unconscious. What is the difference between the two? Uriah Kriegel offers the following answer: whatever else they may represent, conscious mental states always represent themselves (whereas unconscious ones do not, at least not in the...

An introduction and summary of "Pre-reflective Consciousness Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind" Edited by Sofia Miguens, Gerhard Preyer, Clara Bravo Morando 2015 Pre-reflective Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind delves into the relationship between the current analytical debates on consciousness and the debates that took place within continental philosophy...

An introduction and summary of "The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition" By David Carr 1999 Much effort in recent philosophy has been devoted to attacking the metaphysics of the subject. Identified largely with French post-structuralist thought, yet stemming primarily from the influential work of the later Heidegger, this attack has taken the form of a sweep...

An introduction and summary of "A Natural History of Human Thinking" By Michael Tomasello · 2014 Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument...

An introduction and summary of "Transformer The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death" By Nick Lane · 2022 For decades, biology has been dominated by information - the power of genes. Yet there is no difference in information content between a living cell and one that died a moment ago. A better question goes back to the formative years of biology: what processes animate cells and set them ap...

An introduction and summary of "Thinking, Fast and Slow" By Daniel Kahneman · 2011 Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology challenging the rational model of judgment and decision making, is one of the world's most important thinkers. His ideas have had a profound impact on many fields-including business, medicine, and poli...