Future Philosophy

This book is not easy: It contains no quick-fix plan for a better, brighter tomorrow, and gives no ready-made answers. Instead, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behavior patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.

We live in a time of vast changes that include accelerating globalization, mounting quantities of information, the growing hegemony of science and technology, and the clash of civilizations. Those changes call for new ways of learning and thinking in school, business, and the professions. Listen as psychologist Howard Gardner defines the cognitive abilities that will command a premium in the years ahead.

Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden—but what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.

Ripples in Spacetime is an engaging account of the international effort to complete Einstein's project, capture his elusive ripples, and launch an era of gravitational-wave astronomy that promises to explain, more vividly than ever before, our universe's structure and origin. The quest for gravitational waves involved years of risky research and many personal and professional struggles that threatened to derail one of the world's largest scientific endeavors.

We live in a culture of casual certitude. This has always been the case, no matter how often that certainty has failed. Though no generation believes there's nothing left to learn, every generation unconsciously assumes that what has already been defined and accepted is (probably) pretty close to how reality will be viewed in perpetuity. And then, of course, time passes. Ideas shift. Opinions invert. What once seemed reasonable eventually becomes absurd, replaced by modern perspectives that feel even more irrefutable and secure - until, of course, they don't.

Charles Eisenstein explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self. He argues that our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of science, religion, money, technology, economics, medicine, and education as we know them. It has fired our near-pathological pursuit of technological Utopias even as we push ourselves and our planet to the brink of collapse.

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. Of course, his means were disgusting and condemnable. But his message is more important than ever. If we want to thrive in an age where automation and artificial intelligence and rapidly making humans obsolete, it is our responsibility to understand and prepare for the technological machine we are up against.

A “flip,” writes Jeffrey J. Kripal, is “a reversal of perspective,” “a new real,” often born of an extreme, life-changing experience. The Flip is Kripal’s ambitious, visionary program for unifying the sciences and the humanities to expand our minds, open our hearts, and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the culture wars.

A call to save ourselves and our planet by targeting the root of our inaction: extreme shortsightedness.

Solidarity is often invoked, but it is rarely analyzed and poorly understood. Here, two leading activists and thinkers survey the past, present, and future of the concept across borders of nation, identity, and class to ask: how can we build solidarity in an era of staggering inequality, polarization, violence, and ecological catastrophe?

In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices.

By turns illuminating, infuriating, bewildering, and amusing, Nietzsche's masterwork covers a lot of ground. He rejects most strands of Western thought, especially on the subject of morality, and develops his own theme demanding that individuals embrace their own "will to power" to give life intention and direction. First published in German in 1887, this translation was produced in 1907 by Helen Zimmern, a long-standing acquaintance of Nietzsche.

Step into the mind of one of history's most influential thinkers as Nietzsche takes you on a profound journey through morality, truth, and the nature of human existence. This groundbreaking work, brought to life in captivating audio format, explores Nietzsche's bold and revolutionary ideas that continue to resonate in our modern world.

Blunt, shocking, and sometimes profane, this exciting audiobook blasts self-help and feel-good remedies to expose the lies with which we imprison ourselves. It talks straight, hard, and true to the heart of the human condition, pulling no punches. It gives us simple yet revolutionary tools to break out of our minds and into a direct and immediate perception of exactly where we are - then shows us how we can together create a world that works for everyone.

An "elegant", "engrossing" (Carol Tavris, Wall Street Journal) examination of what we think we know about the brain and why - despite technological advances - the workings of our most essential organ remain a mystery.

Humanity has reached a critical moment. Our world is unsettled and rapidly changing, and we face existential risks over the next century. Various outcomes - good and bad - are possible. Yet our approach to the future is characterized by short-term thinking, polarizing debates, alarmist rhetoric, and pessimism. In this short, exhilarating book, renowned scientist and best-selling author Martin Rees argues that humanity’s prospects depend on our taking a very different approach to planning for tomorrow.

Surviving the Future is a story drawn from the fertile ground of the late David Fleming's extraordinary Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It. That hardback consists of 404 interlinked dictionary entries, inviting listeners to choose their own path through its radical vision. Recognizing that Lean Logic's sheer size and unusual structure can be daunting, Fleming's long-time collaborator Shaun Chamberlin has selected and edited one of these potential narratives to create Surviving the Future.

The Philosophy of a Future State implores us to embrace the grandeur of contemplation, to gaze upward at the starlit sky, and to peer inward at the spark of the divine that animates our souls. It calls us to wonder at the infinite potential inherent in every human being and the cosmic dance that envelopes us all.

Kant's Prolegomena, although a small book, is without doubt the most important of his writings, writes the translator, Paul Carus. Prolegomena means, literally, prefatory or introductory remarks, and it furnishes us with a key to his main work, The Critique of Pure Reason; in fact, it is an extract containing all the salient ideas of Kant's system. It approaches the subject in the simplest and most direct way and is therefore best adapted as an introduction into his philosophy.

Financial economist George G. Szpiro here tells the fascinating stories of the pioneers of mathematical finance who conducted the search for the elusive options pricing formula. From the broker's assistant who published the first mathematical explanation of financial markets to Albert Einstein and other scientists, Pricing the Future retraces the historical and intellectual developments that ultimately led to the widespread use of mathematical models to drive investment strategies on Wall Street.