Showing titles in Philosophy

In 1990, Peter Larson, with his team of commercial fossil hunters from the Black Hills Institute, discovered the most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex specimen in history. He dubbed it "Sue" after the field paleontologist who first saw it sticking out of a sandstone cliff on the ranch of Maurice Williams, a Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe member in South Dakota's badlands. Because the skelton was 90% complete, its study promised to yield up priceless information on the life and habits of the T Rex.

From one of the most innovative neuroscientists at work today, an investigation into the bias toward optimism that exists on a neural level in our brains and plays a major part in determining how we live our lives. Psychologists have long been aware that most people maintain an often...

In his first book since 2002's acclaimed The Hidden Face of God, popular scientist Gerald Schroeder combines decades of scientific research and biblical study to present a groundbreaking new paradigm of how to understand God. Fans of Jack Miles' God: A Biography, Francis Collins' The Language of God, and Richard Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible will find much to contemplate in God According to God. 

This book introduces the Anthropic-Independent Reality Index, a conceptual framework designed to assess the degree to which ideas are shaped — or distorted — by evolved cognitive structures. Drawing on insights from evolutionary epistemology, cognitive neuroscience, and the philosophy of science, the index offers a non-utilitarian scale for measuring the ontological independence of a concept from the adaptive biases of the human mind.

An elegant, text-only edition of the New York Times bestseller that’s been hailed as the definitive authority on…everything by Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins, bestselling author and the world’s most celebrated evolutionary biologist, has spent his career elucidating the many wonders of...

An essential read for anyone who has encountered a crisis of confidence. Where does self-confidence come from? How does it work? Why are some people more confident than others? On the surface, these seem like simple questions – but answers can feel hard to come by when we need them most. In...

As we navigate through life we instinctively model time as having a flowing present that divides a fixed past from open future. This model develops in childhood and is deeply saturated within our language, thought, and behavior, affecting our conceptions of the universe, freedom, and the self. Yet as central as it is to our lives, physics seems to have no room for this flowing present. What Makes Time Special? demonstrates this claim in detail and then turns to two novel positive tasks.

A deeply panoramic tour of the night, from its brightest spots to the darkest skies we have left. A starry night is one of nature's most magical wonders. Yet in our artificially lit world, three-quarters of Americans' eyes never switch to night vision and most of us no longer experience true darkness. In The End of Night, Paul Bogard restores our awareness of the spectacularly primal, wildly dark night sky and how it has influenced the human experience across everything from science to art.

Abridged CDs * 8 CDs, 9 hours A revolutionary perspective on the relationship between religion and science that builds a bridge between people of all beliefs...

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Provocative but perceptive . . . You can agree or disagree with Smil—accept or doubt his ‘just the facts’ posture—but you probably shouldn’t ignore him.”—The Washington Post An essential analysis of the modern science and technology that makes...

Professor Luke O’Neill has become one of the most well-known and trusted voices of Ireland’s COVID-19 pandemic. A world-renowned immunologist, he was thrust into the spotlight as the media and public desperately grappled to make sense of a crisis that saw the country grind to a halt. In these high-octane diaries, Professor Luke reveals what life was like behind the scenes.

Before grammar, stories, or history, there was pointing. Grunting. Guesswork. And somehow, from that, we built language. This isn’t a textbook. It’s the story of how humans learned to name the world, how we stitched together meaning from noise, and how the system we invented ended up running us. From cave mouths to cuneiform, slang to syntax, sacred scripts to AI chatbots, this book tells the full arc of the original human software: invented, forgotten, rediscovered, and now automated. This Is a Rock doesn’t teach you how to talk. It shows you how we figured out that we could.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the...

Is there a pill for love? What about an "anti-love drug", to help us get over an ex? This book argues that certain psychoactive substances, including MDMA - the active ingredient in Ecstasy - may help ordinary couples work through relationship difficulties and strengthen their connection. Others may help sever an emotional connection during a breakup. These substances already exist, and they have transformative implications for how we think about love.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and author of the classic The First Three Minutes, Weinberg shares his views on some of the most fundamental and fascinating aspects of physics and the universe. But he does not seclude science behind disciplinary walls or shy away from politics, taking on what he sees as the folly of manned spaceflight, the harms of inequality, and the importance of public goods. His point of view is rationalist, realist, reductionist, and devoutly secularist.

If you could bring back one living being from the whole of the history of time, what would you choose? Comedian and former stem-cell biologist Helen Pilcher has thought about this problem - a lot. In Bring Back the King, Helen explains the cutting-edge science that makes the resurrection of extinct animals a very real possibility and highlights her choices from eras gone by, from the king of the dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex, to the King of Rock 'n' Roll, Elvis Presley.

In its 4.5 billion–year history, life on Earth has been almost erased at least half a dozen times: shattered by asteroid impacts, entombed in ice, smothered by methane, and torn apart by unfathomably powerful megavolcanoes. And we know that another global disaster is eventually headed our way...

It has become the prevalent view among sociologists, historians, and some theistic scientists that religion and science have never been in serious conflict. Some even claim that Christianity was responsible for the development of science. In a sweeping historical survey that begins with ancient Greek science and proceeds through the Renaissance and Enlightenment to contemporary advances in physics and cosmology, Stenger makes a convincing case that not only is this conclusion false, but Christianity actually held back the progress of science for 1,000 years.

In this fully revised and updated edition of his internationally best-selling book, pioneering theorist and entrepreneur Matthew Ball goes beyond the hype cycle to present a definitive account of the future of the internet. The Metaverse, according to Ball’s industry-shaping definition, is a persistent and interconnected network of 3D virtual worlds that will eventually serve as the gateway to most online experiences and underpin much of the physical world.

For millennia, humans have used one simple method to solve problems. Whether it's planting crops, building skyscrapers, developing photographs, or designing the first microchip, all creators follow the same steps to engineer progress. But this powerful method, the "engineering method", is an all but hidden process that few of us have heard of—let alone understand—but that influences every aspect of our lives.