My Reading List
The most valuable books I've come across. In descending order of impact on my life...
Things Hidden Since the Foundations of the World
by Rene Girard
The Uses and Abuses of History for Life
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Democracy in America
by Alexis de Tocqueville
Rousseau’s Theodicy
by Frederick Neuhouser
Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory
by Frederick Neuhouser
三国演义
The Vimalakirti Sutra
The Philosophy of Right
by Georg Hegel
Recognition
by Axel Honneth
Desire, Deceit, and the Novel
by Rene Girard
The Genealogy of Morals
by Friedrich Nietzsche
西游记
Lack and Transcendence
by David Loy
The Phenomenology of Spirit
by Georg Hegel
Debt
by David Graeber
The Republic
by Plato
The Denial of Death
by Ernest Becker
The Struggle for Recognition
by Axel Honneth
The Prince
by Niccolo Machiavelli
The Theban Trilogy
by Sophocles
Fear and Trembling
by Soren Kierkegaard
Battling to the End
by Rene Girard
Confessions
by St. Augustine
The Actuality of Philosophy
by Theodore Adorno
Nichomachean Ethics
by Aristotle
The City of God
by St. Augustine
Either/Or
by Soren Kierkegaard
On the Jewish Question
by Karl Marx
In Love with the World
by Mingyur Rinpoche
The Inferno
by Dante Alighieri
Destined for War
by Graham Allison
The Straussian Moment
by Peter Thiel
Lost in Thought
by Zena Hitz
The Concept of the Political
by Carl Schmitt
The Nine Cloud Dream
by Kim ManJung
The Symposium
by Plato
The Critique of Pure Reason
by Immanuel Kant
水浒传
Paradise Lost
by John Milton
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
by Max Weber
The Gay Science
by Friedrich Nietzsche
When these Things Begin
by Rene Girard
The Elephant in the Brain
by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson
The Selfish Gene
by Richard Dawkins
Persecution and the Art of Writing
by Leo Strauss
Violence and the Sacred
by Rene Girard
Leisure, the Basis of Culture
by Joseph Pieper
Bullshit Jobs
by David Graeber
The Truth of Tripartition
by Myles Burnyeat
The Rise and Fall of American Growth
by Robert Gordon
The Euthyphro
by Plato
The Critique of Judgement
by Immanuel Kant
Socialism
by Axel Honneth
The Meno
by Plato
The Apology
by Plato
The Dialectic of Enlightenment
by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer
Twilight of the Idols
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Macbeth
by William Shakespeare
The Aenid
by Vergil
The Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life
by Shantideva
The Oresteia Trilogy
by Aeschylus
Man’s Search for Meaning
by Victor Frankl
The Odyssey
by Homer
Elementary Particles
by Michel Houellebecq
Das Kapital
by Karl Marx
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
by Rene Girard
Philosophical Fragments
by Soren Kierkegaard
论语
Politics
by Aristotle
The Emptiness that is Form
by Thomas Freeman Yarnall
Simulacra and Simulation
by Jean Baudrillard
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
Sappho
The Origins of Totalitarianism
by Hannah Arendt
When Breath Becomes Air
by Paul Kalanithi
On Liberty
by John Stuart Mill
Engaging Buddhism
by Jay Garfield
The Iliad
by Homer
The Essays
by Montaigne
Sacrifice
by Rene Girard
The Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith
The Great Awakening
by David Loy
The Sickness Unto Death
by Soren Kierkegaard
Discipline and Punish
by Michel Foucault
Evolution and Conversion
by Rene Girard
Science as Vocation
by Max Weber
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
by Friedeich Nietzsche
墨子
道德经
Theory of Moral Sentiments
by Adam Smith
The Ascent of Money
by Niall Ferguson
Politics as Vocation
by Max Weber
Estranged Labor
by Karl Marx
Utilitarianism
by John Stuart Mill
The Leviathan
by Thomas Hobbes
18th Brumaire
by Karl Marx
On the Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin
Reflections on the Revolution in France
by Edmund Burke
The Second Discourse on Inequality
by Jean Jacques Rousseau
The Foundations of Buddhism
by Rupert Gethin
庄子
The Histories
by Herodotus
Second Treatise of Government
by John Locke
The Uncanny
by Sigmund Freud
The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
by Immanuel Kant
Inner Revolution
by Robert Thurman
Capital in the 21st Century
by Thomas Picketty
The Nature of Buddhist Ethics
by Damien Keown
韩非子
The Metamorphoses
by Ovid
The Scapegoat
by Rene Girard
The Religion of Technology
by David Noble
The Political Possibilities in the Long Romantic Period
by Akeel Bilgrami
The One by Whom Scandal Comes
by Rene Girard
The Ecstasy of Communication
by Jean Baudrillard
荀子
Summa Theologica
by St. Thomas Aquinas
Innovation and Repetition
by Rene Girard
The Shipwrecked Mind
by Mark Lilla
Superintelligence
by Nick Bostrom
The Mind Illuminated
by Jeremy Graves
Killing Commendatore
by Haruki Murakami
This Life
by Martin Hagglund
The Heart Sutra
Understanding Media
by Marshall Mcluhan
Theatre of Envy
by Rene Girard
On Self Rule
by Ghandhi
Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions
by Max Weber
Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
by Mary Wollstonecraft
The Game
by Neil Strauss
Genesis of Desire
by Jean-Michel Oughourlian
Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius
The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. du Bois
The Social Psychology of the World Religions
by Max Weber
The Wretched of the Earth
by Frantz Fanon
Meditations on First Philosophy
by Rene Descartes
Zero to One
by Peter Thiel
Anorexia and Mimetic Desire
by Rene Girard
The Task for Social Philosophy and the Institute for Social Research
by Max Horkheimer
Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim
by Immanuel Kant
The Sacred and the Profane
by Mircea Eliade
The German Ideology
by Karl Marx
The Lean Startup
by Eric Ries
How the Economic Machine Works
by Ray Dalio
When Genius Failed
by Roger Lowenstein
Myth of Mirror Neurons
by Gregory Hickok
Counterfeit Gods
by Timothy Keller
Resurrection from the Underground
by Rene Girard
Psychopolitics
by Jean-Michel Oughourlian
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Essential Mind Training
by Thupten Jinpa
The Monk and the Philosopher
by Jean-François Revel and Matthieu Ricard
Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory
by Wolfgang Palaver
The Black Swan
by Nassim Taleb
The Social Contract
by Jean Jacques Rousseau
Oedipus Unbound
by Rene Girard
Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory
by Frederick Neuhouser
To Double Business Bound
by Rene Girard
On Becoming a Person
by Carl Rogers
What is Good and Why?
by Richard Kraut
AI Superpowers
by Lee Kai-Fu
Rene Girard and Creative Mimesis
by Pablo Bandera and Thomas Ryba
The Rescuer from Error
by Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali
The Story of Philosophy
by Will Durant
Elon Musk
by Ashlee Vance
Will to Meaning
by Victor Frankl
Data Science as Machinic Neoplatonism
by Dan McQuillan
The Once and Future Liberal
by Mark Lilla
Why we Sleep
by Matthew Walker
Driven by Compression
by Jürgen Schmidhuber
The Lessons of History
by Will Durant
The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill
by John Stuart Mill
The Lotus Sutra
Literature and Christianity
by Rene Girard
On China
by Henry Kissinger
Never Split the Difference
by Christopher Voss and Tahl Raz
Job, the Victim of his People
by Rene Girard
On Anger
by Seneca
Benjamin Franklin
by Walter Isaacson
Age of Ambition
by Evan Osnos
Hegel’s Ethical Thought
by Allen W. Wood
Einstein
by Walter Isaacson
Skin in the Game
by Nassim Taleb
Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality
by Peter Railton
The Metaphysics of Morals
by Immanuel Kant
Sex at Dawn
by Cacilda Jetha and Christopher Ryan
Economy and the Future
by Jean-Pierre Dupuy
When the Machine Stops
by E. M. Forster
A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will
by Robert Kane
Karma
by Traleg Kyabgon
The Wolfman
by Sigmund Freud
What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly
10% Happier
by Dan Harris
Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse
Hayy Ibn Yaqzan
by Ibn Tufail
The Tale of Genji
by Murasaki Shikibu
Inside the House of Money
by Steven Drobny
Six Pillars of Self-Esteem
by Nathaniel Branden
Cutting through Spiritual Materialism
by Chögyam Trungpa
The Nature of Technology
by Brian Arthur
The Mass Ornament
by Siegfried Kracauer
I am a Strange Loop
by Douglas Hofstadter
How to Win Friends and Influence People
by Dale Carnegie
Discussion about this post
No posts
Fantastic list. I would add any of C.S. Lewis’ classics - e.g. Mere Christianity is one of the most profound books I have ever read.
Why Dale Carnegie? O_o