Sam Harris: Critical Responses

“Sam Harris is one of the world’s most provocative and exciting thinkers and this volume is an essential contribution to the debate over his ideas. I highly recommend it.”

-Michael Shellenberger, author of San Fransicko (2021) and Apocalypse Never (2020).

“Sam Harris is an important and influential public thinker on philosophy, science, religion, and socio-political life. Sam Harris: Critical Responses provides the reader with a survey of his thought that is often critical but always substantive. It is a welcome contribution written for a broad audience.”

-Joshua R. Farris, author of The Creation of Self: A Case for the Soul (2023)

“As with Jordan Peterson, if you mention the name ‘Sam Harris’ in academic company, you invite snickers and sneers. Yet as this volume shows, popularity with the public is by no means a sign of shallow thinking, but often indicates deep engagement with philosophy as a way of life. Sam Harris’s fans and critics alike should take notice.”

-Tristan J. Rogers, author of The Authority of Virtue: Institutions and Character in the Good Society (2020)

“This is a delightful collection of well-wrought essays about a public intellectual whose notoriety rests on many ill-conceived ideas.”

-Michael Rectenwald, author of The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty (2023)

“The greatest honor paid to a thinker is taking his ideas seriously. Sam Harris and his ideas have been given such a careful examination in this book. His critics respond to an important set of questions and potential answers that have formed an interesting career spanning several decades…Few agree with everything Harris has argued and few will agree with every essay in this book. The collection will improve the dialogue, however. This volume is well worth a careful read.”

-John Mark Reynolds, President of Saint Constatine College, where he teaches philosophy with a focus on Plato

Sam Harris: Critical Responses blends philosophy with political science in a survey that intersects both disciplines by examining thinker Sam Harris and his ideas. Nineteen critical essays consider a wide range of Harris’s social and political ideals, from how his Moral Landscape treatise works to his neuroscientific training and how it lends a particular perspective to his views of AI technology, superintelligence, and other scientific evolutionary processes. The result requires a prior familiarity with Sam Harris and his works, but will prove enlightening to those with such a background, or students interested in philosophical debates about his works and perspectives.

James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief of Midwest Book Review