A short life of the author
Samuel Benjamin Harris (b. 9 April 1967) was born in Los Angeles to a secular Jewish mother (the television producer Susan Harris, creator of The Golden Girls) and a Quaker father. He studied English at Stanford, dropped out, spent eleven years studying meditation in India and Nepal — including extended retreats with Dzogchen and Advaita Vedanta teachers — then returned to Stanford to complete his degree in philosophy. He earned a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA.
Life and Career
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004) — published in the wake of the September 11 attacks — argued that religious moderation provides cover for fundamentalism and that faith-based thinking is inherently dangerous. The book won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award and, together with Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great, defined the New Atheism movement.
Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) was a compressed polemic aimed at religious conservatives. The Moral Landscape (2010) argued that science can determine human values — that questions of morality are ultimately questions about the well-being of conscious creatures, and that these questions have right and wrong answers discoverable through empirical inquiry. The thesis was provocative; professional philosophers largely disagreed, but the book reached a vast popular audience.
Free Will (2012) — a short, devastating argument that the subjective sense of free will is an illusion — was his most philosophically concentrated work. Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014) drew on his years of meditation practice to argue for a secular spirituality grounded in direct experience of consciousness. It remains his most personally revealing and least adversarial book.
His Making Sense podcast (launched 2013) and the Waking Up meditation app (launched 2018) have made him one of the most listened-to intellectual voices in the English-speaking world.
Major Works and Themes
Harris writes about consciousness — its nature, its ethical implications, and the possibility of transforming it through contemplative practice. His career is unusual in combining militant atheism with genuine meditative experience; he argues not against spiritual experience but against the dogmatic frameworks that claim to own it. His most persistent controversy involves his arguments about Islam, which critics characterise as Islamophobic and supporters defend as honest engagement with the specific doctrines of a specific religion.
Key Works
- The End of Faith (2004)
- The Moral Landscape (2010)
- Free Will (2012)
- Waking Up (2014)
Collecting Harris
The End of Faith (2004, W.W. Norton) — first edition, first printing — brings $30–$80. Signed copies are available from his speaking tours. Free Will and Lying are slim volumes; firsts bring $10–$25.