Here are 100 books that The Black Cat and Other Tales 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 is the book that shaped philosophical thinking about action since the past half-century, though I didn’t really understand this the first time I read it.
Among other things, Anscombe single-handedly resuscitates the old idea that all we want, we want under the guise of some good from the relative obscurity it had fallen into, handing it over to new generations of philosophers. She vehemently rejects the idea that people can actually behave like Poe’s characters.
Intention is one of the masterworks of twentieth-century philosophy in English. First published in 1957, it has acquired the status of a modern philosophical classic. The book attempts to show in detail that the natural and widely accepted picture of what we mean by an intention gives rise to insoluble problems and must be abandoned. This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.
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.
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.
As a clinical psychologist, I listen to thoughts all the time. I’m also having my own, constantly. We rely on our thoughts to help us navigate the world. However, our thoughts can also be a source of suffering. At times, they're not such reliable guides or helpers. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a way of thinking about thinking. ACT captured my imagination early in my clinical career. I trained with ACT’s originator, Steven Hayes, in the early 1990’s. I’ve come to believe that being more aware of our own thoughts, and our relationship to them is key to creating positive change and living a life grounded in our values.
Dr. Baer was a leading clinician and researcher in the area of treating Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is essentially a problematic relationship between an individual and their thoughts.
His focus was on struggles with thoughts that we identify as “bad” or unacceptable. This book was one of the first texts to fully describe what has come to be called “Pure O” OCD.
I’ve always been drawn to stories about Jewish survival. My mother’s family were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Belarus, and as a child I was often asking questions about what their world was like before it was destroyed. I later studied at Brandeis University where I earned my doctorate in Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, and then taught Jewish Literature at the University of Toronto. When my novel Come Back for Me was published, it felt as though many of my lifelong passions had finally come together in one book. Yet I’m still asking questions. My second novel (almost completed!) continues my quest to further my knowledge of all that was lost.
Despite the title, this is not so much a story of one woman, but a portrait of several individual Jews and Poles caught in the Nazi web during WWII.
Each chapter is a finely drawn sketch of a single individual tested by fate and circumstance. The author captures how each of these characters responds to his or her plight in ways that are rarely predictable. I was particularly impressed by how the author displays a broad knowledge of national and political movements which he incorporates into the stories.
This provides a nuanced backdrop to the personal struggles experienced by each of his meticulously crafted characters.
In Nazi-occupied Warsaw of 1943, Irma Seidenman, a young Jewish widow passes as the wife of a Polish officer, until an informer spots her and drags her off to the Gestapo to await her fate
I’m a political theorist recently retired from the University of Toronto. Around fall 2014, I became aware that a hyper-energetic, well-educated intelligentsia was trying to move heaven and earth to make fascism intellectually respectable again. I resolved to educate myself about these scary characters. I was truly alarmed, and wrote my book to convey my alarm to fellow citizens who hadn’t yet woken up to the threat. Sure enough, within a couple of years, Richard Spencer rose to media stardom; and one of the first things that Trump did after being elected in November of 2016 was to decide that a crypto-fascist Steve Bannon was worthy of a senior position in the White House.
Faye’s book has been extremely controversial, exposing him to sometimes quite nasty attacks by Heidegger apologists. But with respect to the core of what his book is about—the pro-Hitlerite seminars given by Heidegger during the years when he was most closely aligned with the Nazis—it’s an absolutely devastating account. The book is a must-read. Should be read in conjunction with Charles Bambach’s 2003 book, Heidegger’s Roots.
In the most comprehensive examination to date of Heidegger's Nazism, Emmanuel Faye draws on previously unavailable materials to paint a damning picture of Nazism's influence on the philosopher's thought and politics. In this provocative book, Faye uses excerpts from unpublished seminars to show that Heidegger's philosophical writings are fatally compromised by an adherence to National Socialist ideas. In other documents, Faye finds expressions of racism and exterminatory anti-Semitism. Faye disputes the view of Heidegger as a naive, temporarily disoriented academician and instead shows him to have been a self-appointed 'spiritual guide' for Nazism whose intentionality was clear. Contrary to what…
Raised in a proud Jewish home, I was instilled with an appreciation for my cultural heritage from a very young age. Today, I am utterly fascinated with the convergence of Judaism and popular culture in film, television, comics, literature, and other media. After college, I became a freelance entertainment journalist, writing stories for SYFY WIRE,The Hollywood Reporter,Forbes, and Marvel Entertainment. I currently reside in Philadelphia with my wife, Leora, and adorable Cavapoo, Archie.
Every book list needs a good wild card, wouldn’t you agree?
This Dark Horse one-shot published in the run-up to the premiere for Amazon’s Hunters is only a few pages long, but perfectly encapsulates the pulpy spirit of the revenge-driven series created by David Weil. Mr. Weil has stated on numerous occasions that the small screen project was a way for him to pay homage to his Holocaust survivor grandmother and tell an epic, comic book-inspired story of good vs. evil.
The one-shot does just that as the titular squad of Nazi eliminators tracks down a concentration camp doctor notorious for conducting unspeakable human experiments and collecting gruesome trophies.
Ruth Heidelbaum has secret to kill for—hundreds of Nazis are hiding in the United States, and she's on a bloody quest to take them out, one by one. She and her rag-tag teammates call themselves THE HUNTERS, and it's kill, rinse, repeat, until justice has finally been served to every last one of them. This is not murder...it's mitzvah!
The ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes noted that botanists should write history because so much history involves plants. Coincidentally, I am a botanist with a deep interest in history. I began as a child botanizing abandoned farmers’ fields, and now I am always on the lookout for topics at the intersection of plants and human affairs. The books on my list are among many I read while researching for my book. In exploring the role of plants in warfare, I have synthesized vast information about human and military needs, from rationed foods to camouflage and battlefront medicine. Germany provided many unexpected findings.
Science collapses when scientists ignore objectivity and unbiased analysis, and Robert N. Proctor argues this effectively in this book.
I had long assumed (incorrectly) that racial doctrine during the Third Reich came directly from Hitler, but many German scientists actively espoused racial policies with supposed scientific justification. It may be hard to accept that some scientists became sympathizers overnight, no doubt for their own welfare and survival.
Proctor illustrates that pure science can be adapted for evil intent and that a self-centered agenda can result in illegitimate outcomes.
Scholars exploring the history of science under the Nazis have generally concentrated on the Nazi destruction of science or the corruption of intellectual and liberal values. Racial Hygiene focuses on how scientists themselves participated in the construction of Nazi racial policy. Robert Proctor demonstrates that the common picture of a passive scientific community coerced into cooperation with the Nazis fails to grasp the reality of what actually happened-namely, that many of the political initiatives of the Nazis arose from within the scientific community, and that medical scientists actively designed and administered key elements of National Socialist policy.
I would trace the genesis of Hitler’s Monsters to three distinct influences. The first was my childhood love of Golden, Silver, and Bronze Age comics––Batman, Superman, Captain America, The Avengers, The Fantastic Four––which, as illustrated by the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,are replete with themes of Nazi occultism and border science.The second was a conversation with my thesis advisor early in graduate school, when he noted that he was advising a dissertation on German occultism (Science for the Soul). The third influence was observing the mid-2000s resurgence in rightwing populism across Europe and North America, seemingly fueled by recourse to esoteric and supernatural thinking. The rest, as they say, is history.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s Occult Roots of Nazism is arguably the first scholarly monograph to take the relationship between occultism and Nazism seriously, providing a fascinating overview of the “secret Aryan cults” and “Ariosophic” beliefs that ostensibly influenced Nazi ideology.
While Goodrick-Clarke stops short of drawing a direct connection between prewar occult doctrines and Nazi policies during the Third Reich– indeed, his study concludes in 1935––no historian before or since has done as thorough a job, based on copious empirical research, of chronicling the eclectic and ubiquitous occult underground that helped shape the interwar folkish movement that produced Nazism.
Reveals how Nazism was influenced by powerful occult sects that thrived in Germany and Austria almost fifty years before Hitler's rise to power
Over half a century after the defeat of the Third Reich, Nazism remains a subject of extensive historical inquiry, general interest, and, alarmingly, a source of inspiration for resurgent fascism around the world. Goodrick-Clarke's powerful and timely book traces the intellectual roots of Nazism back to a number of influential occult and millenarian sects in the Habsburg Empire during its waning years. These millenarian sects-principally the Ariosophists-espoused a mixture of popular nationalism, Aryan racism, and occultism to…
