In-Depth Resources for Further Reading
Here I share with you some resources from different disciplines that shape my thinking and approach in The Promise of Philosophy and that you can use for further reading into its foundations. This is a growing list that I will update periodically, and it focuses on books and non-technical texts rather than specialized articles.
Theoretical Philosophy
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The Situated Self by J.T. Ismael
This book offers a compelling theory of the self that is compatible with a scientific approach to understanding the world. It argues that humans are a special kind of dynamical system in the world: a self-representing, self-governing system.
As humans, we not only passively receive information about the environment from disparate sensory sources like our eyes, noses, and ears. We also actively synthesize the information from these sources into a global model of our environment, and we use this model to navigate and interact with our environment.
The self in this account is not a special kind of substance that is immediately given in consciousness. Instead, it is a kind of formal object, an achievement of a certain way of uniting our representations, which enables us to unify a position and perspective on the world and choose how we move through it.
This book made clear to me how it is possible to do justice to the richness of lived experience while holding onto a scientifically informed view of reality and our place in it. Properly understood, science does not reduce this richness or expose it as an illusion. Instead, it affirms and enriches our lived experience by articulating our understanding of what it consists of and of how it is possible.
How Physics Makes Us Free by J.T. Ismael
In this book (named one of the best science books of 2016 by Forbes), Ismael tackles the philosophical problem of determinism and free will in a clear and accessible way. Building on her theory of the self and her scientifically informed approach to philosophical problems, she advocates that, properly understood, the kind of determinism at issue in contemporary science and physics is not a threat to human experience agency and free will.
Our lived experience as humans is nested in an environment that can be looked at using a variety of sensory lenses and interacted with using different capabilities. The environment itself, at a microscopic scale, is quite devoid of structure and quality, composed of nothing but simple particles obeying global laws that do not even distinguish between the past and future.
It is by coupling a human being so that it gets information from the environment with its limited sensory perspective that we recover our experience with its rich qualities and distinctions. Other systems (other measuring systems or organisms) with different ways of getting information about the world couple to it differently and so experience the world differently. By seeing our lived experience as emerging out of a coupling interaction between us and the environment, we affirm our everyday experience of freely choosing how we live, and reach a more articulated understanding of how it is possible.
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This book helped me understand that I don't need to worry too much about the problem of free will. A scientific understanding of the world affirms our freedom and experience of it and articulates how it emerges through a special kind of way of uniting representations and self-consciously using them to choose how we move through the world.
Naturalizing Epistemology: Thomas Kuhn and the ‘Essential Tension’ by Fred D’Agostino
This insightful book builds on Thomas Kuhn’s influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions, exploring the social and psychological balancing that make possible the “essential tension” that Kuhn highlighted as central to the development of knowledge: the tension between conservative holding on to what has served well in the past, and innovative rejection of what has served well in the past for something which might be better.
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This book offers a rich and nuanced picture of how humans can gain and accumulate knowledge in the face of limitations as bounded rational beings and the sheer complexity of the world. It argues convincingly that advancing knowledge is an unavoidably collective enterprise. This communal enterprise involves both division of cognitive labor and assembling different results together in a community.
D’Agostino brings together disciplines such as psychology, management science, economics, sociology, anthropology, politics, and philosophy in order to identify the different dynamical factors that are in play in any community of inquiry and that, when balanced, enable that community to function effectively.
This book drove home for me, among other things, just how essential collective activity is to the progress of knowledge given the nature of complexity. It also contains the fruitful idea that the best way to understand good inquiry is not as trying to finding particular pathways to the right solutions, but as providing an imperfect, ever-evolving geography of the issues.
What Emotions Really Are by Paul Griffiths
This book is part philosophy of emotions, part philosophy of biology, teaching several important lessons about how to think about psychological terms. Along the way, it shows the limits of purely philosophical approaches to the emotions that simply focus on analyzing concepts from the armchair and not engaging with the science of emotions. It also shows that some scientific approaches to the emotions are fruitful but limited in scope and can’t explain all emotions.
The main argument of the book is that the term ‘emotion’ does not actually signal any unified theoretical phenomenon that we can study. There is no such thing as THE emotions and what their nature is. There are many different kinds of emotional phenomena and they can be importantly different. A depressive mood, shame at not wearing the right outfit at a social event, and fear of a looming figure don’t really have anything fundamental in common. Learning about how one works, does not teach us about how others do. This means that we need to take different approaches to understand different parts of our emotional lives rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all approach.
This book taught me several lessons in the philosophy of biology, including that innateness is a seriously confusing concept. It confounds, in particular, under one term several properties that are independent and importantly different.
From this book, I learned the need to really take seriously the fact that there is no neat separation between the contributions of “nature” and “nurture” in the development of psychological traits in general and of emotional traits in particular. These traits are constructed through a complex, temporally extended interaction of traditional “biological” factors, traditional “cultural” factors, and factors that are hard to classify in terms of this dichotomy.
The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration by Peter Goldie
In this perceptive book, Peter Goldie provides a deep philosophical exploration of what emotions are, their relationship to feelings, culture, and evolution among other topics. He skillfully spells out the idea that emotions have a dynamic, complex, episodic structure that essentially consists of different kinds of feelings in our body and mind.
Goldie makes many insightful observations about our emotional lives and the way they are much more dynamic and complex than many philosophers of emotions who often focus on static attitudes admit. His emphasis on the narrative structure of emotions and the way they unfold in episodes is especially helpful for understanding the rich roles emotions play in our lived experience.
One big lesson I take away from this book is what Goldie calls the “avocado pear misconception.” This is the idea that emotions have the structure of an avocado pear: a soft outer structure that varies culturally and a hard inner core that is biological and universal. The reality is that there is no good reason to think that “deep down” we are all the same emotionally. Our emotional capacities are developmentally open and vary significantly across cultures in response to culturally local emotion concepts. Humans in different cultures all smile, but a smile does not mean the same thing everywhere in the world.
Another important lesson Goldie highlights is that there is no conflict between our ordinary experience and perspective on the emotions and the scientific study of emotions. We can explore our emotional lives from both the personal point of view (from the inside, as beings who experience those emotions) and from the impersonal point of view (from the outside, as scientists gathering data about those emotions). These two perspectives are not in conflict with one another. They are in different, complementary businesses that must ultimately be fit together in the overall account of what is going on in our emotional lives.
Value Theory
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Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
This is not really a book, but a document that the great Ancient Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself. Indeed, it is originally titled “To Myself” and contains the reflections and promises he wrote to himself to make sure he lived up to his ideals of virtue as he contended with the most powerful office in the world.
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The great philosopher-emperor offers himself (and us) all kinds of practical advice, such as how to be patient with unpleasant people, as well as philosophical reflections on our place in the world — including the beautiful idea that each of us is like a different organ on the collective body that is the world.
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This book helped me realize the power of journaling for yourself and writing to yourself in order to take talking with yourself to the next level; to remind yourself of the philosophical lessons you know to be true; keep them in daily consciousness, shaping your life and keeping yourself accountable as you seek to live a good life.
The Morality of Happiness by Julia Annas
In this excellent book, Julia Annas brings together the results of decades of deep inquiry into Ancient Greek ethical philosophy to present the basic structure of ancient ethical theory and expose many widespread assumptions about Ancient ethics as mistaken.
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It points out that the entry point for ancient ethical reflection is considering one’s life as a whole, which leads to the notion of a final end, which is thinly specified as eudaimonia (happiness or flourishing) and evaluates different candidates for eudaimonia (including pleasure, tranquility, and virtue).
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This book addresses important issues about what one might want from an ethical theory. For example, whether it should give us a decision procedure for deriving what the right thing to do is (a view common in modern western ethical theory) or a general framework for making sense of life as a whole and deciding on the relative importance of different ends (a view common in Ancient Greek ethical theory).
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From this book, I take away a sophisticated view of Ancient Greek ethics as concerned with the holistic rational structure of life. Additionally, I'm compelled by the key lesson that which ethical theory you prefer depends on important background assumptions such as (a) what you want an ethical theory to do and (b) how revisionary or counterintuitive you're willing to allow a theory to be.
Psychology
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The Invisible Gorilla by Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons
This surprising book brings together findings in the psychology of attention, perception, memory, and reasoning to show that may intuitive ways in which we think our minds work are totally mistaken. We think we experience ourselves and the world as they really are, but our minds don’t work the way we think they do.
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The book is titled after experiments in which people were asked to focus on something (like a bouncing basketball) and paid so much attention to the task, that they failed to see that a gorilla passed by the screen. This phenomenon of a gorilla that we experience as invisible despite it passing before our very eyes shows how our attention is limited, and we do not register in it everything that comes before our senses.
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Among other important lessons about the mind includes the idea that so-called “flashbulb memories” (vivid, detailed memories of surprising and important events) are actually not especially accurate even though they are experienced with great vividness and confidence.
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This book vividly dispels the intuitive but false idea that our minds are somehow video cameras that record everything the world presents us with and that our memories are the recordings of those cameras. It drives home the many ways in which we shouldn’t be so sure about ourselves. It shows how things as fundamental as attention and memory (and our knowledge of them) are far more complicated than we might like to think.
Thinking Slow & Thinking Fast by Daniel Kahneman
In this entertaining and illuminating book, cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman shares a lucid summary of his life’s work into how the human mind thinks.
Kahneman goes through much experimental evidence that suggests that the mind can process information in two importantly different ways: (1) fast, intuitively, automatically or (2) slow, deliberately, effortfully. Both ways of processing have their advantages and disadvantages, and by understanding how they work, we can better understand where they tend to go wrong.
Kahneman goes through many heuristics the mind uses to solve problems quickly as well as biases that it is subject to.
Among the most interesting insights into human psychology that Kahneman shares include the idea that there are two selves that can evaluate their life: (1) the experiencing self, who answers the question “how good/bad is it now?” and (2) the remembering self, who answers the question “how good/bad was it on the whole?” Kahneman’s experiments also show that these selves perform evaluations in radically different ways. In particular, many results suggest that the remembering self determines the value of an experience or period of time by averaging the best( or worst) part of the experience together with the end.
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Kahneman’s work is rich and diverse, and people dispute what exact conclusions to draw from it. However, for me, it shows that human psychology is a lot more complex and multifaceted than one might initially think. And it suggests that thinking about the overall value of a human life (given the nature of human psychology) requires considering the value of the experiencing self and of the remembering self’s experience.
Handbook of Emotion Regulation, 2nd. edition (edited by James Gross)
In the second edition of this major handbook, Gross pulls together great new work in this field, which brings together many psychological subdisciplines.
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The researchers in this field take emotions to be whole-body phenomena evaluations or appraisal that make us feel and incline us to act. They generally adopt what they call the “modal model of emotions” that is shared by different approaches to emotion. According to this model, emotions take place in a sequence in which a person finds herself in a situation, to which she pays attention in a certain way, which leads to her appraising or evaluating it and then responding to it (leading to a new situation).
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Different kinds of emotion regulation strategies can be implemented at different points of the modal model of emotions: situation selection and situation modification strategies to change the situation, attentional deployment strategies to change what the person attends to, cognitive change strategies to change how the person evaluates her situation, and response modulation strategies to change how she responds and brings about a new situation.
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In this book, I find the important idea that emotion regulation is limited and imperfect, as the regulation of your direction while running. You can’t simply stop yourself from feeling an emotion once you begin feeling it, just like you can’t immediately stop or go in the opposite direction when you are running in one direction. Any effect of your emotion regulation is one that changes an emotional trajectory you are already in, just as any effect of your running regulation is one that changes a physical trajectory you are already in.
If you’ve ever been curious about the ways in which we are or are not in control of our emotional lives, this handbook goes through the current state of the field and fruitfully discusses many different real (if limited) ways we can take control of our emotional lives.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
In this lovely book, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi shares his investigations into the phenomenon of “flow.” While in flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, total involvement in the activity, and a loss of sense of time.
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Csikszentmihalyi offers many examples of how you can order the information that enters consciousness in a way that unlocks your potential and greatly improves the quality of your life.
He goes through many case studies and examples of flow and teaches you how you can find flow experiences in all kinds of activities, including movement, listening to music, learning, and even working.
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This book really drove home for me the lesson that by engaging our mind and body and interacting with the world in the right way, a way that ideally leads to flow experiences, we can radically improve our lives at any moment. Everything is waiting to be made good by finding the wisdom to flow through life.
Self - Improvement
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Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
In this incredibly practical book, Burnett and Evans offer a framework for using design tools in order to approach the problem of what the good life is with a holistic, experimental approach.
I (and thousands of others) have effectively used and adapted many of the tools in this book to gain greater life direction and to build a happier, better life. But I find that these tools and mindsets worked best when combined with certain philosophical reflections, as I discuss in my posts about philosophy and life design.
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Two big take-home lessons I find here are (1) that by going through certain reflections you can build a tool that will allow you to "wayfind" through life, i.e., to tell whether you are on- or off-course according to your own vision of the good life even if you don't know exactly where you want to go in life, and (2) that, by using a certain journaling technique, you can gather data and information on which ways of pursuing your vision of the good life really work for you.
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