Reading
What’s on my desk, and the plan for the shelves behind it.
On my desk
I read several books at once and move between them. Right now:
- God in Search of Man, Abraham Joshua Heschel: modern Jewish sufism in the language of philosophy. It dovetails with Rambam in unexpected places.
- Discourses and Selected Writings, Epictetus: a reread, after Marcus Aurelius and Seneca.
- Guide to Philosophy, C. E. M. Joad
- The Hemlock Cup, Bettany Hughes
- A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
- Journey Through Genius, William Dunham
- On the Wisdom of America, Lin Yutang
- The Compass of Zen, Zen Master Seung Sahn
- The Compassionate Mind, Paul Gilbert
- Ready for Anything, Samantha Boardman
- Isla Negra, Pablo Neruda
- The Western Canon, Harold Bloom
- Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte
The plan
The shelves behind the desk turned into a reading plan in three subjects: science, mathematics, and philosophy. I alternate between them instead of finishing one before starting the next. Philosophy runs in ten tracks, from method and the Greeks to mind, systems, politics, and art.
Science
Bryson, then experiments, Einstein and Infeld, Feynman, Atkins on the laws of thermodynamics, Russell on relativity, Rees, Gleick on chaos, and Gribbin and Ian Stewart on complexity and life.
Mathematics
Dunham, Maor, Singh on Fermat, Crease, Rucker, the history of zero and of infinity, calculus and probability with the exercises, then Barrow, Kline, Davis and Hersh, and Russell on foundations.
Orientation and method
Magee’s The Great Philosophers, Michalos on reasoning, and Philosophy as It Is.
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics
The Trials of Socrates, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, the Analects of Confucius beside them, and The Stoics Reader.
The good life
Bakewell on Montaigne, Slote, Hare, Fromm, Kaufmann, Katz on mysticism, and Levinas’ Beyond the Verse.
Knowledge and the early moderns
Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza through The Courtier and the Heretic, Kenny, and Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations.
Language and social meaning
Russell on meaning and truth, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Winch, Rorty, Eco, and Margaret Gilbert on social facts.
Freedom and institutions
Marx and Engels, Fromm, Buber’s Paths in Utopia, Cassirer, Arendt, Nelson’s The Hebrew Republic, Fanon, and Hourani’s Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age.
Mind, cybernetics, and systems
The Mind’s I, Braitenberg, Andy Clark, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Bertalanffy, Churchman, and Bateson’s Mind and Nature.
Culture and identity
Du Bois, Minnich, Appiah, Vico’s New Science, Boltanski, and Gould against Brown on human universals.
Nietzsche and after
Zarathustra, Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café, Sartre, Foucault, Culler on deconstruction, and Caputo.
Art and media
Ong’s Orality and Literacy, Ortega y Gasset, and Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics.