Category Philosophy books

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Humanish by Justin Gregg review – how much of a person is your pet?

From prosthetic testicles for dogs to sociable reptiles, a behavioural scientist explains what we get wrong – and right – about animal minds

In the 1970s a former Soviet naval officer named Igor Charkovsky popularised a concept which came to be known as dolphin-assisted birth. Likely inspired by New Age theories, he urged expectant mothers to dip in the ice-cold water of the Black Sea, commune with dolphins, and give birth underwater. In the “very near future,” he claimed, “a newborn child would be able to live in the ocean with a pod of dolphins and feed on dolphin milk”.

The oddest thing about Charkovsky was not so much his theory, but its remarkable resilience within both Soviet and western culture, as Justin Gregg sets out in his illuminating and lively new book. Gregg’s work is both a dissection and an ode to the irresistible allure of anthropomorphism, our tendency to apply human characteristics to non-humans, whether animals, objects, AI, or God. An expert on animal cognition who also teaches improv, Gregg deftly guides us through our alternately charming, destructive and wrong-headed fantasies about everything from marine mammals to our iPhones.

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The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog review – profound, or just a prank?

The director’s provocative seventh book takes in toupees, AI and a pig in a sewer. Should we take him seriously?

At 83, Werner Herzog is a living legend who can and does do precisely what he wants. Like the strange, enchanting films for which he is best known, Herzog’s seventh book defies the usual conventions of structure, narrative arc and the delineation of fact from fiction, even as it addresses the very subject of truth.

This slim volume sets out Herzog’s views on truth in a world where technologically enhanced falsehoods proliferate. These appear to be an elaboration of Herzog’s Minnesota Declaration, the 12 statements he made in 1999 at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis. Much like the declaration, The Future of Truth contains strong, gnomic opinions which include despising cinéma vérité because it obscures more than it illuminates, as well as a plethora of surprising sentences such as “rather die than wear a toupee”.

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How to live a good life in difficult times: Yuval Noah Harari, Rory Stewart and Maria Ressa in conversation

From superintelligent AI to the climate and democracy, three leading thinkers discuss how to navigate the future

What happens when an internationally bestselling historian, a Nobel peace prize-winning journalist and a former politician get together to discuss the state of the world, and where we’re heading? Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli medieval and military historian best known for his panoramic surveys of human history, including Sapiens, Homo Deus and, most recently, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Maria Ressa, joint winner of the Nobel peace prize, is a Filipino and American journalist who co-founded the news website Rappler. And Rory Stewart is a British academic and former Conservative MP, writer and co-host of The Rest Is Politics podcast. Their conversation ranged over the rise of AI, the crisis in democracy and the prospect of a Trump-Putin wedding, but began by considering a question central to all of their work: how to live a good life in an increasingly fragmented and fragile world?

YNH People have been arguing about this for thousands of years. The main contribution of modern liberalism and democracy was to try to agree to disagree; that different people can have very different concepts of what a good life is, and they can still live together in the same society, agreeing on some very basic rules of conduct. And the challenge was always that people who think they have the absolute answer to what is a good life try to impose it on others, partly because, unfortunately for many ideologies, an inherent part of the good life is attempting to make everybody live it. And even more unfortunately, in many cases, it seems that it is easier to impose it on others than to do it ourselves. If we take the original crusade in medieval Christian Europe, you have all these people who can’t live a Christian life of modesty and compassion and love your neighbour, but they are able to travel thousands of kilometres to kill people and try to force them to live according to these principles. And what we are witnessing in the world right now is more of the same.

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When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows by Steven Pinker review – communication breakdown

Unwritten rules, social contracts, shared logic – and what happens when they fall apart

Knots, RD Laing’s 1970 book, was a collection of short dialogues illustrating the tangle of projection and misreading that characterises human encounters. The radical psychiatrist made clear the influence of unacknowledged baggage, the conscious or unconscious laying of traps for the other speaker, and helped us see more clearly the pitfalls of even our most routine conversations. In an era like ours, where global relations can contain as much psychodrama as private ones, Laing’s Zen-like exchanges have more than just individual pertinence.

The contrast between Laing’s absurdist, tragicomic sensibility and Steven Pinker’s crisp reasonableness is obvious. But there is more common ground than we might at first think. Pinker illustrates his arguments with piquant little dialogues, some of them worthy of Laing (“You hang up first”. “No, you hang up first.” “Okay.” “She hung up on me!”); this book is as lively an exposition of cognitive science as you are likely to find.

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On Drugs by Justin Smith-Ruiu review – a philosopher’s guide to psychedelics

What if Descartes had melted his brain on acid? Find out in this mind-expanding exploration of drugs and formal philosophy

This book is a trip. Among other things, it copiously details all the drugs that the US-born professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité has ingested. They include psilocybin, LSD, cannabis; quetiapine and Xanax (for anxiety); venlafaxine, Prozac, Lexapro and tricyclics (antidepressants); caffeine (“I have drunk coffee every single day without fail since September 13, 1990”); and, at least for him, the always disappointing alcohol.

The really trippy thing, though, is not so much Justin Smith-Ruiu’s descriptions of his drug experiences, but the fact that they’re written by a tough-minded analytic philosopher, one as familiar with AJ Ayer’s Foundations of Empirical Knowledge as Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-inspired The Doors of Perception. Moreover, they’re presented with the aim of melting the minds of his philosophical peers and the rest of us by suggesting that psychedelics dissolve our selves and make us part of cosmic consciousness, thereby rendering us free in the way the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza defined it (paraphrased by Smith-Ruiu as “an agreeable acquiescence in the way one’s own body is moving in the necessary order of things”).

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From a new Thomas Pynchon novel to a memoir by Margaret Atwood: the biggest books of the autumn

Essays from Zadie Smith; Wiki founder Jimmy Wales on how to save the internet; a future-set novel by Ian McEwan; a new case for the Slow Horses - plus memoirs from Kamala Harris and Paul McCartney… all among this season’s highlights

Helm by Sarah Hall
Faber, out now
Hall is best known for her glittering short stories: this is the novel she’s been working on for two decades. Set in Cumbria’s Eden valley, it tells the story of the Helm – the only wind in the UK to be given a name – from its creation at the dawn of time up to the current degradation of the climate. It’s a huge, millennia-spanning achievement, spotlighting characters from neolithic shamans to Victorian meteorologists to present-day pilots.

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A Short History of Stupidity by Stuart Jeffries review – comfortably dumb?

From Shakespeare’s fools to Donald Trump, this exhilarating read considers stupidity in its many forms

Stupidity, no question, can be just as rich and subtle as its opposite. Three and a half decades on, I still sometimes meditate on what a school friend of mine said in a here’s-a-profound-thought tone of voice: “I’d rather be stupid than happy”.

In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage, though. First: he has an excellently snappy title but it’s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense. The quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there’s lots of it. Could you write a history of happiness, or bad luck, or knees? You’d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity: a short history, in other words, of “stupidity” – how successive societies and thinkers have defined and responded to reason’s derr-brained secret sharer. As an intellectual historian who has written smart and chewy popular books about the Frankfurt School (Grand Hotel Abyss) and postmodernism (Everything, All the Time, Everywhere), he certainly has the chops for it.

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Transcendence for Beginners by Clare Carlisle review – a philosopher’s guide to enlightenment

Can we experience something bigger than ourselves in the midst of busy, humdrum lives?

Some philosophers find inspiration in mountains, such as Nietzsche, and some in caves, like Plato. Clare Carlisle found hers in a cave halfway up a mountain.

It happened 20 years ago: walking on a Himalayan path, she met a holy man who lived in a cave nearby. Not your stereotypical sadhu, he didn’t have matted hair and wasn’t semi-naked but wore nice trousers and an acrylic pullover. Nor did he have any obvious wisdom to impart; at the last of their three meetings, he and Carlisle mainly got stoned and giggled about the chicken-like patterns on a cushion she had brought him as a gift. Yet, after leaving, she felt a “yearning” for something that they had shared: a sense that there could be a more “noble” way of living, or that we could experience “transcendence”, a higher perspective on life.

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Don’t like joining in? Why it could be your superpower

Some people spend their lives feeling out of place in groups – but it comes with unique opportunities

‘I can’t explain it. He is a sweetheart. A beautiful boy inside and out, and so brilliant.” This was how a session with N, a longtime patient of mine, began some years ago. Her son, A, was a young teenager, and in spite of coming from a warm, loving family with attentive parents, he had started having social  difficulties.

He wasn’t being bullied or left out at school. He wasn’t depressed, moody or anxious. In fact, he was popular, well liked and constantly being invited to parties, to basketball games, and to hang out with groups of young people. The problem was, he turned all these invitations down, and N couldn’t understand why.

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