Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro on the Global Epidemic of Irrational Thinking
In Conversation with Andrew Keen on Keen On
Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.
In this double feature, Andrew is joined by Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro, the authors of When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves, to discuss the basic principles of logic, argument, evidence, and probability that can make all of us more reasonable and responsible citizens.
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Steven Nadler is the William H Hay II Professor of Philosophy and the Evjue-Bascom Professor in Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Spinoza: A Life (2nd ed, 2018); A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (2011); The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter: A Portrait of Descartes (2013); Heretics! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy (2017), co-authored with Ben Nadler; Menasseh ben Israel: Rabbi of Amsterdam (2018); and Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die (2020).
Professor Shapiro’s research spans philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology. Within philosophy of mind he has focused on issues related to reduction, especially concerning the thesis of multiple realization. His books The Mind Incarnate (MIT, 2004) and The Multiple Realization Book (co-authored with Professor Thomas Polger at U. of Cincinnati, Oxford University Press, 2016) as well as articles in The Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research examine these issues. His interests in philosophy of psychology include topics in computational theories of vision, evolutionary psychology, and embodied cognition. He’s published numerous articles on these topics in journals such as The Philosophical Review, British Journal for Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy of Science. His book, Embodied Cognition (Routledge Press), received the American Philosophical Association’s Joseph B. Gittler Award for best book in philosophy of the social sciences (2013) and is now in its second edition (2019). His recent interest in philosophy of religion resulted in The Miracle Myth: Why Belief in the Resurrection and the Supernatural is Unjustified (Columbia University Press, 2016).
