Philosophy

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science....

Predicting society’s present addiction to technology, our challenges with data privacy, and the dramatic increase in drug overdoses and depression that have accompanied a technology-induced lack of purpose, The Unabomber’s vision of the future has become our reality....

Bill Bryson has been an enormously popular author both for his travel books and for his books on the English language. Now, this beloved comic genius turns his attention to science...

How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Find out....

The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology....

Today's "machine-learning" systems, trained by data, are so effective that we've invited them to see and hear for us - and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases.

Bringing his cosmic perspective to civilization on Earth, Neil deGrasse Tyson shines new light on the crucial fault lines of our time—war, politics, religion, truth, beauty, gender, and race—in a way that stimulates a deeper sense of unity for us all....

Richard Dawkins turns his considerable intellect on religion, denouncing its faulty logic and the suffering it causes....

For the millions of Americans who want spirituality without religion, Sam Harris’s new book is a guide to meditation as a rational spiritual practice informed by neuroscience and psychology....

Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs....

A gripping story of human transformation played out against a backdrop of technological upheaval, The Shallows will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds....

An essential analysis of the modern science and technology that makes our twenty-first century lives possible—a scientist's investigation into what science really does, and does not, accomplish....

From the world's leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other living things in the forest—a moving, deeply personal journey of discovery....

In the final book of his astonishing career, Carl Sagan brilliantly examines the burning questions of our lives, our world, and the universe around us....

Merchants of Doubt tells, with “brutal clarity” (Huffington Post), the disquieting story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades....

The New York Times best-selling author of Darwin’s Doubt presents groundbreaking scientific evidence of the existence of God, based on breakthroughs in physics, cosmology, and biology....

A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality.....

A special tenth anniversary edition of the million-copy bestseller What If? from the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd is revised and annotated with answers to important questions you never thought to ask.

Light of the Mind, Light of the World tells a daring new story about how we got here, and how we can chart a better path forward.

"Correlation does not imply causation". This mantra has been invoked by scientists for decades and has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. But today, that taboo is dead....

A captivating exploration of deep time and humanity's search for purpose from the world-renowned physicist and best-selling author of The Elegant Universe....

The authors of the best-selling Bold and The Rise of Superman explore altered states of consciousness and how they can ignite passion, fuel creativity, and accelerate problem solving....

The follow-up to Pinker's groundbreaking The Better Angels of Our Nature presents the big picture of human progress: People are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives....

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best....

In Science and the Akashic Field, philosopher and scientist Ervin Laszlo conveys the essential element of this information field in language that is accessible and clear....

Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions: What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at ninety percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last? What if everyone only had one soulmate? What would happen if the moon went away? In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults with nuclear reactor operators.

Light of the Mind, Light of the World tells a daring new story about how we got here, and how we can chart a better path forward. Surveying the history of science and faith from the astronomers of Babylon to the quantum physicists of postwar Europe and America, classicist and scholar Spencer A. Klavan argues that science itself is leading us not away from God but back to him, and to the ancient faith that places the human soul at the center of the universe.

From ventilators to brain implants, medicine has been blurring what it means to die. In a lucid description of modern neuroscientific thinking, Zeleznikow-Johnston explains that death is not the loss of breath, but of personal identity – that the core of our identities is our minds, and that our minds are encoded in the structure of our brains. On this basis, he explores how recent discoveries now offer us all the chance of preserving our minds for future revival. Whether they discovered cures or fought for justice, we are grateful to those of our ancestors who helped craft a kinder world.

How many times have we looked for something and found something else? A partner, a job, an object? The same thing often happens to scientists: they design an experiment and discover the unexpected, which usually turns out to be very important. This fascinating phenomenon is called serendipity, which takes its name from the mythical Serendip, a place from which, according to a Persian fable, three princes set off to explore the world, making chance discoveries along the way.

Twentieth century science completely revolutionized human understanding of the world, rewriting the story of the universe with exciting discoveries and theories—the big bang, the relativity of space and time, the accelerating expansion of the universe, along with increasingly refined ideas of evolution and the origin of life.