Books by Michael Austin

Democracy requires citizens who can argue as friends. Disagreement drives our democratic processes, but outrage and enmity degrade the civic fabric that enables us to govern ourselves. We Must Not Be Enemies explores the American tradition of civic debate and argues that the health of our democracy requires that we work to recover this tradition

Issue 3 of Speculations: A Journal in Speculative Realism, covering a wide range of topics (from the philosophy of religion to psychoanalysis, from the philosophy of science to gender studies), formats (articles, interviews, position pieces, translations, and review essays) and authors (from well-published authors to the best among a new generation of philosophers). Contributors include: Benjamin Norris, Beatrice Marovich, Levi Bryant, Daniel Whistler, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Christopher Norris, Michael Haworth, Graham Harman, Louis Morelle, Christian Thorne, Peter Wolfendale, Fabio Gironi, Daniel Sacilotto, Dave Mesing, Maxwell Kennel, and Yuting Zou.

New Testaments examines sequelization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from two perspectives: 1) the cognitive perspective, which explores the cognitive and evolutionary foundations of the contradictory desires to produce, and to resist, narrative closure; and 2) the biblical perspective, which explains that the connections between sequels and their original works were often constructed with the same tools that the culture used to forge the Old and New Testaments into a single, coherent narrative.

An exploration of why humans are drawn to fictional stories through the application of evolution theory and cognitive science