Modern Mind Book Discussion Group Weekly Meeting
Details
You are invited to join us in the Modern Mind Book Discussion Group weekly as we explore the contents of an intellectually challenging text.
About 15 people attend our virtual Zoom meetings each week, but most do not RSVP through Meetup. The group has existed since 2001. This profile was created in 2015 to help promote it. We met in person until 2020.
Please send an email to andyrhodes111(at)gmail(dot)com to request the Zoom link.
Each week, the focus is given to one or two chapters. We typically stay on a single book for a few months. The choice of a text is voted on by attendees. Categories selected usually include science, philosophy, history, sociology, religion, economics, or psychology. If you are very curious about the world and enjoy sharpening your understanding on complex topics with some very friendly people, then give our group a try. The meetings are held online from 10:00 - 11:30 AM EST on Sunday mornings. Even if you have not read the chapter planned for that meeting, we encourage you to visit. Our discussions, inspired by the book's content, typically become general enough to where anyone might contribute or enjoy listening to other members share.
Here are many of the books that we have read in previous years:
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future by Robert Reich
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
Understanding Islam: An Introduction to the Muslim World by Thomas Lippman
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann
A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains by Max Bennett
Nonsense: Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language by Robert Gula
The Enlightenment: And Why it Still Matters by Anthony Pagden
Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind by George Makari
The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin
Post-Truth by Lee McIntyre
The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer
Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Dixon
How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell
The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God by David Linden
Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy by Melvin Konner
The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present by Eric Kandel
Short stories by Anton Chekhov
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand
No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model by Richard Schwartz
The Essential Tillich - a collection of works by Paul Tillich
Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction by Susan Blackmore
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Moral Man and Immoral Society by Reinhold Niebuhr
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch
Myths America Lives By by Richard T. Hughes
Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are by Frans de Waal
The Philosophy of Humanism by Corliss Lamont
Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century by Peter Watson
The Sacred Depths of Nature by Ursula Goodenough
Science: A Four Thousand Year History by Patricia Fara
The Odyssey by Homer
Hen’s Teeth and Horses Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould
More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth, and Belief by Bernardo Kastrup
The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery
Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Why? The Purpose of the Universe by Philip Goff
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt
Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think by Andy Norman
The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World by Nichola Raihani
Wisdom and the Senses: The Way of Creativity by Joan Erikson
Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan
Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe by Bernardo Kastrup
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings
The Brain: A Very Short Introduction by Michael O'Shea
Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience by Nancy Sherman
Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson
The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton
Henry James: Major Stories & Essays - a collection of works by this author