Philosophy Past Readings

2023–2024

Kieran Setiya, Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way
Simon Blackburn, Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy
Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought

Julian Baggini, What’s It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life
Yvonnne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers
Zena Hitz, Lost In Thought
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Emily Katz Anhalt, Embattled: How Ancient Greek Myths Empower Us to Resist Tyranny
Steven Pinker, Rationality
Robert Wright, The Evolution of God
Julian Baggini, The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us About Living Well
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings (edited by Giles Gunn)
A. C. Grayling, Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope
Aristotle, Poetics (preferably Oxford Classics edition)

Martha C. Franks, Books Without Borders: Homer, Aeschylus, Galileo, Melville, and Madison Go to China
Wolfram Ellenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy
Stephen Mumford, Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Julia Annas, Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Intoduction
Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, Lives of the Stoics
Edith Hall, Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life
Steven Nadler, Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How To Love and How To Die
Lucretius, The Nature of Things

Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life; and more writings by Thoreau such as “Civil Disobedience”
Carlos Baker, Emerson Among the Eccentrics; plus a few essays by Emerson such as “The American Scholar” or “Divinity School Address”
Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters
Pre-Socratic Philosophers

Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Penguin edition preferred)
Jules Evan, Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations
Carlin Romano, excerpts from America the Philosophical
Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness
Thomas Pink, Free Will: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford)
Brian Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher
Ted Honderich, How Free Are You
Michael Puett, The Path—What Chinese Philosophy Can Teach Us About The Good Life
Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity
Mary Jane Jacob, Dewey for Artists
Ralph Waldo Emerson miscellany such as The Heart of Emerson’s Journals (edited by Bliss Perry), and Emerson In His Journals (edited by Joel Porte)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them
John Kaag, American Philosophy: A Love Story
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men
The Bhagavad Gita
Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
R. J. Hollingdale, editor, A Nietzsche Reader

Ancius Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
Matthew Stewart, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic
Arthur Herman, The Cave and The Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker
Naomi Klein, No Logo
Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story
William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Life
Morris Dickstein, ed. The Revival of Pragmatism (first section)
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom