The Atheist's Guide to Reality

Alex Rosenberg asserts the radical opinion that there is no enduring self on atheism. The existence of the self, he says, is "an illusion."^[1]

In 2011 Rosenberg published a defense of what he called "Scientism"—the claim that "the persistent questions" people ask about the nature of reality, the purpose of things, the foundations of value and morality, the way the mind works, the basis of personal identity, and the course of human history, could all be answered by the resources of science. This book was attacked on the front cover of The New Republic by Leon Wieseltier as "The worst book of the year".^[6] Leon Wiseltier's claim, in turn, was critiqued as exaggeration by Philip Kitcher in The New York Times Book Review.^[7] On February 1, 2013, Rosenberg debated Christian apologist William Lane Craig on the question 'Is Faith in God Reasonable?' during which some of the arguments of the book were discussed.^[8]

Rosenberg has contributed articles to The New York Times Op/Ed series The Stone, on naturalism, science and the humanities, and meta-ethics, and the mind's powers to understand itself by introspection that arise from the views he advanced in The Atheist's Guide to Reality.^{[9][10][11][12]}

How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of our Addiction to Stories

In 2018 Rosenberg published How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of our Addiction to Stories. This work develops the eliminative materialism of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, applying it to the role ‘the theory of mind’ plays in history and other forms of story telling. Rosenberg argues that the work of Nobel Prize winners, Eric Kandel, John O'Keefe and May-Britt Moser along with Edvard Moser reveals that the ‘‘theory of mind‘‘ employed in every day life and narrative history has no basis in the organization of the brain. Evidence from evolutionary anthropology, child psychology, medical diagnosis and neural imaging reveals it is an innate or almost innate tool that arose in Hominini evolution to foster collaboration among small numbers of individuals in immediate contact over the near future, but whose predictive weakness beyond this domain reveals its explanatory emptiness.^[13]

Critical discussions of Rosenberg’s work

In How History Gets Things Wrong Rosenberg claims people never really think about anything. Therefore, it is simply an illusion that people possess intentional states. He admits that therefore the (apparently derived) intentionality of inscriptions and speech cannot be derived from the (original) intentionality of thought. Rosenberg has not provided an account of the intentionality of speech and writing, and may in fact deny that they bear any either. In The Atheist's Guide to Reality he states that its sentences are tools for moving information into the reader's brain, triggering new neural firings. However, critics note that doing so cannot be Rosenberg's purpose in writing the book because on his position no one really has any purposes.

While attracting some interest for its arguments about the philosophy of mind, Rosenberg's critique of narrative history in How History Gets Things Wrong has attracted criticism in academic reviews. Reviewers including Alexandre Leskanich in The English Historical Review,^[14] Jacob Ivey in Philosophia,^[15] and Michael Douma in Journal of Value Inquiry^[16] faulted the book for failing to engage with literature in the philosophy of history and narratology and for oversimplified treatment of historical examples. Ivey also argued that Rosenberg's call for a Darwinian approach to historical explanation failed to acknowledge the limitations of past attempts to apply this approach and the complicated relationship in practice between Darwinian and humanistic methods in history.^[15]

Rosenberg's treatment of fitness as a supervenient property, which is an undefined concept in the theory of natural selection, is criticized by Brandon and Beatty.^[17] His original development of how the supervenience of Mendelian concepts blocks traditional derivational reduction was examined critically by C. Kenneth Waters.^[18] His later account of reduction in developmental biology was criticized by Günter Wagner.^[19] Elliott Sober's "Multiple realization arguments against reductionism"^[20] reflects a shift towards Rosenberg's critique of anti-reductionist arguments of Putnam's and Fodor's.

Sober has also challenged Rosenberg's view that the principle of natural selection is the only biological law.^[21]

The explanatory role of the principle of natural selection and the nature of evolutionary probabilities defended by Rosenberg were subject to counter arguments by Brandon^[22] and later by Denis Walsh.^[23] Rosenberg's account of the nature of genetic drift and the role of probability in the theory of natural selection draws on significant parallels between the principle of natural selection and the second law of thermodynamics.

In the philosophy of social science, Rosenberg's more skeptical views about microeconomics were challenged first by Wade Hands,^[24] and later by Daniel Hausman in several books and articles.^[25] The financial crisis of 2007–08 resulted in renewed attention to Rosenberg's skeptical views about microeconomics. Biologist Richard Lewontin and historian Joseph Fracchia express skepticism about Rosenberg's claim that functional explanations in social science require Darwinian underlying mechanisms.^[26]

The Girl From Krakow

Rosenberg's 2015 novel, The Girl From Krakow, Lake Union Publishing, is a narrative about a young woman named Rita Feuerstahl from 1935 to 1947, mainly focusing on her struggles to survive in Nazi-occupied Poland and later in Germany, under a false identity. A secondary plot involves her lover's experiences in France and Spain during its Civil War in the 1930s and then in Moscow during the war. Rosenberg has acknowledged that the novel is based on the wartime experiences of people he knew. He has also admitted the incongruity of writing a narrative, given his attack on the form in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. He has said that The Girl from Krakow began as an attempt to put some of the difficult arguments of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality into a form easier to grasp".^[27] The Girl From Krakow has been translated into Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Hebrew and Croatian.

Autumn in Oxford

In 2016 Rosenberg's second novel, Autumn in Oxford, appeared, also published by Lake Union Publishing. An afterword identifies the large number of real persons—academics, civil rights advocates, military officers, politicians and intelligence agents from the 1940s and '50s who figure in the narrative.

The Intrigues of Jennie Lee

in 2020 Rosenberg's third novel was published by Top Hat Books. An afterword identities the large number of public figures from Great Britain in the '30s who figure in the novel, including Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon--the subsequent centenarian Queen Mother, Lady Astor, Ellen Wilkinson, Ramsay MacDonald and Oswald Mosley.

In the Shadows of Enigma

Rosenberg's fourth historical novel, a sequel to “The Girl from Krakow”, was published in 2021, also by Top Hat Books. This novel offers an explanation of why the Western Allies—the US, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia—kept the breaking of the German Enigma code secret for 30 years after the end of the Second World War. Four characters from his earlier novel figure in the sequel, Rita Feuerstahl, her partner Gil Romero, her son Stefan and a former Gestapo detective still working for the German Federal Republic, Otto Schulke.