All Reviews
Reviews are listed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent review appearing first in the list.
Because We Are Bad
Lily Bailey is a British model and now an author. At the age of 23 she is young to have written a memoir, but she has lived all of her remembered life wi…
Beyond Bioethics
From the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep, to the FDA’s approval of BiDil as the first race-specific medication to ongoing discussions concerning th…
Beyond the Self
Beyond the Self is a series of dialogues between the neuroscientist Wolf Singer and the Buddhist monk and author Matthieu Ricard. Both are extre…
Democracy Struggles
Democracy Struggles covers the birth of the United States relationship with democratic ideals from 1789 to the present. It is 172 pages, 13…
How Fascism Works
Jason Stanley’s book on How Fascism Works sets out various tactics politicians use to divide people and oppress those at the lower rungs of soci…
Morals Not Knowledge
Sociology of religion expert John H. Evans has written a well-researched, multi-disciplinary text that speaks to our current historical moment. Using the…
On Trails
When hiking in the wilderness or even just in the countryside, trails are essential. It is possible to go off trail, but it is hard work if the area is o…
Psychoanalysis
Topology is a branch of mathematics that formalizes places and shifts without measurements. It became popular during the nineteenth century dealing with…
The Compassionate Connection
By its title, David Rakel’s The Compassionate Connection: The Healing Power of Empathy and Mindful Listening might seem like another b…
The Late Sigmund Freud
In the final chapter of his life, Sigmund Freud wrote a letter to his admirer Lou Andreas-Salomé in which he summarises his present and future in…
The Limits of Free Will
Russell’s book represents the culmination of over a decade of work, but for sake of brevity this review will take slightly less time to produce than it t…
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The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy
This is a review of the last three sections (tilted “Philosophy from Gaṅgeśa, Early Modernity: New Philosophy in India and Freedom &…
Read the full review of The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy
The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics
There was a time when “animal ethics” referred to a subfield of environmental ethics. Then there was a schism, with two sorts of ethicists go…
Read the full review of The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics
The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Consent
The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Consent is a collection essays on the philosophical issues surrounding consent. Like other Routledg…
Read the full review of The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Consent
The Wisdom of Frugality
The Virtue of Frugality, by Emrys Westacott, is an informed contribution to the literature devoted to understanding human nature. This literatur…
Untrue
We are familiar with the high rate of infidelity in the US, and it’s easy to understand it using the stereotype of men wanting sex and women wanting secu…
A Mirror Is for Reflection
Over the last century, experts have written on many commonalities between Buddhism and modern Western philosophy. The main area of overlap between t…
Addiction and Self-Control
This collection of 12 papers by philosophers and psychologists has important contributions to the field of addiction studies, mainly addressing the quest…
Dignity
In his introduction to Dignity. A History the editor, Remy Debes, explains that the aim of the book is “to deliver the first dedi…
Ethics in Everyday Places
In Ethics in Everyday Places, Tom Koch, a medical geographer and bioethicist, explores what he terms “the mapping of ethics.” He begins by…
Family and Other Catastrophes
Emily and David are getting married. They are in their late twenties, they live in San Francisco, and they love each other. But Emily is very anxious and…
God
Reza Aslan is an important type of thinker, putting him in a category, for example, with Steven Pinker. That is, he brings to his argument a wide range o…
How Not to Get Shot
How Not to Get Shot is a satirical look at the influence of white people’s interpretation and advice regarding how Blacks can protect thems…
How to Stop Feeling Like Shit
This book was published by Seal Press, which was founded in the 1970s and used to be explicitly feminist. The publishing industry has had a great deal of…
Hume’s True Scepticism
Donald C. Ainslie’s (University of Toronto, Professor of Philosophy) scholarly work, Hume’s True Scepticism (Oxford, 2015), presents a…