Here are 100 books that Justice for Animals fans have personally recommended if you like
Justice for Animals.
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I boast a two-decade-long career in the software industry. Over the years, I have diligently honed my programming skills across a multitude of languages, including JavaScript, C++, Java, Ruby, and Clojure. Throughout my career, I have taken on various management roles, from Team Leader to VP of Engineering. No matter the role, the thing I have enjoyed the most is to make complex topics easy to understand.
This book profoundly influenced my thinking process, combining the worlds of mathematics, art, and music. I was captivated by how the book explores the deep connections between Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Escher’s art, and Bach’s art of counterpoint.
The book’s puzzles and thought experiments pushed me to think more abstractly and critically. Despite being dense, I found it incredibly rewarding and eye-opening. I recommend this book to anyone interested in logic, creativity, and the nature of human thought. It’s a masterpiece!
Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of maps" or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out of the formal chemical substrate of the cell, if consciousness can emerge out of a formal system of firing neurons, then so too will computers attain human intelligence. Goedel, Escher, Bach is a wonderful exploration of fascinating ideas at the heart of cognitive science: meaning, reduction, recursion, and much more.
I’ve always thought of myself as someone who “cares about animals,” but I came to see that I was thinking mainly about mammals and birds and overlooking the vast majority of animal life: fishes and invertebrates. I’m a philosophy professor at the London School of Economics, and for almost 10 years now, I’ve also been part of an emerging international community of “animal sentience” researchers—researchers dedicated to investigating the feelings of animals scientifically. In 2021, a team led by me advised the UK government to protect octopuses, crabs, and lobsters—and the government changed the law in response. But there is a lot more we need to change.
I underestimated fish for a long time. I’ve been amazed by recent evidence that some of them will seemingly recognize themselves in mirrors, make logical inferences, or hunt in teams with octopuses.
I found Balcombe’s book an absorbing tour through this new picture of fish: creatures equipped with minds that help them solve the challenges of their underwater worlds.
Endorsed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama - 'Balcombe vividly shows that fish have feelings and deserve consideration and protection like other sentient beings'
What's the truth behind the old adage that goldfish have a three-second memory? Do fishes think? Can they recognize the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water? Myth-busting biologist and animal behaviour expert Jonathan Balcombe takes us under the sea, through streams and estuaries to the other side of…
I’ve always thought of myself as someone who “cares about animals,” but I came to see that I was thinking mainly about mammals and birds and overlooking the vast majority of animal life: fishes and invertebrates. I’m a philosophy professor at the London School of Economics, and for almost 10 years now, I’ve also been part of an emerging international community of “animal sentience” researchers—researchers dedicated to investigating the feelings of animals scientifically. In 2021, a team led by me advised the UK government to protect octopuses, crabs, and lobsters—and the government changed the law in response. But there is a lot more we need to change.
I love the way the book takes you on a personal journey—full of close-up, underwater encounters with octopuses and cuttlefish—that led Godfrey-Smith to a profound revelation: evolution has created minds not just once but over and over again.
When we think about “animal minds,” we often think about cats, dogs, chimpanzees, and dolphins… but these are all mammals—only one tiny twig on the tree of life. Minds are everywhere, including in invertebrate animals that are very different from us.
'Brilliant' Guardian
'Fascinating and often delightful' The Times
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE
What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?
In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself - a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared.
Tracking the mind's fitful development from unruly clumps of seaborne cells to…
I’ve always thought of myself as someone who “cares about animals,” but I came to see that I was thinking mainly about mammals and birds and overlooking the vast majority of animal life: fishes and invertebrates. I’m a philosophy professor at the London School of Economics, and for almost 10 years now, I’ve also been part of an emerging international community of “animal sentience” researchers—researchers dedicated to investigating the feelings of animals scientifically. In 2021, a team led by me advised the UK government to protect octopuses, crabs, and lobsters—and the government changed the law in response. But there is a lot more we need to change.
Bees are sometimes dismissed as robot-like “reflex machines” that feel nothing—but they learn from each other, they are creative, they have “cultures” of a kind, they even “play” with little balls, and they plausibly feel pain.
Chittka’s amazing work over many decades has persuaded me that insects probably have feelings—feelings very different from our own, no doubt, but feelings that matter to them and should matter to us.
A rich and surprising exploration of the intelligence of bees
Most of us are aware of the hive mind-the power of bees as an amazing collective. But do we know how uniquely intelligent bees are as individuals? In The Mind of a Bee, Lars Chittka draws from decades of research, including his own pioneering work, to argue that bees have remarkable cognitive abilities. He shows that they are profoundly smart, have distinct personalities, can recognize flowers and human faces, exhibit basic emotions, count, use simple tools, solve problems, and learn by observing others. They may even possess consciousness.
I embarked on this arduous journey of making sense of the I in AI while working as an Assistant Professor of Finance, which, however, began to look increasingly uninteresting and oppressive. With this innovative endeavor, I return home to philosophy. Apart from being passionate about AI in academia, I’m a tech entrepreneur by heart with three software start-ups in Germany, Switzerland, and Malawi under my belt. Moreover, I served as Deputy Director of and Head of AI at the Swiss Fintech Innovation Lab in Zurich, as Director of Startup Grind Geneva, and I continue to fulfill my role as start-up coach/judge and mentor in various startup programs.
This book is as close as you can get to making sense of intelligence in a way that enriches our understanding of AI. And it opens the door with a bang: Starting from human intelligence, it is highlighted that how a brain made of simple cells creates intelligence remains a mystery.
I appreciate the strength of the book which does not surrender in front of the immense obstacle of figuring out the most complex system in the known universe, our brain, but it moves on and eloquently expresses the ultimate goal of thousands of scientists: to understand the mechanics of the human mind.
This proposed theory of intelligence allowed me to lay the foundation of comparing human and machine intelligence in a meaningful manner.
For all we hear of neuroscience's great advances, the field has generated more questions than answers. We know that the brain combines sensory input from all over your body into a single perception, but not how. We think brains "compute" in some sense, but we can't say what those computations are. We believe that the brain is organized as a hierarchy, with different pieces all working collaboratively to make a single model of the world. But we can explain neither how those pieces are differentiated, nor how they collaborate.
Neuroscientist and computer engineer Jeff Hawkins argues that it's so hard…
I spent over forty years developing complex, software-intensive systems, and the Association of Computing Machinery honored me with the title of distinguished engineer. AI and robotics have been my main technical focus for the last 5 years. For the last couple of years, I have been binge-watching videos on advances in AI and robotics and binge-reading books on the topic. I am also a multi-award-winning author of science fiction novels and short stories. Most of the short stories in my coming book involve AI and robots.
As an author of science fiction, I loved this book because each chapter included a brief science fiction short story illustrating the chapter’s subject. This is another very-readable book for non-technical people interested in what the future of AI will be like.
The book estimates when various ramifications of AI will occur, but the field is advancing at an accelerating rate, so the dates need to be taken with a grain of salt.
A WALL STREET JOURNAL, WASHINGTON POST, AND FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
In this ground-breaking blend of imaginative storytelling and scientific forecasting, a pioneering AI expert and a leading writer of speculative fiction join forces to answer an imperative question: How will artificial intelligence change our world within twenty years?
AI will be the defining development of the twenty-first century. Within two decades, aspects of daily human life will be unrecognizable. AI will generate unprecedented wealth, revolutionize medicine and education through human-machine symbiosis, and create brand new forms of communication and entertainment. In liberating us from routine work,…
I embarked on this arduous journey of making sense of the I in AI while working as an Assistant Professor of Finance, which, however, began to look increasingly uninteresting and oppressive. With this innovative endeavor, I return home to philosophy. Apart from being passionate about AI in academia, I’m a tech entrepreneur by heart with three software start-ups in Germany, Switzerland, and Malawi under my belt. Moreover, I served as Deputy Director of and Head of AI at the Swiss Fintech Innovation Lab in Zurich, as Director of Startup Grind Geneva, and I continue to fulfill my role as start-up coach/judge and mentor in various startup programs.
If there were only five things I could bring to an island to live on, Terrel Miedaner’s deeply thought-provoking fiction book The Soul of Anna Klane would be among those five items.
His book is on a question which is more fundamental than the one on the I in AI. The Soul of Anna Klane ponders the many sides of the question of what constitutes life and consciousness: the scientific, the atheistic, and the religious with due respect.
It showed me how little we know about the brain, mind, and soul. And if we don’t understand the center of human intelligence, how can we make sense of the I in AI? Undoubtedly one of the best books I have ever read. For this reason, it would be on an island where I only possess five things so that I’m not distracted from reading it again and again. The effect would…
She's the golden darling of a wealthy genius. A child-prodigy. Yogi adept. And dying of brain tumor. She wants to heal herself, but the courts and the doctors cry "no" - and enter her brain with an incredible million-dollar probe that cures her body, while it splits her soul -- and sends it hurtling into a psychic hell...
Only Anatol Klane knows of his daughter's spirit-death. Now he must take her life... and convince an astonished world that he has set her free...
I’ve always thought of myself as someone who “cares about animals,” but I came to see that I was thinking mainly about mammals and birds and overlooking the vast majority of animal life: fishes and invertebrates. I’m a philosophy professor at the London School of Economics, and for almost 10 years now, I’ve also been part of an emerging international community of “animal sentience” researchers—researchers dedicated to investigating the feelings of animals scientifically. In 2021, a team led by me advised the UK government to protect octopuses, crabs, and lobsters—and the government changed the law in response. But there is a lot more we need to change.
Are things getting better or worse for farmed animals? I greatly appreciate the honesty of Peter Singer’s update to his 1975 classic. His dream was to inspire a movement that would end cruel “factory farming” by boycotting its products. And he did inspire a movement—but the industry has only got bigger, more intensive, more brutal, more ruthless.
It’s wrecking our environment, our health, and other animals’ lives all at once. The enemy was tougher to beat than he thought. Where do we go from here if we care about other animals? I think this book is a really powerful place to start.
THE UPDATED CLASSIC OF THE ANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, NOW WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY YUVAL NOAH HARARI
“The indispensable foundational text for the movement, new and updated with the honesty and philosophical depth characteristic of all of Singer’s work.” —J.M. Coetzee, author of The Lives of Animals and Disgrace
“Peter Singer may be the most controversial philosopher alive; he is certainly among the most influential.”—The New Yorker
Few books maintain their relevance – and have remained continuously in print – nearly 50 years after they were first published. Animal Liberation, one of TIME’s “All-TIME 100 Best Non-Fiction Books” is one such…
Growing up on a small family farm in the Midwest, I was immersed in a world of animals: pets, free-ranging wildlife, and “food” animals (pigs and cows). As an adult and academic professional, I longed for a way to bridge my vocation (teaching college students and writing about literature) and my deep commitment to the care and stewardship of all beings. These books have opened my eyes to the lived experiences of farmed animals and to the mythologies we use to hide these experiences from ourselves and, especially, our children. I hope you find them as moving and insightful as I do!
Scully's tour de force investigates the state of humanity's relationship with animals through a Scriptural lens, exploring the multifaceted concept of "dominion" from the Biblical creation story as he takes on industrial farmers, trophy hunters, and others who gain fame and fortune on the backs of suffering nonhuman creatures.
I continue to be moved by the author's courage in using his voice as a well-known Republican speechwriter to dismantle the notion that compassion for animals is a "liberal" cause. His immersive research into the full range of manifestations of animal cruelty makes this one of the most shocking and compelling texts I have read on the subject of our treatment of other beings.
In the Book of Genesis, God grants mankind "dominion" over other animals. But with such power comes an important responsibility: To treat them with kindness. Part investigative journalism and part call to action, DOMINION explores how we have disregarded and even perverted that duty towards animals. Building a case that avoids the extremes of more radical animal rights advocates, Matthew Scully argues against the popular and "scientifically proven" notions that animals cannot feel pain, experience no emotions and are not conscious of their own lives. Moving from that biblical injunction to a safari convention and a hellish factory farm, and…
Ever since childhood, I have been fascinated by African wildlife. When I worked in Africa as a journalist, I always found ways to view wildlife and to meet those who lived alongside dangerous and charismatic animals and those who conserved them. When I moved into academia, I started researching human-wildlife relations in detail, examining sustainable conservation approaches and how to control the illegal wildlife trade. It is a passion, almost an obsession, and as I finish researching and writing one book, another is already fixed in my brain.
I love the academic rigor, clear writing, and balanced approach to one of the most controversial topics in wildlife conservation. I have written about hunting in relation to elephants, lions, and rhinos and found this book to be comprehensive in its coverage of the issue and its wider linkages.
Does hunting have a value–if so, what is the value, and to whom does it accrue? Do utilitarian arguments around the idea of the greatest good for the greatest number work to justify the sport/trophy hunting of animals? Can the shooting of a rhino, elephant, lion, buffalo, etc, be ethical if it contributes to conserving habitat and a wide range of species? These are all topics I have wrestled with and continue to think deeply about as I write about wildlife conservation.
This book gets to the heart of trophy hunting, unpacking and explaining its multiple facets and controversies, and exploring why it divides environmentalists, the hunting community, and the public. Bichel and Hart provide the first interdisciplinary and comprehensive approach to the study of trophy hunting, investigating the history of trophy hunting, and delving into the background, identity and motivation of trophy hunters. They also explore the role of social media and anthropomorphism in shaping trophy hunting discourse, as well as the viability of trophy hunting as a wildlife management tool, the ideals of fair chase and sportsmanship, and what hunting…
