review ⁽⁵⁾

In reshelving books on their shelves recently, with the two bookshelves themselves only returned to their place in the living room after we replaced the flooring, my eye lingered on a book cover. I did not recognise it, but it was familiar in the way one's infancy can return feelings. The book is then both unknown and known at the…

Reaction to a review by David Copp of: Frans De Waal: Primates and philosophers: how morality evolved, edited by Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, 232pp. 9780691169163 I was excited to find this in my to-do reading list as I did not know that a 2016 revamped version of his 2003 Tanner Lectures on Human Values…

A reaction to a paper that came my way. I am working my way through a to-do list of them. So this is from 1993. I was in my late twenties. Never read any of this stuff back then. This is before primatologists and paleo-anthropologists came up with the idea of the Egalitarian Revolution of the Paleolithic among Homo species.

Steve Stewart-Williams, a reading of his The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve. (Cambridge University Press, 2018. #ISBN9781108425049 ) I pick this up because it covers some big history, from which general assumptions in my approach to morality and worldbuilding arise. It’s an academic book, as opposed to scholarly. It’s got a great innovation in…

Reading Gilles Deleuze’s Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Zone Books. Cambridge, Mass: MIT. 2005. ISBN9781890951252 I’ve begun a project in which I tackle writing that I find difficult to read. This in order to write in a more understandable way. That is, to see if helps put me in their shoes. I found this book by Deleuze on a dear friend’s…