I was lucky enough to be sent a pre-publication copy of the book by the publisher. I loved it. It is part autobiography, part intellectual history, by one of the great minds of the twentieth/twenty-first century.
It tells the story of Dennett’s life (so far) and of his own intellectual journey. Personally, his early work was instrumental in luring me away from the traditional sort of arm-chair philosophy I had been trained in. What I hadn’t realized is quite what a polymath he is: musician, sculptor, philosopher, as well as a cognitive scientist.
Daniel C. Dennett, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist, has spent his career considering the thorniest, most fundamental mysteries of the mind. Do we have free will? What is consciousness and how did it come about? What distinguishes human minds from the minds of animals? Dennett's answers have profoundly shaped our age of philosophical thought. In I've Been Thinking, he reflects on his amazing career and lifelong scientific fascinations.
Dennett's relentless curiosity has taken him from a childhood in Beirut and the classrooms of Harvard, Oxford, and Tufts, to "Cognitive Cruises" on sailboats and the fields and orchards of Maine, and…
I read a lot of detective fiction, and this turned out to be one of my favorites.
It centers around a retired Chicago policeman who is trying to rebuild his life (and the house he has bought) deep in the Irish countryside, where he gets drawn into the mysterious disappearance of a young man. The story itself is gripping, the central characters are engaging, and the descriptions of the Irish hedgerows and fields (and rain) are lush and evocative. (Almost good enough to make me want to go back there.)
'Terrific - terrifying, amazing' STEPHEN KING 'Completely, indescribably magnificent' MARIAN KEYES -----
A DISAPPEARANCE. A SMALL TOWN. A QUESTION THAT NEEDS ANSWERING...
Cal Hooper thought a fixer-upper in a remote Irish village would be the perfect escape. After twenty-five years in the Chicago police force, and a bruising divorce, he just wants to build a new life in a pretty spot with a good pub where nothing much happens.
But then a local kid comes looking for his help. His brother has gone missing, and no one, least of all the police, seems to care. Cal wants nothing to do…
This is a fascinating review of research (much of it conducted by Bonanno himself) into the factors that influence whether someone will “bounce back” from tragedy in relatively short order or become crushed by it.
Illuminated with lots of individual case-histories, Bonanno shows how a “flexibility mindset,” incorporating an optimistic outlook, confidence in one’s own ability to cope with the situation, and a challenge orientation (“this is something to be overcome”) is protective against PTSD; and also how such a mindset can be encouraged and developed.
After 9/11, thousands of mental health professionals from across the country assembled in Manhattan to help handle the almost certain avalanche of traumatized New Yorkers. Curiously, it never came. While plenty of people did seek mental health counseling after 9/11, the numbers were nowhere near expected.
As renowned psychologist George Bonanno argues, psychiatrists failed to predict the response to 9/11 because our model of trauma is wrong. Psychiatrists only study clinically traumatized people, and over time this skewed sample has led us to believe that trauma was the natural response to stress. But what about all the people who never…
Motivational hedonism (often called “psychological hedonism”) claims that everything that people do is done in pursuit of pleasure (in the widest sense) and to avoid pain and displeasure (again, in the widest sense). Although perennially attractive, many philosophers and experimental psychologists have claimed to refute it. Human Motives shows how decision-science and the recent science of affect can be used to construct a form of motivational hedonism that evades all previous critiques. I argue, however, that rather than being intrinsic properties of experience (as hedonism requires), pleasure and displeasure are really perception-like representations of the goodness or badness of the objects in question. The result is pluralism about human motivation, making room for genuine altruism.
