Nigel Warburton

A collection of quirky, entertaining, and reader-friendly short pieces on philosophical topics that range from a theory of jerks to the ethics of ethicists.Have you ever wondered about why some people are jerks? Asked whether your driverless car should kill you so that others may live? Found a robot adorable? Considered the ethics of professional e...

From a leading philosopher of the mind comes this lucid, provocative argument that offers a radically new picture of human consciousness--panpsychism. Understanding how brains produce consciousness is one of the great scientific challenges of our age. Some philosophers argue that consciousness is something "extra," beyond the physical workings of t...

'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman', wrote Simone de Beauvoir.This is a woman who was also to become a philosopher, a novelist, an existentialist, and a feminist icon. Her novels won prestigious literary prizes and The Second Sex transformed the way we think about sex and gender. She was also the long-term lover of Jean-Paul Sartre, but ...

An innovative and insightful exploration of the passionate early life of Socrates and the influences that led him to become the first and greatest of philosophers.Socrates: the philosopher whose questioning gave birth to the foundations of Western thought, and whose execution marked the end of the Athenian Golden Age. Yet despite his pre-eminence a...

An engaging look at the aphorism, the shortest literary form, across time, languages, and culturesAphorisms--or philosophical short sayings--appear everywhere, from Confucius to Twitter, the Buddha to the Bible, Heraclitus to Nietzsche. Yet despite this ubiquity, the aphorism is the least studied literary form. What are its origins? How did it deve...

From the celebrated author of American Philosophy: A Love Story and Hiking with Nietzsche, a compelling introduction to the life-affirming philosophy of William JamesIn 1895, William James, the father of American philosophy, delivered a lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?" It was no theoretical question for James, who had contemplated suicide d...

The story of the greatest of all philosophical friendships--and how it influenced modern thoughtDavid Hume is arguably the most important philosopher ever to have written in English, but during his lifetime he was attacked as "the Great Infidel" for his religious skepticism and deemed unfit to teach the young. In contrast, Adam Smith, now hailed as...

From one of America’s most brilliant writers, a New York Times bestselling journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness.At the heart of Buddhism is a simple claim: The reason we suffer—and the reason we make other people suffer—is that we don’t see the worl...

In the tradition of How to Live and How Proust Can Change Your Life, a philosopher asks how ancient Stoicism can help us flourish todayWhenever we worry about what to eat, how to love, or simply how to be happy, we are worrying about how to lead a good life. No goal is more elusive. In How to Be a Stoic, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci offers Stoicis...

"[A] lucid and thoughtful book... In a spirit of reconciliation, Crane proposes to paint a more accurate picture of religion for his fellow unbelievers." --James Ryerson, New York Times Book ReviewContemporary debate about religion seems to be going nowhere. Atheists persist with their arguments, many plausible and some unanswerable, but these make...

Utilitarianism may well be the most influential secular ethical theory in the world today. It is also one of the most controversial. It clashes, or is widely thought to clash, with many conventional moral views, and with human rights when they are seen as inviolable. Would it, for example, be right to torture a suspected terrorist in order to preve...