Eric Schwitzgebel, "The Weirdness of the World" (Princeton UP, 2024)
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What is the central premise of Eric Schwitzgebel’s book *The Weirdness of the World*?
Hi everyone, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and I'm also a historian. I used to be a history professor, and I love maps. So I'm especially happy to tell you that this episode is sponsored by What's Your Map, which was the winner of the best education podcast at the 2025 British Podcast Awards. What's Your Map is hosted by historian and prize-winning author, Professor Jerry Broughton. In each episode, he invites a guest to share. A map close to their heart and unfurl the ideas, inspirations, and stories behind it. I can tell you I've listened and it's fascinating. The podcast is in its sixth series and is enjoyed by audiences around the globe. You can explore all the maps in the podcast at occulehyphenmundi.com while you listen.
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdoor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. And I'm co-hosted the channel along with Robert Talise, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Eric Schwitzgable, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Riverside. His new book, The Weirdness of the World, is just out from Princeton University Press. What's life for if there's no time to play and explore? So ends Eric Schwitzgable's new book, where he invites the reader to a walk on the wilder side of philosophical speculation about the cosmos and consciousness.
Is consciousness entirely a material phenomenon? How much credence should we have in the existence of a world outside our minds? Are there multiple parallel universes? Schwitzgable constructs chains of conditional probabilities to explore the zone just beyond the edge of what we can understand, however imperfectly, given concurrent scientific theory. He also distinguishes hypothetical scenarios that are not worth taking seriously, like being a brain in a vat, from those that are just plausible enough to deser to deserve playful, yet motivated consideration. Let's turn to the interview. Um, hello Eric Schritzgable. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Hi, thanks for having me.
Um, it should be a fun ride talking about your latest book, uh, The Weirdness of the World. And I should say for for longtime listeners of New Books in Philosophy, uh Professor Schwitz Gable was my very fused, very first interviewee for this podcast, and he was extremely Uh patient with the process um of learning how to do it correctly, including uh being willing to go through the interview twice because I messed up the recording. Um, but Also, I mean, there's another sense in which, you know, the the 12 years that have separated these two books, there's also a commonality in that. The first book that that I did was Perplexities of Consciousness, two thousand eleven. Now we're talking about the weirdness of the world in which a lot of the perplexities about consciousness kind of persist.
Um So I still haven't
figured it out.
So tell us a bit, you know, about yourself and then, you know, how this book came about.
Right. So um yeah, I'm a professor of philosophy at U C Riverside. I've been thinking about consciousness pretty seriously for almost twenty five years now. I got into it because Kind of sideways in a way, uh most philosophers would think of it.
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