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Cognitive scientist here, but at heart my interests are in human factors, human-computer interactions, and other such applied junk. Check out Design of Everyday Things (née, "Psychology of Everyday Things") by Donald Norman!

Plainly put, he explains how there isn't generally a lot of thought put into designing things for human use in a relatively fun and readable way. Doorknobs, copiers, vehicles, you name it, there are examples of human tools that just don't meet the physical or mental constraints of the humans using them.

I like this area of research as an introduction to cognitive science at large because it really highlights the fact that humans are systems with alllllll these interesting features, and it gives great examples of how we excel or have limits in different circumstances in everyday life.

(See also his online course about the same: https://www.udacity.com/course/design101 )

I’m not sure anyone read this article, but it’s kind of trash. Affect theory is pretty weak in terms of explanatory power imo, and the jargon is just too much. Here’s a much easier and all together better rendering of early modern personhood by Charles Taylor that I assign for my Western Civ class. Buffered and Porous Selves.

From Amazon:

> Paul Hazard’s magisterial, widely influential, and beloved intellectual history offers an unforgettable account of the birth of the modern European mind in all its dynamic, inquiring, and uncertain glory.

> Beginning his story in the latter half of the seventeenth century, while also looking back to the Renaissance and forward to the future, Hazard traces the process by which new developments in the sciences, arts, philosophy, and philology came to undermine the stable foundations of the classical world, with its commitment to tradition, stability, proportion, and settled usage.

> Hazard shows how travelers’ tales and archaeological investigation widened European awareness and acceptance of cultural difference; how the radical rationalism of Spinoza and Richard Simon’s new historical exegesis of the Bible called into question the revealed truths of religion; how the Huguenot Pierre Bayle’s critical dictionary of ideas paved the way for Voltaire and the Enlightenment, even as the empiricism of Locke encouraged a new attention to sensory experience that led to Rousseau and romanticism.

> Hazard’s range of knowledge is vast, and whether the subject is operas, excavations, or scientific experiments his brilliant style and powers of description bring to life the thinkers who thought up the modern world.

1. Plato's forms
2. Socratic dialectic
3. Aristotle's teleology
4. Pyrrhonian Skepticism
5. Christianity
6. Natural theology
7. Magna Carta
8. Development of the scientific method/the move from science as revealing the mysteries of God in nature to revealing the underlying structure of the world.
9. Descartes's cogito
10. Hume's anti-realism
11. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations
12. Marx's Das Kapital
13. Darwin's On the Origin of Species

almost made the list: 1. Kan'ts 'Copernican revolution' 2. Taylorism and Fordism 3. Weber's 'rationalization'

Here we have (1) the birth and development of Western philosophy, along with its subsequent split into factions (however you want to cash that out); (2) the development of Christianity (which was used to justify a lot of good historical phenomena, as well as the world-historical, terrible phenomena of absolute monarchy, imperialism, racism, and colonialism); (3) the birth and development of Western science, which has conquered the world; and (4) the birth and development of Western political economy, which has also conquered the world.

Russell is quite biased against certain philosophers and is not afraid to show his prejudice. For certain entries he almost goes so far as to misrepresent the thinkers in question, by not developng the arguments past the point where they can be easily refuted (an example might be Parmenides, and his contempt for Nietzsche is a matter of historical record). On the plus side this work of his is extremely comprehensive, covering just about every significant philosopher from the ancient Greeks right up to the 20th century with no gaps in chronology.

I would recommend Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy which while it covers far fewer thinkers, gives them all a fair hearing and does provide a bit more "biographical" information about their lives etc. as well as their philosophy.

Primary reference: The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet.
See also: Vox article

I do not have a specific suggestion, but I have always liked the quote "All great truths have another great truth as their negation". From memory so...

My favorite example is "Energy is conserved". Nailing down the concept of energy, and then understanding and using its conservation led to progress in many scientific fields (astronomy, chemistry, mechanics, etc).

The negation of this is the truth "Energy is NOT conserved". This is the basis of how the Sun warms us, and how atomic and nuclear weapons work. The new truth is now seen to be "matter-energy is conserved".

So, you might possibly get some some ideas for your classes if you consider this possible POV. Good luck.

Edit: The quote is from Niels Bohr: "As quoted in Max Delbrück, Mind from Matter: An Essay on Evolutionary Epistemology, (1986) p. 167. It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth"

wait, i've just found this, the same article, accessible to everyone:

https://www.academia.edu/21652844/We_Are_History_The_Outlines_of_a_Quasi-Substantive_Philosophy_of_History

if it works for you, we can link this

Recommend the book by Tony Aspromourgos The Science of Wealth: Adam Smith and the framing of political economy https://www.amazon.com/Science-Wealth-political-Routledge-Economics-ebook/dp/B001OLRO4E/ref=nodl_

I highly recommend:

Banvard’s Folly by Paul Collins https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312300336/

The Constant Podcast https://www.constantpodcast.com/

This is a subject matter that really fascinates me. I’m glad to see it posted here.

I'm sorry, this article popped up while I was searching for a review of William Child's book. I'm not really familiar with Paris Review.

> Insofar as the Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and Politics are all philosophical and theoretical treatments of ethical subject matter, they appear to be instances of Aristotle employing tools of scientific reasoning in application to ethical enquiry.

> The stated aim of the volume is to explore the extent to which Aristotle actually does approach ethics with a scientific framework and "to expose some of the ways in which the received view has over-estimated the gap Aristotle sees between science and ethics".

This is an incredible volume. I got this as a christmas present when I was 20. The entries are concise and include references for further investigation. For an overview of philosophy though, giving an idea of what it is, mixing opinion with factual historiography, I'd highly recommend Bertrand Russell's 'A History of Western Philosophy'. It's a bit thick, but has some of the best historical and critical commentary on philosophy I've ever seen.

John Kenneth Galbraith on wikipedia:

> John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith, OC (15 October 1908 – 29 April 2006) was a Canadian and later, U.S., economist, public official and diplomat, and a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism.

>His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s, during which time Galbraith fulfilled the role of public intellectual. In macro-economical terms he was a Keynesian and an institutionalist.

> Galbraith's main ideas focused around the influence of the market power of large corporations. He believed that this market power weakened the widely accepted principle of consumer sovereignty, allowing corporations to be price makers, rather than price takers, allowing corporations with the strongest market power to increase the production of their goods beyond an efficient amount.

>In <em>The Affluent Society</em> Galbraith asserts that classical economic theory was true for the eras before the present, which were times of "poverty"; now, however, we have moved from an age of poverty to an age of "affluence", and for such an age, a completely new economic theory is needed. Galbraith's main argument is that as society becomes relatively more affluent, so private business must "create" consumer demand through advertising, and while this generates artificial affluence through the production of commercial goods and services, the public sector becomes neglected.

FTA:

> Frederick Douglass (1817–1895) is a central figure in United States and African American history. He was born a slave, circa 1817; his mother was a Negro slave and his father was reputed to be his white master. Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838 and rose to become a principal leader and spokesperson for the U.S. Abolition movement. He would eventually develop into a towering figure for the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and his legacy would be claimed by a diverse span of groups, from liberals and integrationists to conservatives to nationalists, within and without black America.

> He wrote three autobiographies, each one expanding on the details of his life. The first was Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself (in 1845); the second was My Bondage and My Freedom (in 1852; Douglass 1994, p. 103–452); and the third was Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (in 1881; Douglass 1994, p. 453–1045). They are now foremost examples of the American slave narrative. In addition to being autobiographical, they are also, as is standard, explicitly works of political and social criticism and moral suasion; they were aimed at the hearts and minds of the readers, and their greater purpose was to attack and to contribute to the abolition of slavery in the United States, and to argue for the full inclusion of black Americans into the nation.

Wiki article on the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.

1974 interview with Robert Pirsig.

> In <em>A Little History of Economics</em>, Niall Kishtainy details the complex trajectory of economics from ancient Greece to the present, drawing on a wealth of historical knowledge, illuminating anecdotes and examples as well as imaginative metaphors to trace the evolution of economic thinking. But, asks Madeline McSherry, where are the women in this history?

(interesting overview of the book from amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1590179021/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_e.cNyb8A290F8)

We don’t understand the reactionary mind. As a result, argues Mark Lilla in this timely book, the ideas and passions that shape today’s political dramas are unintelligible to us.

The reactionary is anything but a conservative. He is as radical and modern a figure as the revolutionary, someone shipwrecked in the rapidly changing present, and suffering from nostalgia for an idealized past and an apocalyptic fear that history is rushing toward catastrophe. And like the revolutionary his political engagements are motivated by highly developed ideas.

Lilla begins with three twentieth-century philosophers—Franz Rosenzweig, Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss—who attributed the problems of modern society to a break in the history of ideas and promoted a return to earlier modes of thought. He then examines the enduring power of grand historical narratives of betrayal to shape political outlooks since the French Revolution, and shows how these narratives are employed in the writings of Europe’s right-wing cultural pessimists and Maoist neocommunists, American theoconservatives fantasizing about the harmony of medieval Catholic society and radical Islamists seeking to restore a vanished Muslim caliphate.

The revolutionary spirit that inspired political movements across the world for two centuries may have died out. But the spirit of reaction that rose to meet it has survived and is proving just as formidable a historical force. We live in an age when the tragicomic nostalgia of Don Quixote for a lost golden age has been transformed into a potent and sometimes deadly weapon. Mark Lilla helps us to understand why.

Chris Surprenant is the author of <em>Kant and the Cultivation of Virtue</em>, so I hope this is of interest to some folks here. Please join us over at the thread in /r/philosophy!

A review of <em>Modernity and Its Discontents -- Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois From Machiavelli to Bellow</em> (2016) by Steven B. Smith.

From Amazon:

> This book investigates how the Jewish backgrounds of major Critical Theorists, and the differing ways in which they related to their origins, impacted their work, the history of the Frankfurt School, and the difference that emerged between them over time

Previous posts about the Frankfurt School.

This is a review of the book What is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic by Shagab Ahmed. Please have a look at the article or even the Amazon description before downvoting.

> A book that is certain to provoke debate and significantly alter our understanding of Islam, What Is Islam? reveals how Muslims have historically conceived of and lived with Islam as norms and truths that are at once contradictory yet coherent.

> At the core of this book is a linguistic argument: that the emergence of these words in the 16th and 17th centuries proves that significantly new ideas had emerged. Wootton puts forward a very strong version of this thesis.

> (...)

> Overall, Wootton justifies nicely his argument that we “tend to overestimate the importance of new technology and underestimate the rate of production and the impact of new intellectual tools”.

> (...)

> The Invention of Science is not only a history of science but a revisionist historiography of science, in which Wootton attacks allegedly homogeneous schools called “the sociologists of science” and “the cultural determinists”, expending thousands of testy words situating himself carefully between two implausible views, the extreme versions of which are held by almost no one.

Amazon link.

Lol no, I'm ashamed. I've been reading a lot of other stuff on the topic aside from Israel's works. Which seem to be the preeminent work for a solid overview and analysis?

I plan on getting it at some point I think. My public library doesn't have it nor does the community college I attend. But Spinoza has captured my interest to the point I might end up buying his oeuvre before Radical Enlightenment.

not exactly a religious history, but Barbarian Virtues is an excellent text covering that period

Robert Nisbet's text is pretty foundational on the history of the idea of progress.

I would definitely peruse this volume before engaging with some of the older texts mentioned in this thread.

Darwinian Natural Right by Larry Arnhart.

I'm writing my phd dissertation on the relationship between modern science and classical political philosophy. Arnhart's book is a good primer.

They attacked him so viciously last time they went near his work that I am scared to listen. I am a quiet fan of Mr Schopenhauer and his unending tirades against Hegel.

The appendix essay on Kant remains pivotal in Western philosophy.

Btw, the Magee book is superb on Schopenhauer, really doing a good job of destroying the typical criticisms made of him.

> How about "Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud"

There is also a "sequel" of sorts, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century that is worth considering.

Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay is a worldwide travelogue of pigments and dyes. Fascinating and fun, definitely my favorite painter book so far.

I do philosophy of science policy, and the best book I've found on that is Heather Douglas' <em>Science Policy and the Value Free Ideal</em>. I've heard some fairly hard core policy wonks say it's the only philosophy book they enjoyed reading. It goes over the history of the role of the science advisor in US, and talks about the role values play in science and science policy. It's a fantastic read!

Faster by James Gleick made me so much more aware of time and how it has affected us in so many ways. Highly recommended read.

http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Acceleration-Just-About-Everything/dp/067977548X