Recommendations from Professor Curtis Brown

Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife.  An excellent time travel novel. For scientific issues you’re better off with something like Gregory Benford’s Timescape. For philosophical conundrums, you can’t beat Robert A. Heinlein’s story “By His Bootstraps.” But Niffenegger’s novel is a beautifully written exploration of the emotional complications of a relationship with an involuntary time traveler.

 

Rhonda Wilcox, Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  The closest thing I know of to the definitive Buffy book.

 

Daniel Nolan, David Lewis.  It is hard to believe it has already been six years since David Lewis passed away. This extremely lucid and surprisingly accessible book does a nice job of surveying Lewis’s contributions to many areas of philosophy.

 

Recommendation from Professor Steven Luper:

Some oldies but goodies: 

Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat;

Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches;

Koller, Oriental Philosophies;

Storr, Solitude;

Parfit, Reasons and Persons.

Some new stuff: 

Hawthorne, Knowledge and Lotteries;

Benatar, Life, Death and Meaning;

Potten and Wilson, Apoptosis:  the Life and Death of Cells;

Dennett, Kinds of Minds;

Harman, Reasoning, Meaning and Mind.

 

Recommendations from Professor Judith Norman:

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (a novel)

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky