Why We Follow Orders: The Neuroscience of Com...

Batya Ungar-Sargon joins Michael Shermer for a wide-ranging conversation about the historical relationship between Jews and the American left, and why that relationship has become increasingly strained in recent years. The discussion begins with the reaction to October 7 and the ...  Show more

Jon Mills, a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and clinical psychologist, joins Michael Shermer to discuss how social justice ideology has moved from a concern with fairness and equal treatment into a rigid moral framework built around oppressors and victims, privilege and disadvantage ...  Show more

WIRED FOR WHY: How We Think, Feel and Make Meaning. (Self-Published 2025) spans eighteen chapters exploring everything from how we manage to stay alive against all odds, to why language separates us from other species, to whether death might be a metaphor. It's a journey through ...  Show more

Today I talked to David B. Wong about his book Moral Relativism and Pluralism (Cambridge UP, 2023). The argument for metaethical relativism--the view that there is no single true or most justified morality--is that it is part of the best explanation of the most difficult moral di ...  Show more

How much of our understanding of the world comes built-in? More than you'd expect.

That's the conclusion that <a href= "https://cos.northeastern.edu/pe ...

This book is available open access here. The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024), Mazviita Chirimuuta argues that the standard ways neuroscientists simplify the human brain to build models for their research purposes mi ...  Show more