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Category: Philosophy

An Introduction to Law and Legal Reasoning by Steven J. Burton

Posted on September 13, 2022November 4, 2022
Topics: Philosophy, Textbooks

Rating: 8.1/10. Book that describes at a high level how the law works, suitable for laymen or beginning law students. The purpose of legal system is to settle disputes that arise in a complex society in a fair and peaceful way. There are competing views on how deterministic are the judgments made by the legal…

The Art Question by Nigel Warburton

Posted on August 1, 2022August 1, 2022
Topics: Arts and Music, Nonfiction, Philosophy

Rating: 8.0/10. Philosophical investigation into the question of: “What is art?” This question is often asked when faced with certain postmodern art pieces, such as readymade objects like a urinal displayed in an art gallery. Bell proposes that art must have “significant form” — choices made by a human artist in order to produce an…

On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

Posted on November 19, 2021April 11, 2022
Topics: Classics, Philosophy

Rating: 8.3/10. One of the most influential philosophical essays by English philosopher John Stuart Mill, written in 1859 and espousing the values of individual freedom. It has since served as a foundational work for liberalism and many of its principles have been adopted into democratic societies. Mill argues that society tends to force the preferences…

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

Posted on August 22, 2021April 11, 2022
Topics: Novels / Fiction, Philosophy

Rating: 7.9/10. While technically a novel, there is not much a plot beyond the narrator conversing with a telepathic gorilla in a Socratic dialogue. Ishmael, the gorilla, teaches willing pupils on how to save the world. According to Ishmael, our civilization has accomplished many impressive feats, but is on a surefire path to self-destruction since…

An Introduction to Political Philosophy by Jonathan Wolff

Posted on July 26, 2021April 11, 2022
Topics: Philosophy, Textbooks

Rating: 8.1/10. Political philosophy asks questions about the purpose of government and how power should be distributed in a society. To better understand the role of a state, the first chapter considers what would happen in a “state of nature” where there is no government. Hobbes thought without laws, everyone would be at war constantly….

Metaethics: An Introduction by Andrew Fisher

Posted on March 8, 2021April 10, 2022
Topics: Philosophy, Textbooks

Rating: 7.6/10. Summary Metaethics is a second-order philosophy: whereas normative ethics is the study of principles of what’s right and what’s wrong, metaethics studies what we’re doing when we talk about ethics. Are moral facts real, expressing a belief, or expressing an emotion? How do we know if a moral fact is true? The book…

Six Myths About the Good Life by Joel J. Kupperman

Posted on February 24, 2021April 10, 2022
Topics: Philosophy, Textbooks

Rating: 7.9/10. Summary Fairly short book by a philosophy professor asking “what makes a life good?” This is a fundamental question for ethics because any ethical theory must assume some kind of utility function (what is good for an individual) before it can consider what’s best for society as a whole. This book examines a…

Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder

Posted on August 8, 2020April 10, 2022
Topics: Nonfiction, Philosophy

Rating: 7.7/10. Novel about the history of philosophy, set in Norway, in the form of monologues between a 14-year-old girl Sophie and a mysterious philosopher Alberto Knox, who sends her letters teaching her philosophy. This has the purpose of explaining philosophical ideas in the form that a teenager can understand. In the first half of…

Four Views on Free Will by Kane, Fischer, Pereboom, and Vargas

Posted on July 17, 2020April 10, 2022
Topics: Philosophy, Textbooks

Rating: 8.7/10. Ch1: Libertarianism (Robert Kane) Libertarianism is the view that the universe is not deterministic, and this is necessary for FW; also, FW is necessary for moral responsibility. It’s closest to laymen’s intuitions about FW. Compatibilists attack it in two ways: (1) by claiming that determinism doesn’t conflict with FW, and (2) that indeterminism…

Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan B. Peterson

Posted on June 8, 2020April 10, 2022
Topics: Nonfiction, Philosophy

Rating: 6.6/10. Jordan Peterson’s first book, written in 1999, two decades before he became famous and wrote “12 Rules for Life“. This one is over 400 pages and is a lot more dense, although not written for academic philosophers. The basic theme is that mythology should be studied as a representation of meaning, in an…

Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

Posted on January 4, 2020April 10, 2022
Topics: Nonfiction, Philosophy

Rating: 7.8/10. It is unclear whether or when strong AI (superior to humans on a wide range of tasks) will be achieved, but many experts predict 2040-2050. Some possible ways to achieve strong AI: Current artificial intelligence path: unclear whether this will succeed, but it’s also the most unpredictable, since a small missing piece can…

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Posted on November 14, 2019April 10, 2022
Topics: Nonfiction, Philosophy

Rating: 8.5/10. An autobiographical book where the author describes the psychology of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. What’s the difference between the survivors and non-survivors? According to Frankl, the key difference is the will to survive — in the camps, you constantly have to use clever means to survive (eg: trading cigarettes for soup to…

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