Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett FREEDOM EVOLVES DANIEL DENNETT PDF. Freedom Evolves has ratings and reviews. Samir said: Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers “yes!” Using an array of. Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers “yes!” Using an array. Galen Strawson reviews book Freedom Evolves by Daniel C Dennett; drawings ( M). Author: Kimi Dushakar Country: Uzbekistan Language: English (Spanish) Genre: Automotive Published (Last): 21 April 2010 Pages: 410 PDF File Size: 14.69 Mb ePub File Size: 6.87 Mb ISBN: 745-1-41727-261-9 Downloads: 6854 Price: Free* [ *Free Regsitration Required ] Uploader: Jushicage. Cartesian theater Greedy reductionism Heterophenomenology Intentional stance Intuition pump Multiple drafts model. The decision was made the second the universe started. Thus, two writers who started from opposite positions in the sociobiology debate have both, on freeom, reached similar conclusions on the relation between freedom and egolves. What makes this effectiveness seem impossible is not science treedom the rhetoric that has depicted the mind as a separate, helpless substance being pushed around by matter. Complexity and imagination complicates the world, precipitates madness, and puts you in a state of unease – and this is when philosophy, religion, and art things Dennett has conceptually referred to as “memes” enter the fray. Some steps are not yet clear and scientists are currently working on promising theories e. Fate by fluke. And then there’s the whole quantum indeterminacy thing. Although the last two chapters delineate a picture of evolved human life that implies free will, he nevertheless maintains until the end of the book that scientific determinism remains valid. It was amazing in places. They ignore their supposedly scientific beliefs rather as their ancestors often ignored threats of eternal punishment. But what he did do, throughout this book, is make me really consider what the concept of free will means to me. For example, Dennett remarks in chapter 4: As in his previous books, Dennett weaves a richly detailed narrative enlivened by analogies as entertaining as they are challenging. He convinced me on these points. As if you can’t have one without the other. The need for it has vanished because he is now endorsing human thought and feeling as real parts of nature – genuine activities, not supernatural feredom – part of normal causality and therefore capable of explaining what happens in culture. Mar 11, Edward rated it liked it Shelves: But is this relevant to how much control you have over your own decisions? The judgment of Dennett’s hard-determinist friend Sam Harris whose book on free will I have otherwise critically reviewed here may be on frerdom Like arguing for the sake of arguing within the parameters of the available knowledge in their field is. But as you zoom out, you start to see patterns and structures – cells, tissues, organs, and eventually animals. This idea is quite fascinating if you fancy a future Utopia where: We – including our mental faculties – are products of natural selection, just like the rest of life on earth. Paperbackpages. But then again, if you would trade places, you wouldn’t be you anymore The best materialistic account of free will I’ve yet encountered. So, you don’t notice the neurological processes regulating your heartbeat; you will notice changes in your visual area though. He quotes, with some alarm, a passage from a science-fiction book in which an amoral character triumphantly cites Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained as proving finally that we have no free will, we cannot control our actions, and thus that we can have no duties. Request removal from index. This page was last edited on 22 Novemberat People interested in determinism and free will. And he says it’s consistent with determinism. Weaving a richly detailed narrative, Dennett explains in a series of strikingly original argume Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? So what’s so great about Dennett’s society is that it makes things easy not a bad prospect for many How many milliseconds should he have to add to this number to get the time you were conscious of it? All, including Freedom Evolvesare now available on Kindle. Dennett is a brilliant polemicist, famous for challenging unexamined orthodoxies. Freedom Evolves – Wikipedia. As in Consciousness ExplainedDennett advertises the controversial nature of his views extensively in advance. In this light, Freedom Evolves is a breath a fresh air, compared with Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea – two amazingly difficult, dense works of pages Free Will in Everyday Life: In all, this was an amusing book to read – food for thought – even though denneett some moments the main story became bogged down in intricate philosophical debates. Preview — Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. In particular, we are now finding steadily increasing complexity throughout the developing spectrum of organic life. Can fgeedom be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? There’s still a nagging question after closing the book though. It’s certainly one of Dennetts easier-to-follow books. I mean, just because it appears to us, in taking a large-scale view, that things are happening differently on this large scale, does not mean that it isn’t simply happening according to the laws we impose, in the same way that us feeling consciousness does not mean we are somehow disobeying the law of physics. Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett. Freedom Evolves has ratings and reviews. Samir said: Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers “yes!” Using an array of. Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers “yes!” Using an array. Galen Strawson reviews book Freedom Evolves by Daniel C Dennett; drawings ( M). Author: Maugar Tojasho Country: Kuwait Language: English (Spanish) Genre: Finance Published (Last): 14 July 2012 Pages: 340 PDF File Size: 20.82 Mb ePub File Size: 20.23 Mb ISBN: 707-2-71985-453-8 Downloads: 83551 Price: Free* [ *Free Regsitration Required ] Uploader: Kitaur. Evolvse our uniqueness as reflective, communicating animals does not require any ‘human exceptionalism’ that must shake a defiant fist at Darwin We may thus concede that material feeedom ultimately govern behaviour, and yet at the same time reject the notion that people are always and everywhere motivated by material self-interest. This is the burden of Daniel Dennett’s new book and it is really welcome. As he points out, educated people today are often trapped in a strange kind of double-think on this topic. Officially, they believe physical science calls for determinism, which proves they have no control over their lives. But in actual living, most of freecom time they assume they do have this control. They ignore their supposedly scientific beliefs rather as their ancestors often ignored threats of eternal punishment. Yet those beliefs can still cause deep underlying anxiety, confusion, guilt and a sense of futility. Dennett shows he has grasped this odd situation. Freedom Evolves – Wikipedia. He quotes, dennwtt some alarm, a passage from a science-fiction book in which an amoral character triumphantly cites Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained as proving finally that we have no free will, we cannot control our actions, and thus that we can have no duties. He rightly insists he never said this. But he does see now why people may think he did. The trouble is that, in these discussions, what chiefly gets across to the reader is not so much the detailed arguments as the general tone, the rhetoric, the way the emphasis lies. And writers like Dennett, who want to promote a worldview centring on science, are indeed often feredom hostile to dxniel concept of free will. They treat it as an ally of traditional religion and a prop of the penal system. They do not readily notice that it is just as necessary to today’s secular morality, which centres on personal autonomy. These campaigners aim to get rid of the immortal soul. But the last thing they want to do is to lose individual freedom. In this book Dennett does at last grasp this nettle. He tries much harder than he has before to show that he understands the importance of our inner life. He devotes much of the book to dissecting the mistaken notion that “science” dwnnett us to write off that inner life as an ineffectual shadow. Determinism, he says, is not fatalism. Fatalism teaches that human effort makes no difference to what happens, and we know this is false. Human effort often does make that difference. What makes this effectiveness seem impossible is not science but the rhetoric that has depicted the mind as a separate, helpless substance being pushed around by matter. That rhetoric grew out of Descartes’ dualism and an atomistic simplification that dates from the 17th century – the conviction that a single simple pattern, found in the interaction of its smallest particles, must govern the whole of nature. Particle physics, which at that time dealt in very denndtt ultimate particles like billiard balls, must therefore supply the model for all other interactions. All complexity was secondary and somehow unreal. Since that time, as Dennett points out, all the sciences, including physics, have dropped that over-simple model. They find complexity and variety of patterns everywhere. That is why we now need scientific pluralism – the careful, systematic use of different thinking in different contexts to answer different questions. In particular, we are freerom finding steadily increasing complexity throughout the developing spectrum of organic life. The more complex creatures become, the wider is the range of activities open to them. And with that increase goes a steadily increasing degree of freedom: Human freedom, in part a product of the revolution begat of language and culture, is about as different from bird freedom as language is different from birdsong. But to vennett the richer phenomenon, one must first understand its more modest components and predecessors. Interestingly, this evolutionary view of human freedom is quite close to the one Steven Rose suggested in his excellent book Lifelines. Thus, two writers who started from opposite positions in the sociobiology debate have both, on reflection, reached similar conclusions on the relation between freedom and evolution. They both make the central point that our conscious inner life is not some sort of irrelevant supernatural intrusion on the working of our physical bodies but a crucial part of their design. We have evolved as beings that can feel and think in a way that makes us able to direct our actions. This means, of course, that the self is a much larger and more complex thing than the detached soul which Descartes thought was dennet essence of our being. We operate as whole people. Our minds and bodies are aspects of us, not separate items. They do not need to compete for the driving seat. Freeeom Dennett points out, this holistic approach certainly works better than the simple libertarian attempt to avoid fatalism by interrupting determinism with patches of quantum indeterminacy – an attempt that could only produce spasms of randomness, not freedom. Dennett’s and Rose’s path between randomness and fatalism is surely essentially the right one. But it needs to be worked out with great care and sensibility. In this book Dennett does, on the whole, supply these excellent qualities. Fate by fluke. He uses a much more conciliatory tone than he did in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. There is no more fighting talk here of Darwinism being a “universal acid”, eating through all other thought-systems and radically transforming them. There is not much rhetoric about sky-hooks, and there is absolutely nothing about the fashionable doctrine now known as “evolutionary psychology”. Only one relic of extreme neo-Darwinism remains, namely, the doctrine of memes. Memes are supposed to be a kind of parasitical quasi-organism that function as genes or possibly as units of culture, producing behaviour patterns by infesting evoves minds just as biological parasites infest their bodies. Freedom Evolves. These mythical entities were invented, somewhat casually, by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene as a dahiel to his story of the causal supremacy of genes, and the current huge popularity treedom evolutionary thinking has caused the idea to catch on despite its wildness. It supplies people outside the physical sciences with something that looks to them like a scientific explanation of culture – “scientific” because it looks vaguely like genetics, and because it does not mention human thought and feeling. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea Dennett ardently embraced this story, offering memetics as the only truly scientific way of explaining culture. But in Freedom Evolves he does not really need this device any longer. The need for it has vanished because he is now endorsing human thought and feeling as real parts of nature – genuine activities, not supernatural extras – part of normal causality and therefore capable of explaining what happens in culture. Yet, quite gratuitously, alongside this admirably realistic approach, Dennett still insists that memes – he explains them as comparable to liver-flukes, genuinely external to humans and having their own interests to promote – are its true scientific explanation. Occam, however, was surely wise in suggesting that we should not multiply entities beyond necessity. Might we not reasonably ask: On memetic principles, the only reason why he and others campaign so ardently for neo-Darwinism must be that a neo-Darwinist meme or fluke has infested their brains, forcing them evolevs act in this way. That is, of course, a less welcome notion than the similar explanation of the idea of God which is their favourite example. As Dawkins put it, God is perhaps a computer virus. But if you propose the method seriously you must apply it consistently. And if you ffeedom that, you should surely see that it is pure fatalism. This quaint remnant is perhaps the only serious flaw in an otherwise really admirable and helpful book. Higher education Science and nature books Philosophy books Daniel Dennett reviews. FREEDOM EVOLVES DANIEL DENNETT PDF. Freedom Evolves has ratings and reviews. Samir said: Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers “yes!” Using an array of. Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers “yes!” Using an array. Galen Strawson reviews book Freedom Evolves by Daniel C Dennett; drawings ( M). Author: Meztinris Brashura Country: Nicaragua Language: English (Spanish) Genre: Health and Food Published (Last): 13 March 2004 Pages: 391 PDF File Size: 13.76 Mb ePub File Size: 15.2 Mb ISBN: 515-1-89358-823-7 Downloads: 57126 Price: Free* [ *Free Regsitration Required ] Uploader: Nilabar. Nevertheless, like the impossibility of following the ball in quantum mechanics, I still don’t understand his exact position even after two readings of this book. What remains to be answered for me is, what is the benefit of a scientific deterministic worldview when we have concluded that the state system and the technological progress that created it freedomm that it demonstrably perpetuates in return were not, are not, and cannot be desirable? Penguin, This idea is quite fascinating if you fancy a future Utopia where: For example, I found his treatment of consciousness one chapter much more enlightening than his treatment of consciousness in Consciousness Explained a whole book! Now why on earth should we care about your question? Pages to import images to Wikidata. Dennett, in common with other compatibilists, thinks this everyday version of free will is much more important and relevant to autonomy and morality than the subatomic or metaphysical sort. What Dennett seems to do is to conflate consciousness, for which he his explanations are very agreeable and sound, with Free Will. Most, 90 percent and more, of all the organisms that have ever lived have died without viable offspring, but not a single one of your ancestors, going back to the dawn of life on Earth, suffered that normal misfortune. Dennett, Freedom EvolvesKindle ed. Like arguing for fredeom sake of arguing within daniiel parameters of the available knowledge in their field is. As Dawkins put it, God is perhaps a computer virus. Freedom Evolves – Wikipedia. This discussion was, for me at least, less compelling. Was it not in their genes, maybe roused in them by inspiring speeches from their father or encouraging notes from a teacher? That rhetoric grew out of Descartes’ dualism and an atomistic simplification that dates from the 17th century – the conviction that a single simple pattern, found in the interaction of its smallest particles, must govern the whole of nature. The key distinction here is between the physical level, the fundamental variables that determine the outcome of the coin toss, versus the design level, what agents are actually able to observe and experience. I would say, instead, “worth believing in,” as I don’t believe his case is proven. This is called the “compatibilist” version of free will, held by many philosophers from Hobbes and Hume onward. Ease and simplicity allows you to move about the world in complete obedience to its laws and decrees. If you read and liked this book, email me or message me on this website or something. What I like about that is that the philosophy is argued within the realm of philosophy – logical thought arguments. Fate by fluke. View all 12 comments. Dennett’s stance on free will is compatibilism with an evolutionary twist — the view that, although in the strict physical sense our actions might be pre-determined, we can still be free in all the ways that matter, because of the abilities we evolved. Each book contains a set of original ideas or new approaches to old problems, and for this Dennett deserves credit – a lot. And what it might mean for me to say something like, “I wish I had done such and such. And with that increase goes a steadily increasing degree of freedom: Dennett cuts through the baggage wrought by naval-gazing philosophers of the past and dennetr to the heart of the issue of free will. Dennett argues that only a deterministic world offers the stability and predictablity for nature to ‘design’ organisms that can use their dennetf to interact with the world to accomplish goals. About half-way through his book, Dennett transitions from an obsession with game theory to an preoccupation with genetic and cultural evolution. Jan 27, Polaris dsniel it it was ok. Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett. Sign in Create an account. I tend to defer to authors when reading a book by someone, you know, smarter than me, but I’m fairly certain that this is one of the worst books I’ve ever read. Mar 18, Richard Rogers rated it really liked it. Johnson April 29, So while his death in the desert was not his fault —I’m not blaming the victim—it certainly was avoidable. Human effort often does make that difference. Dennett finds an essentially indetectable notion of free will to be incredible. Here are some short steps that outline his main argument I’m sure I missed some important details. Fate by fluke. "Concern about free will is the driving force behind most of the resistance to materialism generally and neo-Darwinism in particular. "Free will is an evolved creation of human activity and beliefs, and it is just as real as such other creations as music and money. Recognising our uniqueness as reflective, communicating animals does not require any 'human exceptionalism' that must shake a defiant fist at Darwin. We may thus concede that material forces ultimately govern behaviour, and yet at the same time reject the notion that people are always and everywhere motivated by material self-interest." This is the burden of Daniel Dennett's new book and it is really welcome. As he points out, educated people today are often trapped in a strange kind of double-think on this topic. Officially, they believe physical science calls for determinism, which proves they have no control over their lives. But in actual living, most of the time they assume they do have this control. They ignore their supposedly scientific beliefs rather as their ancestors often ignored threats of eternal punishment. Yet those beliefs can still cause deep underlying anxiety, confusion, guilt and a sense of futility. Dennett shows he has grasped this odd situation. He quotes, with some alarm, a passage from a science-fiction book in which an amoral character triumphantly cites Dennett's book Consciousness Explained as proving finally that we have no free will, we cannot control our actions, and thus that we can have no duties. He rightly insists he never said this. But he does see now why people may think he did. The trouble is that, in these discussions, what chiefly gets across to the reader is not so much the detailed arguments as the general tone, the rhetoric, the way the emphasis lies. And writers like Dennett, who want to promote a worldview centring on science, are indeed often somewhat hostile to the concept of free will. They treat it as an ally of traditional religion and a prop of the penal system. They do not readily notice that it is just as necessary to today's secular morality, which centres on personal autonomy. These campaigners aim to get rid of the immortal soul. But the last thing they want to do is to lose individual freedom. In this book Dennett does at last grasp this nettle. He tries much harder than he has before to show that he understands the importance of our inner life. He devotes much of the book to dissecting the mistaken notion that "science" requires us to write off that inner life as an ineffectual shadow. Determinism, he says, is not fatalism. Fatalism teaches that human effort makes no difference to what happens, and we know this is false. Human effort often does make that difference. What makes this effectiveness seem impossible is not science but the rhetoric that has depicted the mind as a separate, helpless substance being pushed around by matter. That rhetoric grew out of Descartes' dualism and an atomistic simplification that dates from the 17th century - the conviction that a single simple pattern, found in the interaction of its smallest particles, must govern the whole of nature. Particle physics, which at that time dealt in very simple ultimate particles like billiard balls, must therefore supply the model for all other interactions. All complexity was secondary and somehow unreal. Since that time, as Dennett points out, all the sciences, including physics, have dropped that over-simple model. They find complexity and variety of patterns everywhere. That is why we now need scientific pluralism - the careful, systematic use of different thinking in different contexts to answer different questions. In particular, we are now finding steadily increasing complexity throughout the developing spectrum of organic life. The more complex creatures become, the wider is the range of activities open to them. And with that increase goes a steadily increasing degree of freedom: "The freedom of the bird to fly wherever it wants is definitely a kind of freedom, a distinct improvement on the freedom of the jellyfish to float wherever it floats, but a poor cousin of our human freedom. Human freedom, in part a product of the revolution begat of language and culture, is about as different from bird freedom as language is different from birdsong. But to understand the richer phenomenon, one must first understand its more modest components and predecessors." Interestingly, this evolutionary view of human freedom is quite close to the one Steven Rose suggested in his excellent book Lifelines. Thus, two writers who started from opposite positions in the sociobiology debate have both, on reflection, reached similar conclusions on the relation between freedom and evolution. They both make the central point that our conscious inner life is not some sort of irrelevant supernatural intrusion on the working of our physical bodies but a crucial part of their design. We have evolved as beings that can feel and think in a way that makes us able to direct our actions. This means, of course, that the self is a much larger and more complex thing than the detached soul which Descartes thought was the essence of our being. We operate as whole people. Our minds and bodies are aspects of us, not separate items. They do not need to compete for the driving seat. As Dennett points out, this holistic approach certainly works better than the simple libertarian attempt to avoid fatalism by interrupting determinism with patches of quantum indeterminacy - an attempt that could only produce spasms of randomness, not freedom. Dennett's and Rose's path between randomness and fatalism is surely essentially the right one. But it needs to be worked out with great care and sensibility. In this book Dennett does, on the whole, supply these excellent qualities. He uses a much more conciliatory tone than he did in Darwin's Dangerous Idea. There is no more fighting talk here of Darwinism being a "universal acid", eating through all other thought-systems and radically transforming them. There is not much rhetoric about sky-hooks, and there is absolutely nothing about the fashionable doctrine now known as "evolutionary psychology". Only one relic of extreme neo-Darwinism remains, namely, the doctrine of memes. Memes are supposed to be a kind of parasitical quasi-organism that function as genes (or possibly as units) of culture, producing behaviour patterns by infesting people's minds just as biological parasites infest their bodies. These mythical entities were invented, somewhat casually, by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene as a supplement to his story of the causal supremacy of genes, and the current huge popularity of evolutionary thinking has caused the idea to catch on despite its wildness. It supplies people outside the physical sciences with something that looks to them like a scientific explanation of culture - "scientific" because it looks vaguely like genetics, and because it does not mention human thought and feeling. In Darwin's Dangerous Idea Dennett ardently embraced this story, offering memetics as the only truly scientific way of explaining culture. But in Freedom Evolves he does not really need this device any longer. The need for it has vanished because he is now endorsing human thought and feeling as real parts of nature - genuine activities, not supernatural extras - part of normal causality and therefore capable of explaining what happens in culture. Yet, quite gratuitously, alongside this admirably realistic approach, Dennett still insists that memes - he explains them as comparable to liver-flukes, genuinely external to humans and having their own interests to promote - are its true scientific explanation. Occam, however, was surely wise in suggesting that we should not multiply entities beyond necessity. Might we not reasonably ask: how does memetics apply to Dennett's own case? On memetic principles, the only reason why he and others campaign so ardently for neo-Darwinism must be that a neo-Darwinist meme (or fluke) has infested their brains, forcing them to act in this way. That is, of course, a less welcome notion than the similar explanation of the idea of God which is their favourite example. (As Dawkins put it, God is perhaps a computer virus.) But if you propose the method seriously you must apply it consistently. And if you do that, you should surely see that it is pure fatalism. This quaint remnant is perhaps the only serious flaw in an otherwise really admirable and helpful book. · Mary Midgley's most recent book is Science and Poetry (Routledge) Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett. Dennett, Daniel C.; Penguin, 2004, 368 pages. ISBN 0142003840, 9780142003848. topics: | philosophy | free-will. Do we have freedom of choice? If the mind is just the brain and there is nothing else, then our behaviours can be reduced to interactions of molecules in the brain, and appear to be deterministic. If this is the case, then where is the place for free will? There are two ways of handling this situation. a. We are deterministic, and free will is a myth. Hard-headed scientific types sometimes proclaim their acceptance of this position, even declaring it a no-brainer. Many of them would add: And if determinism is false, we still don't have free will—we don't have free will in any case; it's an incoherent concept. But then, how come they hold onto this position with such vigour? Or, why do they let strongly held moral convictions to guide their actions in daily life? b. Libertarianism: We do have free will, so determinism must be false. Fortunately, thanks to quantum physicists, the received view among scientists today is that indeterminism is true (at the subatomic level and, by implication, at higher levels under various specifiable conditions). but can the indeterminism of quantum physics be related to human decision making? [p.97-98] This book considers the problem of free will (and eventually moral decision making/ ethics) in a post-cartesian mechanistic world. If everything is deterministic, we don't have free will [ch.4]. So where does choice come from? Consider intelligence as a result of a number of autonomous processes. The point is that a number of autonomous processes acting together (he uses the game of Life, by Conway, to great effect p.36-41) create a nondeterminism where systems exhibit chaotic behaviours. Details Benjamin Libet's experiment on the onset of consciousness, who shows that certain brain patterns can reliably predict this conscious awareness - presents some of Libet's original figures (p.227-230). [The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will by Benjamin Libet, Anthony Freeman, Keith Sutherland [books?id=GygmUh51_AcC] Thus, Dennett is essentially arguing that freedom is a result of increasing complexity. Thus, higher-level structures (categories) were not present in ancient organisms, but have arisen as organisms have become more complex. One of the results is the emergence of free will, and Dennett argues that this free will can exist even in a deterministic world. While he does consider game theoretic notions of equilibrium, I am surprised that Dennett does not consider the complexities arising from nonlinear system behaviour, such as chaos, which implies that even though the system is deterministic, this is true only if the input is measured with infinite precision. Hence, since our sensory inputs are finite, things for most agents in the world are far from deterministic. Hence, in God's mind (with infinite precision) all our actions, including my typing this word here now, may be pre-determined, but for me it is an act of free will. The thrust of the argument is to support the case for humans being in some way distinct from other animals, and to tie in this argument with earlier positions in western philosophy linking human uniqueness with free will. As John Gray points out in his review (below) in The Independent , this is ultimately an attempt to defend what is essentially a Judaeo-Christian stance: Extracts. Conway's game of life. Creating categories. Institutions as organisms. Are decisions voluntary? Or are they things that happen to us? Review by John Gray. to contribute some excerpts from your favourite book to book excerptise. send us a plain text file with page-numbered extracts from your favourite book. You can preface your extracts with a short review. email to (bookexcerptise [at] gmail [dot] com) .