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Our selection of books and associated reviews. Each cover is an affiliate link to Amazon for purchase.
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
In the current resurgence of interest in the biological basis of animal behavior and social organization, the ideas and questions pursued by Charles Darwin remain fresh and insightful. This is especially true of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin’s second most important work. This edition is a facsimile reprint of […]
The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom
The Science of Freedom completes Peter Gay’s brilliant reinterpretation of the Enlightenment of the philosophes begun in The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism. In that book, Mr. Gay analyzed the struggle in which the philosophes pitted classical pagan thought against their Christian heritage. In the present book, which can be read independently as a […]
The Fire Next Time
The Fire Next Time is a poignant, personal observation of the turbulent life for African-Americans during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Baldwin cuts right to the heart of the matter in this masterful book, suggesting that whites in America have historically operated under the illusion that they have something that black Americans must […]
The Green Hills of Earth
First published in 1951, this collection includes “Delilah and the Space-Rigger,” “Space-Jockey,” “The Long Watch,” “Gentlemen Be Seated,” “The Black Pits of Luna,” “It’s Great to Be Back,” “We Also Walk Dogs,” “Ordeal in Space,” “The Green Hills of Earth” and “Logic of Empire.”
The Impossibility of God
Most people, believers and nonbelievers alike, are unacquainted with the variety and force of arguments for the nonexistence of God. In fact, the very mention of such an argument is usually a source of amusement, if not derision. Indeed, how can there be a serious argument for the nonexistence of God, let alone for the […]
The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims
Description This book reveals how, for well over a millennium, across three continents—Asia, Africa, and Europe—non-Muslims who were vanquished by jihad wars, became forced tributaries (called dhimmi in Arabic), in lieu of being slain. Under the dhimmi religious caste system, non-Muslims were subjected to legal and financial oppression, as well as social isolation. Extensive primary […]
The Meme Machine
What is a meme? First coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 study The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation: stories, fashions, inventions, recipes, songs, and ways of plowing a field, throwing a baseball, or making a sculpture. It is […]
The Myth of Sisyphus
The Myth of Sisyphus is a philosophical essay that explores the themes first expressed in Camus’s novel The Stranger. Camus begins with an exposition of suicide to see if Tolstoy’s argument, “if God does not exist then we must kill ourselves” is sound advice. He finds that it is not and that we have a […]
The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge
No description available.
The Problem of God
The Problem of God explores God as Completely Perfect, the Unmoved Mover, the Uncaused Cause, the Creator Ex Nihilo, the Necessary Being, the Cosmic Mind, and as All-Good and Omnipotent.
The Robots of Dawn
A puzzling case of “roboticide” takes interplanetary detective Elijah Baley from Earth to the planet Aurora – the self-styled World of the Dawn, where humans and robots coexist in seemingly perfect harmony. There, the most advanced robot in the Universe – an awesomely human machine – has been murdered. Only one man on Aurora had […]
The Square
Duras’ The Square is a short novella (published with three other stories in this edition) that explores the existentialist theme of what project one should choose for one’s life; ultimately, what do we do with ourselves?
The Universe, the Eleventh Dimension, and Everything
Some books have a hard time living up to their titles, but The Universe, the Eleventh Dimension, and Everything does just fine. Physicist and writer Richard Morris seeks to explain the current state of knowledge in cosmology and subatomic physics; as if that weren’t enough, he goes on to give us his take on how […]
Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society
For those who have felt that other memetics sources were just teasers, your 20 year wait is over! Written by a scientist who independently discovered memetics when the field was less than 10% its present age, Thought Contagion explains movements ranging from Amish to Nazi, sexually transmitted beliefs to apocalyptic religion. The book earns advance […]
Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe
Suppose there is no God. This supposition implies that human life is meaningless, that there are no moral obligations and hence people can do whatever they want, and that the notions of virtue and vice, right and wrong, and good and evil have no place in the universe. Erik J. Wielenberg believes this view to […]
What Really Happened to Jesus
This book created a storm of controversy in Europe as soon as it was published. Were the resurrection appearances real physical events–or nothing more than grief-induced hallucinations? What does it mean to say, Jesus rose from the dead? Dissatisfied with what he regarded as evasive answers given by theologians and scholars about the nature of […]
Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief
Over the centuries, theories have abounded as to why human beings have a seemingly irrational attraction to God and religious experiences. In Why God Won’t Go Away authors Andrew Newberg, M.D., Eugene D’Aquili, M.D., and Vince Rause offer a startlingly simple, yet scientifically plausible opinion: humans seek God because our brains are biologically programmed to […]
Witness for the Defense
A synopsis of this book is unavailable.
2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People With the Courage to Doubt
The English speaking world rarely acknowledges the many and varied gifts that “disbelievers” have bestowed upon humanity. Churchmen generally contend that great figures in history, such as America’s founders, were conventional believers. But author James A. Haught demonstrates that this just isn’t true. In 2000 Years Of Disbelief: Famous People With The Courage To Doubt, […]
A History of God
Armstrong, a British journalist and former nun, guides us along one of the most elusive and fascinating quests of all time — the search for God. Like all beloved historians, Armstrong entertains us with deft storytelling, astounding research, and makes us feel a greater appreciation for the present because we better understand our past. Be […]
African-American Humanism: An Anthology
This book offers biographical sketches, essays, and interviews with prominent African-American humanists.
Appointment Denied: The Inquisition of Bertrand Russell
In the spring of 1940 amidst the Great Depression and the threat of world war a tempest in a teapot was brewing on the island of Manhattan, where the board of the City College of New York had just appointed the renowned philosopher Bertrand Russell to teach. with the appointment of this most celebrated of […]
Atheism, Morality, and Meaning
Despite the pluralism of contemporary American culture, the Judeo-Christian legacy still has a great deal of influence on the popular imagination. Thus it is not surprising that in this context atheism has a slightly scandalous ring, and unbelief is often associated with lack of morality and a meaningless existence. Distinguished philosopher and committed atheist Michael […]
Belief’s Own Ethics
The fundamental question of the ethics of belief is “What ought one to believe?” According to the traditional view of evidentialism, the strength of one’s beliefs should be proportionate to the evidence. Conventional ways of defending and challenging evidentialism rely on the idea that what one ought to believe is a matter of what it […]
Black Holes and Time Warps
In this masterfully written and brilliantly informed work, Dr. Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, leads readers through an elegant, always human, tapestry of interlocking themes, answering the great question: what principles control our universe and why do physicists think they know what they know? Subtitled “Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy,” and featuring an […]
Childhood’s End
The Overlords appeared suddenly over every city–intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humankind. Benevolent, they made few demands–unify Earth, eliminate poverty and end war. With little rebellion, mankind agreed, and a golden age began. But at what cost? To those who resisted the benign new alien rule, it became evident that the Overlords had an […]
Contemporary Materialism: A Reader
Contemporary Materialism presents an important collection of recent work on materialism in connection with metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and theories of value. This anthology charts the contemporary problems, positions and themes on the topic of materialism. It illuminates materialism’s complex intersection with related subjects such as cognition and psychology. By gathering a […]
Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature
The author argues that Darwinian biology supports an Aristotelian view of ethics as rooted in human nature. Defending a conception of “Darwinian natural right” based on the claim that the good is the desirable, the author documents at least twenty natural desires that are universal to all human societies because they are based in human […]
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion / Natural History of Religion
David Hume is the greatest and one of the most provocative philosophers in the English language. His sceptical accounts of the causes and consequences of religious belief, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion, are the most formidable attack upon the rationality of religious faith ever mounted by a philosopher. The Dialogues […]
Dreams of a Final Theory
Weinberg, the 1979 Nobel Prize-winner in physics, imagines the shape of a final theory and the effect its discovery would have on the human spirit. He gives a defense of reductionism–the impulse to trace explanations of natural phenomena to deeper and deeper levels–and examines the curious relevance of beauty and symmetry in scientific theories. Weinberg […]
