Prepublication sample of my next book

[Sue]

My publisher just released a sample from my next book; I wanted to share it with you all here! Go here to read or download the sample.

It's a kind of philosophy-based "book of questions," designed to promote philosophical thought, writing, argument, and discussion either as a personal journaling project or in book group or Socrates Café contexts. As you can see in the book sample, I'm asking readers to do serious philosophical work, and the content I'm providing is not watered down (although it is, hopefully, accessible!). So this is real, serious philosophy, presented in a manner that asks the reader to do philosophy, not just read tidbits of "the wisdom of the ages" or whatever.

If it looks interesting to you, please consider pre-ordering. It'll be carried nationwide by bookstores like Barnes & Noble, and possibly other stores like Target and BJ's, but apparently retailers use Amazon pre-orders to figure out how much to promote the book, which obviously makes a big difference. So pre-orders right now are really valuable for helping the book become prominent.

If you might like to pre-order the book, please go here!

Forum moderators: I hope this isn't an uncomfortable thing to post! Of course, there's a commercial element to the post, which is a bit weird. If it bothers you, please just delete the thread; I don't want to push any buttons or boundaries—just wanted to share this with this community.

 

[Secundino]

Sorry,
but to much religion, to much capitalism, to much dicotome thinking, to much assumptions that are limited/limiting from a beginning. A thing that can't be divided has no length and therefore is no thing? Only one option to choose? Is there only right and wrong?

Good luck with your book.

 

[Sue]

You might note the section of the sample about Jesus was about Camus's views—Camus was an atheist. But there is a fair amount of religion in the book. Such is the history of philosophy. As to the argument about dividing things and length, Kant's *point* there was that it was a false dichotomy. On capitalism: yes, perhaps. That's the context I'm writing in. There are several entries on Marx and Marxists in the book, though, FWIW.

Anyhow, thanks for taking a look at it!

 

[cnycharles]

congrats; I tried to download and read with my dialup, but still hadn't loaded after a few minutes. i'll try again later

 

[kentuckiense]

Congratulations on the publication. I can't help but notice that you're in Norfolk. I was just at the Virginia Zoo there a couple weekends ago (I split my time between Richmond and Virginia Beach).

 

[TyroneGenade]

Sorry,
but to much religion, to much capitalism, to much dicotome thinking...

Philosophy is the product of thinking about God and "Nature" as surely as "conspiracy theories are the product of saying there is no God and asking who is in his place" (to paraphrase Karl Popper). The Philosophy of Science is just one off-shoot of that thinking so it is inevitable that Science eventually starts thinking about God (and thinking it is God). Though, quite strangely, I rarely meet "scientists" who seem to think about the philosophical roots of what they are doing. Seems a Ph. D. (doc of philosophy) is wasted on scientists. In my science teaching I try to change that so I'm very keen on seeing what you book is about but I'm having trouble downloading it from Scribd. Any chance you can email me the sample?

Reading Socrates & Plato I can't help but wonder whether all the ideas of Philosophy are merely pregnant in Socrates or whether he and his students actually thought them through and thought them to unimportant to record?

 

[Sue]

kentuckiense—Yeah, I teach at ODU! Do you ever come to the Tidewater OS meetings? We meet the first Sundays of most months. Our web presence is uninformative (I'm trying to change that) so we don't do outreach as well as we could . . .

Charles; Tyrone: I'm sorry you're having trouble! Let me try putting in the link as plain text to copy-and-paste. Maybe that will help?

www.scribd.com/doc/130530975/Prepublication-Sample-The-Philosopher-s-Book-of-Questions-and-Answers

If that doesn't do it, yeah, I'll upload it somewhere else as well and post a new link. Thanks for your interest!

And Tyrone: in the sample, there's only one entry from each chapter, but there is a whole chapter on philosophy of science, including two entries on Popper (one on falsification, and one on the demarcation problem).

EDIT:
Ok, I couldn't get the URL to post without automatically being converted to a link, so I went ahead and uploaded it elsewhere:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/391067/Philosophers Book Final eblad.pdf

Hope that works!