Out of all the books I’ve read, some have really stood out in their profundity; and have played a large part in the formation of my philosophy. I thought it might be useful to start a thread, as I am interested to see what books others have considered instrumental.
On the nature of the universe:
The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality - by Brian Greene
On the origins of morality:
Our Inner Ape - by Frans de Waal
On the modern day application of morality:
The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values - by Sam Harris
On the origins of human sexuality:
Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships- by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha
On the modern day application of human sexuality:
A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships - by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam
On Evolution:
Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body - by Neil Shubin
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - by Matt Ridley
So, even with all the books I’ve read, I can’t complete a top 10 list. Still room for 3 more.
None of these are familiar to me. Neither the subject (with the exception of Nietzsche) or the authors (except Goethe, whom I have heard of, but not read).
I look forward to reading these, and hopefully gaining new insights.
And to Faust:
I find Nietzsche’s philosophy fascinating - especially the Master Morality/Slave Morality concept. Unfortunately, I find him a bit hard to read. I really enjoyed Robert Solomon’s course on Nietzsche from The Teaching company. I find it easier for me to digest his material when it is presented in a more “modern” tongue. But yeah - he’s one of my favorites. I just could not put his books on my list, because of how hard it is for me to “translate” (and that’s AFTER it’s been translated into English)
I read Russell’s History of Western Philosophy - enjoyed it thoroughly. I’ll have to check out the other ones you’ve recommended from him. The other ones also look likes ones I’d enjoy - so I will add them to my list as well.
And a big thanks to everyone who is taking to time to add your books. I very much appreciate it!
Dude, don’t leave out the Sneetches. It covers a lot of ground - some of the same ground that Nietzsche covers, in fact. And it’s a lot easier to read. And you cannot count yourself as even educated without having read at least most of the OT. You can leave out Numbers. Boring.
I’ve had most of the bible read to me. It was easier than reading it myself. I think the bible is an influence on post modernism. For example, human rights is a big thing today, but I think it came out of a christian mood. All races are equal = more christian mood. Justice based on the ideal of free will, another christian mood.
Some things I’ve learned on my own, and some things I’ve learned from ILP. I have not read allot of books. I read some of nietszche’s books but I forgot because of how it’s been a few years now.
I think the bible has been my biggest influence, even though I am not a christian. I still was attracted to the whole eutopianism. I made up my own ideal after ditching parts of christianity that I didn’t agree with.
Excellent question. I’ll give some books that have changed my way of thinking about things - although not necessarily to what it is now. I honestly believe that if you ever stop reading, or only read the type of books you’re going to agree with anyway, you’ll stagnate. So much of this is part of my history, but not so much a part of where I am now.
Book of Ecclesiastes - yeah, it’s the bible, blah blah, but it’s one of the first glimpses I got at the struggle to make sense of things, accept things, structure the world and ones place in it.
Godel, Escher, Bach; Hofstadter - cleverly-written, entertaining, and pretty heavyweight introduction to mathematical logic, why Godel was important and what he said, recursion, self-reference, paradox… all sorts of interesting things, written in a way that makes it clear why they’re interesting.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Pirsig - I think you pretty much have to be a white male between 18 and 25 to get much out of this book, based on my and various friends’ responses to it; I was, and I loved it. It drew my attention to the Buddhist way of thought, explained from the viewpoint of someone trained in (western) philosophy. Made me more aware of the moment, and mindfulness, and sympathetic to eastern thought.
Philosophical Investigations; Wittgenstein - some people hate it, some people love it, some people get bored three pages in. I love it, it has immediate points to make and some that only sink in after you’ve reread it a couple of times, seen the structure and method. A lot of it is just a completely new look at things - as thought everyone else sees the candlestick, and he points out the two faces either side. I could have put On Certainty instead, it’s from the same period and a much more focussed look at certainty and belief (insofar as W is ever focussed - “I do philosophy now like an old woman who is always mislaying something and having to look for it again: now her spectacles, now her keys.”).
After Virtue; Macintyre - I think one of the best books on morality of the past century, and beautifully written, too. Certainly one of the most influential on the last thirty years of moral philosophy, making the case for a return to virtue ethics in the modern world.
Capital; Marx - really impressive (and big) work, and completely changed my view of Hegelian dialectic for the better. The descriptive economics is excellent, the prescriptive politics less so. It’s also nice to have read it to contextualise it . And realise how little most people seem to know about Marxism as it was formed - capitalists don’t read it because it’s too heavy by Marx, Marxists don’t read it because it’s too heavy about capitalism
The Black Swan; Taleb - an interesting application of classical philosophy to modern-day economics and society. Much better than my description makes it sounds - a critique of mathematics, of psychology, of values.
The Concept of Mind; Ryle - one of the major Ordinary Language Philosophy textbooks - well-written, clear, concise, entertaining, but quietly revolutionary. Does away with the ghost-in-the-machine mythology, but doesn’t leave you with just a machine, as the current trend of scientist thought tends to attempt. Ryle was also Dennett’s PhD supervisor, I believe.
The Tao of Nature; Chuang Tzu - one of the basic Taoist texts. It teaches a way of looking at things, inverting things, flipping them on their head and asking different questions, in order to stop asking questions.
Genealogy of Morals; Nietzsche - Nietzsche’s like salt for your philosophy. You need a bit to make it interesting, but too much is poison. This (and Beyond Good and Evil) is the interesting bit.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Kuhn - this is pretty much essential reading for anyone seriously interested in what science tells us: as important as Popper, maybe more so. And it’s also important to read it because a lot of people think it says something very different to what it says. The way science works in paradigms, that progress is not gradual but incremental, the mechanisms of improved scientific understanding - it’s all there.
Those are the influential ones, for me. There are bucketsful of important ones on top of that - Hume’s Treatise/Enquiry, Schopenhauer’s Will and Representation, Spinoza’s Ethics; the recently-written Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman, or Being Wrong by Schulz; Dawkins’ Selfish Gene, Sense and Sensibilia by Austin… but they didn’t really influence me, so much as explicate or educate. They provided facts and arguments and helped me see where I was right and wrong, without changing my worldview. But still, read them all.
Looking at your list, if I had to recommend a book that I think you would enjoy, I’d go with Steven Jay Gould’s “Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle”, it’s a philosophical/scientific take on the history of geology.
And for anyone, everyone, I’d recommend “The Art of Clear Thinking” by Rudolf Flesch. It’s an old book, from the late 40s/early 50s, written by one of the first modern psychologists. But it’s written well, and clearly, and is full of interesting things. Some things are really dated, but… it’s just great. I love it.
Sartre “nausea”
Eldridge cleaver “soul on ice”
Susan sontag “illness as a metaphor”
Kierkegaard “this sickness unto death”
Nitzche. “The birth of Tragedy”
Wittgenstein “philosophical investigations”
Schopenhauer “the vanity of existence”
Marcuse “one dimensional Man”
Camus “myth of sysyphus”
Sartre “saint genet”
I will only list a couple of books that may be of interest to the OP. And yes, they belong among the ones that have been the most influential for my philosophy.
Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, by Laurence Lampert;
Nietzsche’s Teaching. An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, also by Laurence Lampert; and
The Mating Mind. How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, by Geoffrey Miller.
Nearly a decade ago, I picked up my very first book of philosophy and it was Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I shit you not. I’m not sure how it fell into my hands, but most people start with something like Sophie’s World, and if you have a choice, I’d recommend starting with something like that. I made it about a th ird of the way into CPR, and then discovered that Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics was Kant’s version of CPR for dummies. Obviously, I understood nothing from CPR but got a great deal out of the Prolegomena. I still think that’s one of the most important impacts on my philosophical life… I mean, the realism idealism issue, the question of how you know what you think you know, and transcendental investigations.
From there, I wandered around with some books you might expect were relevant… Descartes’ Meditations, and George Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Understanding.
This was all a part of purging myself of ideas I didn’t have a legitimate claim to. The basic project behind transcendental questions—questions about what makes something possible–as well as Cartesian skepticism, and Berkeley’s radical idealism, is all part of the Socratic one of removing falsehoods from your thinking, and recognizing to know when you don’t know something. That intellectual humility is absolutely critical, and needed here for people like volchok and Gobbo and SIATD, who are given to making preposterous leaps, like then cartoon coyote who only falls after he looks downward.
I experienced Socratic aporia in works like Euthyphro and Republic, but at some point, a guy’s gotta have answers. Only knowing that you know nothing gets tiring, and it’d even be better to make stuff up… create it for yourself.
Nietzsche’s unpublished notebooks, and Beyond Good and Evil, and everything else he wrote. I’ve read each more than I can count on one hand, and some more than both hands. Never read Nietzsche cover to cover. Read an aphroism, and don’t read again for days… let it sink in. It’s tough to say what I got out of it. A self-reliance, self-indulgence, maybe… maybe just beautiful writing, like lightening bolts, and that’s it.
If you ever read Nietzsche, balance him out with something like Heretics by G.K. Chesterton, for sanity.
I’ve been talking about morality a lot lately, but surprisingly I come by my consequentialism independently of Mill and Bentham. Sure, I’ve read then, I just don’t think they had much impact.
Plato’s Republic, Symposium, The Phaedrus were my first works I studied seriously.
Goethe’s Faust Trying to wrap my head around this book is amazing and moving. Art teaches, it’s depth psychology with a passion. Like friction is to motion, err is to living. Never let the storms and stresses stop you from reaching wholeness and transcendence. “Tarry awhile, thou art so fair”
Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy
Collingwood’s The Idea of History Man’s goal writ-large to acquire self respect.
D. N. Robinson’s An Intellectual History of Psychology He writes densely at times, but it’s a worthy read. Also recommened by him are Aristotle’s Psychology and Consciousness and Mental Life.
Guthrie’s The Pythagorean Sourcebook Fitness, balance, harmony, proportion, and the task of getting it just right, perfectly so. Pythagoras wasa perfectionist. The first to call himself a philosopher. This is a man of gold.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet The trials and tribulations of the contemplative mind. To take arms against a sea of trouble or suffer the slings and arrows of outragous misfortune.
Erasmus’ Praise of Folly A sermon that ought to humble the most hubristic of all, even yours truly. If you think your on a flight path to Mt. Olympus, maybe this book will sting your winged horse.
Thomas Reid’s An Inquiry Into the Human Mind A witty perspective on Hume and others during the enlightenment. A good common sense philosophy. If you’re pragmatic, this might be down your alley.
These are a few that have expanded my mind, on top of all the classwork my professors give me.
The Sneetches is great. Most definately, “oh the places you’ll go” is up there also. But these did not influence me, these agreed with me after I had already been influenced.
The Bible, in more ways than anything, is my primary influence. From believing it, to disbelieving it. Taking what I see as good, and what I see as bad. This book broke it all open for me, it cracked the world like an egg on a frying pan and cooked it.
Everything else is just supplemental or disagreeable, from my own thoughts. I unfortunately have not had the luxury to read a book and have the authors thoughts smash into me like some sort of cosmic mind blowing blitzkrieg of enlightenment. I have always read with a critical eye, weary of deceit.
