Today is publication day for the second edition of my book Why Sane People Believe Crazy Things: How Belief Can Help or Hurt Social Peace!
The new edition adds a chapter about the foundations of morality, as well as various other improvements scattered throughout the book.
Here’s a high-level outline:
- Chapter 1: How to Explain Anything
- Chapter 2: What Belief Isn’t
- Chapter 3: What Belief Is
- Chapter 4: Why Saadia and Maimonides Couldn’t Believe — But Did
- Chapter 5: Why Spinoza Could Believe — But Didn’t
- Chapter 6: Why Mendelssohn Changed the Subject
- Chapter 7: Belief and Biology
- Chapter 8: What Beliefs Do
- Chapter 9: How Beliefs Can Be Justified
- Chapter 10: Plato, Descartes, Thomas Reid, and “The Matrix”
- Chapter 11: How Beliefs Have Meaning
- Chapter 12: How the Ineffable Leads to Religion
- Chapter 13: How Foundational Descriptions Shape Truth
- Chapter 14: Errors of Postmodernism
- Chapter 15: The Basis of Morality
- Chapter 16: Why Be Tolerant?
- Chapter 17: Building Tolerant Societies
- Appendix A: Why “Modest Foundationalism” is Circular Reasoning
The book also covers topics such as the mathematical explanation of entropy, the love life of John Stuart Mill, the Ancient Egyptian method for calculating the area of a circle, the nature of truth, song lyrics from “South Pacific,” and Sir Charles Napier’s story of how he saved a widow from being burned on her late husband’s funeral pyre.
If you’re interested in reviewing the book, send an email to tapes.gutsier_0m@icloud.com.
The Amazon ebook page has preview pages for the book so you can see if you like it. Check it out!
The Thousand-Year View 