David Edmonds Knihy

Watch out, Brussells Academy - this robot will outwit you all! If super-high-tech android Dotty can spend an entire year masquerading as a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, she could win a multi-million-pound prize that will enable her creators to continue their ground-breaking work in the development of AI. Easy-peasy, right? As Dotty navigates the social expectations of Year 7 she gets into a series of hilarious scrapes, and encounters numerous ethical dilemmas both at school and at home. Then a boy in her class discovers there's a reward for outing the robot, and becomes intent on proving that Dotty is not who - or what - she says she is. To prevent herself from being discovered, Dotty needs to put into practice everything she has learned about being human. But will it be enough...?

Most people feel it's wrong to kill the fat man.

Philosophers Take on the World paves the way for people to become independent thinkers, more mindful of the philosophical implications that lurk behind all corners of our lives. Anna Zanetti, The Oxford Culture Review

"On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. Weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of rising extremism in Hitler's Europe, David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle--associated with billiant thinkers like Otto Neurath, Kurt Gödel, Rudolf Carnap, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Popper--and of a philosophical movement movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by and unreason."--

"27 leading thinkers on 27 intriguing topics."--Cover.

But in 1972 along came the American, Bobby Fischer: insolent, arrogant, abusive, vain, greedy, vulgar, bigoted, paranoid and obsessive - and apparently unstoppable. Against him was Boris Spassky: complex, sensitive, the most un-Soviet of champions.

A sparkling, original tour through 2,500 years of Western thought, from Socrates to Derrida, from happiness and love in ancient Greece to truth and forgiveness in the twentieth century. Twenty-seven of today's leading philosophers each introduce and explore ideas from one of history's greatest minds.

From the bestselling coauthor of Wittgenstein's Poker, a fascinating tour through the history of moral philosophy A runaway train is racing toward five men who are tied to the track. Unless the train is stopped, it will inevitably kill all five men. You are standing on a footbridge looking down on the unfolding disaster. However, a fat man, a stranger, is standing next to you: if you push him off the bridge, he will topple onto the line and, although he will die, his chunky body will stop the train, saving five lives. Would you kill the fat man? The question may seem bizarre. But it's one variation of a puzzle that has baffled moral philosophers for almost half a century and that more recently has come to preoccupy neuroscientists, psychologists, and other thinkers as well. In this book, David Edmonds, coauthor of the bestselling Wittgenstein's Poker, tells the riveting story of why and how philosophers have struggled with this ethical dilemma, sometimes called the trolley problem. In the process, he provides an entertaining and informative tour through the history of moral philosophy. Most people feel it's wrong to kill the fat man. But why? After all, in taking one life you could save five. As Edmonds shows, answering the question is far more complex—and important—than it first appears. In fact, how we answer it tells us a great deal about right and wrong.

'Philosophy Bites' is a selection of interviews from the hugely successful podcast of the same name. Leading philosophers discuss a wide range of philosophical issues, from ethics to aesthetics to metaphysics, in a lively, informal, personal way.

Wittgenstein's Poker is an engaging mixture of philosophy, history, biography and detection. It ranges from the place of assimilated Jews in fin-de-siegrave;cle Vienna, to what happens to memory under stress, to a vivid portrait of Cambridge and its eccentric set of philosophy dons, including Bertrand Russell (who acted as umpire). At the centre of the story stand the philosophers themselves, proud, irascible, larger than life, and spoiling for a fight. 'Those 10 minutes shook the world of Western philosophy literally to its foundations . . . Edmonds and Eidinow have a very good story to tell, and they tell it wonderfully well.' Irish Times 'Excellent . . . If people have recently been led to think of philosophy solely in terms of its consolations, a kind of chicken soup for the soul, this is the book to cure them all.' Sunday Times