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Title:
Uncommon sense : the strangest ideas from the smartest philosophers / Andrew Pessin.
Author:
Pessin, Andrew, 1962-
Publication Information:
Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, c2012.
Call Number:
190.223 P4391U
Abstract:
"In Uncommon Sense, Andrew Pessin leads us on an entertaining tour of philosophy, explaining the pivotal moments when the greatest minds solved some of the knottiest conundrums--by asserting some very strange things. But the great philosophers don't merely make unusual claims, they offer powerful arguments for those claims that you can't easily dismiss. And these arguments suggest that the world is much stranger than you could have imagined: You neither will, nor won't, do certain things in the future, like wear your blue shirt tomorrow ; But your blue shirt isn't really blue, because colors don't exist in physical objects; they're only in your mind ; Time is an illusion ; Your thoughts are not inside your head ; Everything you believe about morality is false ; Animals don't have minds ; There is no physical world at all. In eighteen lively, intelligent chapters, spanning the ancient Greeks and contemporary thinkers, Pessin examines the most unusual ideas, how they have influenced the course of Western thought, and why, despite being so odd, they just might be correct. Here is popular philosophy at its finest, sure to entertain as it enlightens."--Publisher's website.
ISBN:
9781442216082
Physical Description:
ix, 223 p. ; 24 cm.
Contents:
Plato / More Than What Meets the Eye -- Aristotle / Neither You Will Nor You Won't -- Augustine / Forced to Be Free -- Anselm / God is Not Just a Good Idea -- Maimonides / Keeps Going, and Going, and Going...Or Not? -- Thomas Aquinas / God Has Not Been on Vacation Since the Original Creation -- René Descartes / "A Monstrous Thesis" -- John Locke / True Colors -- Nicolas Malebranche / On Honoring Leeks and Vegetables -- G. W. Leibniz / Synchronicity -- George Berkeley / To Be Is to Perceive, or Be Perceived -- David Hume / Stercus Accidit -- Friedrich Nietzsche / Philosopher, Psychologist--Antichrist? -- John McTaggart / Time Does Not Fly Even When You're Having Fun -- Ludwig Wittgenstein / The Voice In My Head is Speaking Nonsense -- Hilary Putnam / Thinking Outside the (Cranial) Box -- David Lewis / The Incredulous Stare -- Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers / Mind and Matter, Together Again at Last (Sort of)!.
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