Sarah Braybrooke and Philip Gwyn Jones at Scribe UK have acquired UK and Commonwealth (ex ANZ) rights to This Isn’t A Debate by journalist, ethicist, and recovering champion debater Eleanor Gordon-Smith.
This Isn’t A Debate is a narrative field guide to how people really change their minds, and what we can do to help. It combines contemporary philosophy with real-world stories to explore what makes the process of changing minds so complex, starting with Gordon-Smith’s own experience of challenging men who catcalled her and trying to change their minds about street harassment – an experience she reported on for NPR’s This American Life.
The book goes on to explore the ethics of belief through in-depth interviews with people who have changed their minds about some of their most fundamental views: who they “really” are, whether their spouse is capable of heinous crimes, whether their parents adopted them, whether they want to end their lives, or whether they really believe in the teachings of a punitive religious sect
Currently at Princeton University, Gordon-Smith combines philosophical rigour with reportage and powerful storytelling to explore a question that has never been more urgent; in an irrational age, how do we form our beliefs about the world – and about ourselves?
Gwyn Jones says: ‘Rarely do we come across a book proposal that has so much clarity of thinking, clarity of purpose, clarity of structure and such character. This is a glorious uplifting piece of hybridised behavioural science and popular philosophy, and I believe that Gordon-Smith deserves to be one of the leading voices in the next generation of public philosophers.’
Braybrooke says: ‘This is such a lucid, elegant and above all fun look at a vital subject. Gordon-Smith not only tells some incredible stories, she articulates an approach to the ethics of belief that can't fail to win over any reader, whether they see themselves as a champion for evidence-based argument or whether they think logic is an oppressive term.’
Rights were acquired in a pre-empt from Jeff Shreve of The Science Factory, acting on behalf of NewSouth Publishing (UNSW Press). It will be published in the UK and Australia in mid-2019.