Since their breakthrough hit "Creep" in 1993, Radiohead hascontinued to make waves throughout popular and political culturewith its views about the Bush presidency (its 2003 album was titledHail to the Thief), its anti-corporatism, its pioneering efforts toproduce ecologically sound road tours, and, most of all, itsdecision in 2007 to sell its latest album, In Rainbows, online witha controversial "pay-what-you-want" price. Radiohead and Philosophyoffers fresh ways to appreciate the lyrics, music, and conceptualground of this highly innovative band. The chapters in this bookexplain how Radiohead’s music connects directly to thephilosophical phenomenology of thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Pontyand Martin Heidegger, the existentialism of Albert Camus and JeanPaul Sartre, and the philosophical politics of Karl Marx, JeanBaudrillard, and Noam Chomsky. Fans and critics know that Radioheadis "the only band that matters" on the scene today — Radiohead andPhilosophy shows why.

What are human beings like? How is knowledge possible? What istruth? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these havestood at the center of Western philosophy for centuries. Inaddressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamentalassumptionsthat we can know our own minds by introspection, thatmost of our thinking about the world is literal, and that reason isdisembodied and universalthat are now called into question bywell-established results of cognitive science. It has been shownempirically that:Most thought is unconscious. We have no directconscious access to the mechanisms of thought and language. Ourideas go by too quickly and at too deep a level for us to observethem in any simple way. Abstract concepts are mostly metaphorical.Much of the subject matter of philosopy, such as the nature oftime, morality, causation, the mind, and the self, relies heavilyon basic metaphors derived from bodily experience. What is literalin our reasoning about such concepts is minimal and conceptuallyim