A good book on the recent history of Afghanistan.
It help us to understand how an insignificant country became the safe harbor of terrorism, making 9/11 possible.
It also tells us how the West has failed in the subsequent period: Bush didn't cared about reconstruction, sparing money and men for the Iraqi adventure. Thus he enabled Taliban resurgence.

Rashid is the most authoritative voice in this field and this book may help us to define our opinion on this issue- without either mad militarism or blind isolationism.

Barnett is not a pacifist and he truly beliefs in the importance of a clever military action, when required. However, he strongly critics Bush's unilateral diplomacy and the way wherewith he carried out the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Moreover, he thinks that the Nuclear Bomb has created a stalemate in military thinking, thus banning Great Powers's War once and for all (forget about China's menace).
Barnett can't be callad a leftist: he's steady in his idea that economics rules politics and he thinks that democracy ensues only when economic development raises a middle class. Though, he has an indipendent point of view and he's very faraway from neocon's foolishness.
Interesting.

The plot and the drawings are very different from the motion picture. Even though this is the original one i've liked much more the movie.

On the political side it's weird and unrealistic.
Anarchy cannot be the only alternative to fascism. Let's get real.

The best account on consciousness i've read so far.
Damasio addresses the problem from a biological and evolutionary perspective and show us that consciousness is not the monolith we are used to think of: rather, it comes in many stages, core and extended.
Under both these two kinds there's another level, the 'protoself': an automatic and uncoscious representation held in our brains of everything that happens in our body. This mechanism has the primary role of mantaining the homeostatis, an essential state of equilibrium of our chimical internal state, thus providing a primitive stage for consciousness in the form of a unitary though ever-changing scheme of the organism.

The trick of consciousness happens when we are involved in knowing something.
We have both the sensory cortices of our brain elaborating the characteristics of the object, and the structure of the protoself detecting the changes our organism undergoes in the processing of the object (these may be emotional responses, changes to permit a better elaboration of the input).
At this point, the brain elaborate a second-order 'map', a representation which holds both the object processing and the body engaged in the knowing.
It's simple as that.

But this is not the whole picture: here arise a lot of incomprehension in those who hold skeptical opinions on the explanation of consciousness.
The kind described above is the core version of consciousness, owned by a large number of animal species.
It's a simple though very show more effective survival device because it develops an individual perspective in the organism, an ability to locate itself in its environment and think of innovative strategies for react to possible threats (way better than an unconscious emotional response as fear or rage).
Though, this knowledge is restricted to the 'here and now': it's the kind owned by a fox, an eagle or a baby.

What makes us human is extended consciousness.
Our brain and his amazing processing power allow us to develop a huge number of memories through all our life, unique facts of which we became conscious.
Extended consciousness springs up when, beside the world we face each instant, we keep continously in mind memories pertaining our identity, our plan for the future, our recent and ancient past.
Only then we could say that 'we' are doing something, that our actions have a meaning.
If someone's afraid that despelling consciousness would throw away our uniqueness as human beings, it's this second kind of consciousness he wants to defend, not the former: and he should not be afraid either, because this vision of human mind is even stronger than every other possible religious weirdness.

-
Two more remarks: extended consciousness doesn't need language: it seems that monkeys has it, as well as some other intelligent species (a gleaming example: your dog). However, language amplifies extremely consciousness' potentialities, expanding our identies like tiny big bangs.
Second: Damasio also scolds philosophers who more often than not muddle up the whole thing. In particular, it's a long debated problem that of the impossibility to experience the mind of an another subject only by means of scientific inquiry and objective knwoledge (how does it feel to be a bat?).
This is a logical fallacy rather than a real problem.
The only time that 'be something' and 'know something' coincide is in our personal experience, and i don't see how it could be otherwise: not much of an argument against scientific research, imho. show less

How societies born, develop, thrive and prosper or die.
The main factor behing the lines of history are not the choices of a few inspired individuals (like our way of teaching history seems to tell us).
Enviroment is a much more influencing factor in future of one society: the number of species man can tame, the availability of the right kind of plants, the disposition of the continents, etc.

The best part of this book, though, is the short one about the development of hierarchical, unequal societies as long as the number of people and its density grows.

Rousseau is a strange philosopher. Some of his idea are dangerous, too.
For example, his theory of social contract doesn't provide any limitation to the power of the 'General Will': the opposite of the other equally famous theory, Locke's one, which requires some check and balances and doesn't have absolute power toward the citizens (the results are easy to see: Rousseau's legacy are Napoleon and Urss, Locke's the United States).

Aside from that, Rousseau's account of the birth of human societies (the argument of this book) is bit fuzzy and misleading.
I think that Hobbes' one -100 years older- is far more near to reality: the first societies arose out of men's desire of selfpreservation and this happend always with the absolute subjection of them to a central authority, a leader (though obviously Hobbes approves this absolute power and we do not).
Rousseau brings a fundamental detail to this picture: the cause behind this association, the element that made an ever-continous (yer not very harmful) state of war a deep problem was agriculture.
Agriculture pushed men toward bigger and hierarchical societies: those societies thus gained a remarkable advantage toward the less efficent ones, and started the age of slavery .

Camus' critique of Marx's thought is a lot better: more reasonable, less boring.

We must never forget.

Especially now as time flows on and memory is getting thinner and thinner... we must remember.

I am not religious and i think that every kind of sense of guilt toward some supernatural being is foolish: but we must feel ashamed and share the regret for that carnage for ever and ever, in order not to let it happen again.

Peace.

The last frontier of modern physics, the string theory.
Greene takes on the burden of explaining it to us mortals, in a clear language.

A bit hollow, though well written.

After all, it's postmodernism....

Please, note that the exposition and the writing should get 1/5.

And it's a shame, since what Dennett has to say is awfully important.

In a nutshell, Dennett claims that all the fear of genetic determinism and neuroscience is a phobia.
This fear comes from a series of misunderstandings.

1) First of all, we muddle two different meanings of the word 'determined'.
The first is the 'God perspective': the way things are and will be. There's only one future, only one past. Determined.
But this point of view doesn't concern us, because it's not our own.
We do care about the second meaning of the word: determined from US.
Which could be expressed better with 'predicted'.
We are free only as long as we can act to change a certain outcome.
This difference is fundamental and it is the source of a lot of mistrust toward scientific thinking.
On the contrary, we have a lot of freedom. Maybe more than we'd like.
2) The fear of genetic determinism.
We're afraid that genes may determine our behaviour like the instructions of a program controls a computer.
But this is false. Genes don't think for us. They make us able to think, they lay down the first bricks and leave the rest to chance, enviroment and OUR choices.
An animal is very much like a computer, ridden by instincts and reactions.
But far beyond any animal process of learning, we evolved a self.
We developed language. Every idea of 'I' is a thick web of social reletionships, past experiences, desires.
Genes simply can't do all this. We do.

Human show more freedom and human responsability persist even now that we're discovering the mind and debunking consciousness. show less

Consciousness exists in a very different way from what we're used to think; it's not a substance, neither a smaller person in our brain who run all the rest.
Dennett tells us that it's more like a software (some knowledge in informatics will help): less real than mere matter, more concrete than an idea.
Dennett perspective is intelligent and sound. He understands that our doubt on the matter comes from our fear that dispelling consciousness will give away our ideas of responsability and moral behaviour. There's no need for that. (He dedicated one more book on the argument, 'Freedom evolves', but here it is a short explanation -> http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incpages/publctns.shtml
Read ”Some observations on the psychology of thinking about free will”, 2007)
It could take more than one lecture to grasp completely all the argumentations and the implications which contrast with our common sense. Though, all the effort pays well.
Some things may have been explained better, but in the end Dennett's perspective is crystal clear.
Philosophy at its best.

Boring.

Damasio's hypothesis is that the process of reason is deeply linked and influenced by our 'feeling' and by the processes ongoing in our body.

'Jaws's plot plus 'Matrix's one.
Original

Unlike the precedent book (the myth of sysiphus) this one is an hymn of life and radical thinking, a bashing critic of nihilistic thought and every form of totalitarianism.

The main theme of the essay is the revolt.
The revolt is the main thread of human history, it permeates every claim of justice and freedom.
Camus explain to us why the revolt of man against the unfairness of his condition mustn't decay in a revolution against the whole universe, a total negation of every sense and value, even of the human nature and of the humans' sufference that triggered revolt at the beginning.
Camus sets out a series of historical and philosophical examples of revolt: not every one is worth considering, except the main target of the book: Marx.
He hardly critics the position of Marxist dogmas as religious one, he denounces a revolution that betrayed its ideals, ending in a totalitarian regime.
Now this considerations may seem obvious to us, but remember that his book was written in the 50's -Stalin was still alive.
It was a strong breaking off with most of the french intellectual vanguard, it led to the his definitive rift with Sartre.
This book that has much more to share with poetry and art than with philosophy or history, but it's a gleaming example of intellectual courage and honesty.

When the best regarded conservative italian journalist turns to strongly oppose the new populist leader of the right (Berlusconi), it means that something is definitely wrong.

When nihilism becomes a fashion, it means that somehow it's vanishing.
This is still a funny book anyway.

Much of the book is extremely old, but i liked very much the combination of modern physics to ancient philosophical speculation.

The Absurd is the distressing match between man's interrogation on his ultimate questions and the silent universe.
Camus said that man must mantain this match, for closing it would be an escape or a liberation.
Though, it doesn't seem a great solution to me.
Sartre instead said that the only way to get rid of anguish was to realize that it's up to us to shape ourselves and to be responsible of our choices; compared to that, Camus' cure sounds like a dead end (and a way to -having therfore analyzed the absurd condition- assimilate it).

But what if man's question was wrong?
Douglas Adams docet.

A bit depressing: while the protagonist ruminates about the value of life and why he mustn't kill himself, we watch outside our windows, see the sun, the people gently living along without any need to find a superior mystical value to life except life itself, and think 'man, WTF?'.
Though, it's well written and the plot is thoroughly arranged.

It's scaring how clear in his work are the worries and the remarks that led him to suicide, despite his rich display of knowledge and wit.

'The legs of women are the compass of the world'
Thus spake the master.

For many people through the years this book has been something similar to the Qur'an.
It's a compelling and fascinating though short text, a look backward in time.

The (2nd) best book on pirates ever.
Ahrrr!

'Chance alone is at the source of every innovaton, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty is at the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution... It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact.'

"There's your answer, Captain."
"I don't see"
"The Martians discovered the secret of life among animals.
The animal does not question life.
It lives.
Its very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life. You see -the statuary, the animal symbols, again and again."
"It looks pagan"
"On the contrary, those are god symbols, symbols of life.
Man had become too much man and not enough animal on Mars too. And the men of Mars realized that in order to survive they would have to forgo asking that one question any longer: why live?
Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.
The Martians realized that they asked the question 'why live at all?' at the height of some period of war and despair, when there was no answer.
But once the civilization calmed, quieted, and wars ceased, the question became senseless in a new way.
Life was good and needed no arguments."

Or 'Why Italy has the worst judicial system ever'. (Most of all, because it looks like it was specifically designed in order to do not work properly)

Another plague of italian politics: bad journalism and servility. That's why we had Berlusconi elected for three times so far.

The turtle moves!