Here are 100 books that Intention fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a philosopher based in Tartu, Estonia. In my work I’ve always been interested in value and value judgments, and how value gets us to act, sometimes, though by no means always. But only recently have I become puzzled by what happens when value motivates us the wrong way, as when we are drawn to something (an action, an event) for its badness, not for its goodness. And that’s how I gradually uncovered the fascinating, centuries-long philosophical (and sometimes literary) history narrated in my book and partially represented in the booklist.
Aristotle is an obligatory milestone in the history of the main idea of my book: all desire the good or the apparent good.
The Nicomachean Ethics also provides a gallery of interesting and puzzling characters: the akratic, who wants the good but, being weak, goes for what they know to be worse; or the outright vicious, who wholeheartedly chooses the bad, but still under the guise of the good, being misled by pleasant associations with the wrong things.
"The Nicomachean Ethics", along with its sequel, "the Politics", is Aristotle's most widely read and influential work. Ideas central to ethics - that happiness is the end of human endeavor, that moral virtue is formed through action and habituation, and that good action requires prudence - found their most powerful proponent in the person medieval scholars simply called 'the Philosopher'. Drawing on their intimate knowledge of Aristotle's thought, Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins have produced here an English-language translation of the Ethics that is as remarkably faithful to the original as it is graceful in its rendering. Aristotle…
I’m a philosopher based in Tartu, Estonia. In my work I’ve always been interested in value and value judgments, and how value gets us to act, sometimes, though by no means always. But only recently have I become puzzled by what happens when value motivates us the wrong way, as when we are drawn to something (an action, an event) for its badness, not for its goodness. And that’s how I gradually uncovered the fascinating, centuries-long philosophical (and sometimes literary) history narrated in my book and partially represented in the booklist.
This book personally helped me focus on and get interested in the concept of acting for reasons.
We all do things for reasons (good or bad), e.g. we take an umbrella because outside it’s raining, but what this exactly means is a philosophical puzzle. Dancy is probably the most powerful in arguing that we don’t normally find those reasons in ourselves, but in how things objectively are or might be.
Even when all we can say is “I do it because it’s my desire”, there has to be something attractive in what we desire beyond the fact that we desire it, which is one way to bring us back to the old idea of the guise of the good.
Practical Reality is about the relation between the reason why we do things and the reasons why we should. It maintains that current philosophical orthodoxy bowdlerizes this relation, making it impossible to understand how anyone can act for a good reason. In order to understand this, Dancy claims, we have to abandon current conceptions of the reasons why we act (our 'motivating' reasons) as mental states of ourselves. Belief/desire explanations of action, or purely cognitive accounts in terms of beliefs alone, drive too great a wedge between the normative and the motivational. Instead, we have to understand a motivating reason…
I’m a philosopher based in Tartu, Estonia. In my work I’ve always been interested in value and value judgments, and how value gets us to act, sometimes, though by no means always. But only recently have I become puzzled by what happens when value motivates us the wrong way, as when we are drawn to something (an action, an event) for its badness, not for its goodness. And that’s how I gradually uncovered the fascinating, centuries-long philosophical (and sometimes literary) history narrated in my book and partially represented in the booklist.
Flash forward a few centuries, one finds not just a doubt, but a powerful statement of the reality of perverse inclinations in human nature: in Poe’s tales, such as The Black Cat or The Imp of the Perverse, one finds characters doing the most horrible things out of a self-confessed desire to do evil, with no apparent gain, and embracing the moral destruction they bring upon themselves.
Clearly the times were ripe for a radical revision of the guise of the good dogma. It was exciting for me to discover in Poe’s fiction a clear expression of philosophical ideas central to my project.
I’m a philosopher based in Tartu, Estonia. In my work I’ve always been interested in value and value judgments, and how value gets us to act, sometimes, though by no means always. But only recently have I become puzzled by what happens when value motivates us the wrong way, as when we are drawn to something (an action, an event) for its badness, not for its goodness. And that’s how I gradually uncovered the fascinating, centuries-long philosophical (and sometimes literary) history narrated in my book and partially represented in the booklist.
Like for Aristotle, this is no easy read, but Augustine must be credited with planting in the clearest and most dramatic way the central doubt: cannot we want and do something merely for the sake of the evil or wrong we would commit?
His story of the pear theft is bound to leave an impression on anyone, regardless of one’s religious background. Later Christian philosophers will try to get around Augustine’s doubts, with more or less success.
I am a philosopher of language (and of art) and have been for 30+ years. Why philosophy of language? Well, it encourages a certain salutary kind of self-consciousness—which is extremely valuable to philosophy—and facilitates greater rigor. But it only got going some one hundred and twenty years ago. So it's modern(ish) as well as deep. And whereas it might seem a narrow slice of the philosophical pie, it isn't; it seems to provide fruitful ways of thinking for almost any philosophical subject. For example, rather than 'What is X?', we ask 'What do we mean by "X"?'; a subtle difference perhaps but the change in perspective might be a key.
I first read this book at age twenty-one and have never stopped returning to it. It gets better and deeper each time.
Ludwig teaches that language and reality are bound up in so many ways. It also contains some famous themes and head-scratchers, such as language games, family resemblance, private language, and rule-following, discussed, as always, in a non-technical way.
Incorporating significant editorial changes from earlier editions, the fourth edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is the definitive en face German-English version of the most important work of 20th-century philosophy The extensively revised English translation incorporates many hundreds of changes to Anscombe's original translation Footnoted remarks in the earlier editions have now been relocated in the text What was previously referred to as 'Part 2' is now republished as Philosophy of Psychology - A Fragment , and all the remarks in it are numbered for ease of reference New detailed editorial endnotes explain decisions of translators and identify references and…
Todd May has been teaching philosophy for over thirty years. He is the author of sixteen books of philosophy, many of which have been praised for their clarity and relevance to people reflecting on their lives. He was also a philosophical advisor to the hit television sit-com The Good Place.
This may not be the best place to start, but sooner or later you’ll want to land here. Aristotle’s view of a good life, one that involves developing virtuous ways of being, is surprisingly contemporary. And unlike a lot of contemporary philosophy, he has deep reflections on the role of friendship in creating a worthwhile life.
Presents a support resource for students being introduced to philosophical texts and to philosophy in general. This work contains a glossary of terms relating to the philosopher's use of terms.
When I learned science's story of the universe–that it began as a primordial plasma that transformed itself into stars, galaxies and a living planet that then transmogrified into plants and animals and consciousness–when I learned the details of how the universe began as small as an acorn and then magically transformed that acorn of elementary particles into two trillion galaxies, I was beset with one, piercing, lifelong question: WHY ISN'T EVERYONE WAKING UP EACH MORNING STUNNED OUT OF THEIR MINDS? My entire professional life has been an effort to draw others into this amazement, into life as an ongoing celebration.
Thomas Berry was a cultural historian who studied the cultures of Europe, China, America, India, and the Indigenous worlds with a single burning question in his mind: What is the role of humanity in the universe? Of course, this idea that humanity has a cosmic role is the opposite of the view promoted by modern science of an evolving universe that is going nowhere.
Given his professional background in the humanities, it is surprising that Berry names science as the primary revelation of the divine. He is committed to the idea that the sciences have discovered a common creation story, one that will play an important role for centuries to come.
When I first met Thomas Berry and asked him about my personal role in the universe, he said simply, "Tell science's story of a developing universe; but tell it with a feeling for its music. That's what the spiritual…
This landmark work, first published by Sierra Club Books in 1988, has established itself as a foundational volume in the ecological canon. In it, noted cultural historian Thomas Berry provides nothing less than a new intellectual-ethical framework for the human community by positing planetary well-being as the measure of all human activity.
Drawing on the wisdom of Western philosophy, Asian thought, and Native American traditions, as well as contemporary physics and evolutionary biology, Berry offers a new perspective that recasts our understanding of science, technology, politics, religion, ecology, and education. He shows us why it is important for us to…
Since before I was a teenager, I have been painfully aware of two things: the society I am living in is an extremely racist one, and capitalism fosters egotism, greed, selfishness, and a degradation of what is best in life. Ever since then I have been pursuing the goal of envisioning, and in some way advancing, an alternative to both (which in my view are related). I have suggested these five books because they have given me much inspiration for pursuing this goal, difficult as it surely is. I hope they will prove to be for you as well.
This remarkable study, first published in Czechoslovakia in 1964 and translated into English in the 1970s, is one of the most profound studies of the Hegelian and Phenomenological dimensions of Marx’s work ever written.
It argues that daily life in capitalist modernity takes the alienated form of a “world of the pseudo-concrete,” in which possibilities for self-development and purposeful creation that is integral to humanity become radically suppressed. If you want to understand why the world is not as you wish it to be, read this book.
Kosik writes that the history of a text is in a certain sense the history of its interpretations. In the fifteen years that have passed since the first (Czech) edition of his Dialectics of the Concrete, this book has been widely read and interpreted throughout Europe, in diverse centers of scholarship as well as in private studies. A faithful English language edition is long overdue. This publication of KosIk's work will surely provoke a range of new interpretations. For its theme is the characterization of science and of rationality in the context of the social roots of science and the…
I have long been fascinated by what makes us human. Great art is about the human condition. We are very quick to reject art that gets that human condition wrong. I’m a poet, a playwright, and a scientist. While my science has found itself at the center of fields such as computational psychiatry and neuroeconomics, I find myself turning again and again to the insights from great novels to understand the subtleties of the human condition. So to complement the scientific questions of morality (because morality is all about the human condition), one should start with great novels that ask who we are and why we do what we do.
A science fiction tale couched in the language of a novel study of academia, Anathem by Neal Stephenson describes a world in which monk-like academicians ensconce themselves away in “maths” which shut their doors to the world for a day, a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium.
A marvelous vision on what it means to study something, to understand it, and, thus to see the world from a different perspective.
Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians. There, he and his cohorts are sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable "saecular" world, an endless landscape of casinos and megastores that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides it is only these cloistered scholars who have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his friends, mentors, and teachers are summoned forth…
For most of my life I’ve been both a writer and a swimmer. I’ve engaged in both activities for many decades, but I’ve always kept the two entirely separate. Write about swimming? Why? What would I say? What was there to say about water and the act of moving through it? It seemed to me that it was a case of “you have to be there,” that writing about swimming would be too removed from the immediacy, the tactility, the floating state of mind. It was only when I discovered works by some truly great writers that I began to see that I could write about my own love of being in water, and how I might go about it.
This book is packed with fascinating, dramatic, and sometimes bizarre tales of swimming lore from history and literature. Sprawson is also fascinated with the swimming world’s legacy to Hollywood in the thirties and forties, exploring the careers of “aquamusical” star Esther Williams and Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, who starred in a dozen Tarzan movies. Sprawson’s reputation as a literary writer about swimming is second only to that of Roger Deakins. What gives the book a strange fascination for many people is the fact that after the publication of Haunts of the Black Masseur, Sprawson never wrote another one.
In a masterful work of cultural history, Charles Sprawson, himself an obsessional swimmer and fluent diver, explores the meaning that different cultures have attached to water, and the search for the springs of classical antiquity.
In nineteenth-century England bathing was thought to be an instrument of social and moral reform, while in Germany and America swimming came to signify escape. For the Japanese the swimmer became an expression of samurai pride and nationalism. Sprawson gives is fascinating glimpses of the great swimming heroes: Byron leaping dramatically into the surf at Shelley’s beach funeral; Rupert Brooke swimming naked with Virginia Woolf,…
