Conversations About Philosophy, Volume 1

Conversations About Philosophy, Volume 1, includes the following 5 wide-ranging Ideas Roadshow Conversations featuring leading researchers. This collection includes a detailed preface highlighting the connections between the different books. Each book is broken into chapters with a detailed introduction and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter:

1.Plato’s Heaven: A User’s Guide – A Conversation with James Robert Brown, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. This conversation addresses a central theme in current philosophy: Platonism vs. Naturalism and provides accounts of both approaches to mathematics. The Platonist-Naturalist debate over mathematics is explored in a comprehensive fashion and also sheds light on non-mathematical aspects of a dispute that is central to contemporary philosophy. This book also surveys new avenues of research into the epistemology of thought experiments.

2.Philosophy of Brain – A Conversation with neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland, UC San Diego. During this comprehensive conversation Patricia Churchland discusses her extensive research in the fields of philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy of the mind and neuroethics. Further topics include how the brain works, how we are able to represent the external world of objects and our inner world of thoughts, self and consciousness.

3.Defined By Relationship is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Charles Foster, who is a writer, traveller, veterinarian, barrister, philosopher and Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. This in-depth conversation provides a detailed exploration of several of his books in many different fields with a particular focus on Human Dignity in Bioethics and Law and the New York Times Bestseller Being a Beast.

4. Free Will: An Investigation – A Conversation with Alfred Mele, the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. This conversation examines free will and the different notions of free will that exist, the connections of free will with developments in neuroscience, social psychology and public opinion polls and Alfred Mele’s key concern about how current and future insights might be directly applied to improve our world.

5. Appreciating Analytic Philosophy – A Conversation with Scott Soames, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at University of Southern California. Scott Soames is specialized in the philosophy of language and the history of analytic philosophy. This detailed conversation provides a thoughtful introduction to analytic philosophy, including some examples of contemporary relevance to a wide range of other fields.