The Economist August 6th 2011

The Economist is a global weekly magazine written for those who share an uncommon interest in being well and broadly informed. Each issue explores the close links between domestic and international issues, business, politics, finance, current affairs, science, technology and the arts.

What is This Thing Called Knowledge? 2nd Ed.

What is Knowledge? Where does it come from? Can we know anything at all? This lucid and engaging introduction grapples with these central questions in the theory of knowledge, offering a clear, non-partisan view of the main themes of epistemology including recent developments such as virtue epistemology and contextualism.

Mental Mechanisms - Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience

A variety of scientific disciplines have set as their task explaining mental activities, recognizing that in some way these activities depend upon our brain. But, until recently, the opportunities to conduct experiments directly on our brains were limited. As a result, research efforts were split between disciplines such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence that investigated behavior while disciplines such as neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and genetics experimented on the brains of non-human animals.

For the New Intellectual

This is Ayn Rand's challenge to the prevalent philosophical doctrines of our time, and the "atmosphere of guilt, of panic, of despair, of boredom, and of all-pervasive evasion" that they create.
One of the most controversial figures on the intellectual scene, Ayn Rand was a proponent of a moral philosophy called Objectivism-and ethic of rational self-interest-that stands in sharp opposition to the ethics of altruism and self-sacrifice. The fundamentals of this morality-"a philosophy for living on earth-are here vibrantly set forth by the spokeswoman for a new kind of intellectual.