POPPER, Karl, & John C. Eccles.

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The Self and Its Brain. With 66 Figures. First edition, presentation copy, inscribed on the front free endpaper to Popper's friend, the philosophical broadcaster Bryan Magee, "To Bryan, with love, from Karl. November 3rd, 1977". By the 1970s, Popper and Magee (1930-2019) were friends and intellectual allies. Popper appeared twice on Magee's 1970 radio series Conversations with Philosophers, and in 1973 Magee wrote a laudatory book-length study of Popper's thought: one of the earliest such studies of Popper. In his 1998 memoirs, Magee judged Popper "the foremost philosopher of the age" (p. 246).A loosely inserted 1978 letter from Gerhard D. Wassermann (1919-2004), a biologist at Newcastle University, indicates that Magee sought to canvas opinion on The Self and Its Brain among working scientists. Unfortunately, Wassermann was unpersuaded by the book's arguments against epiphenomenalism, contending that it was indeed compatible with natural selection. Magee has made several small ink annotations in the book's margins. The Self and Its Brain was jointly written by Popper and the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist John C, Eccles. The two men sought to develop a philosophy of the mind which would integrate older philosophical concepts of the self with newer discoveries in neurobiology.

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