The most recommended books on rationalism

Jordan’s is probably the most elegantly written of the five studies and stands out for providing a particularly generous allocation of space to Robespierre’s voice, telling the story of his life as much as possible through his own words. At the same time, Jordan’s intellectual biography is quietly attentive to providing a sense of the complex political environment in which any French revolutionary statesman had to act.

This is another important contribution to our understanding of Spinoza as a moral philosopher. It is a denser read than the first three books, but fascinating nonetheless for those already with a little Spinoza under their belt. Rather than concentrating on just the latter parts of the Ethics, where most scholars interested in Spinoza’s moral philosophy focus and where we find the mature discussion of the “free person” who lives under the “guidance of reason”, Sangiacomo is especially concerned with the evolution of Spinoza’s moral thought from his earliest writings to his final, uncompleted work. He considers tensions within, and pressures upon, Spinoza’s understanding of the “Supreme Good” and how to achieve it, and the changes that that account consequently undergoes. Sangiacomo’s thesis is thus both historical and philosophical.

Foucault’s groundbreaking work from the 1960s looks at how systems of order and classification came into being during the age of rationalism with Descartes, culminating in the 18th-century Enlightenment’s project of subjecting every field of knowledge to its own self-enclosed order. It remains of the great works of theoretical synthesis, patiently dissecting the structures of knowledge, of order and priority, that western learning continues to take for granted. At half a century’s distance, Foucault is the one French thinker whose legacy remains intact for his lucidity, polemical edge, and refusal of esoteric linguistic games.

Political scientists and economists have long argued that voters are rationally ignorant.

On this theory, people tend to acquire and retain information only if the expected benefits exceed the expected costs. This explains why students cram material to pass a test but let themselves forget it afterward, why Americans who speak English at home don’t usually bother to learn a foreign language but so many people learn English, or why you don’t bother attempt to memorize your local phonebook.

It also explains why voters know so little. Since individual votes make so little difference, individual voters can afford to remain ignorant. Political information is a collective action problem: what we know matters, but what any one of us knows does not. 

Caplan adds an innovation. This point also applies to how we think, not just what we know. Political psychologists have long found that voters process what little information they… show more.

This book first came out in 1926 but it’s interesting how much of what he teaches in this book is still relevant and lacking in today’s workplace. He is falsely remembered for his operations concepts as if they were more important than the employee, but he stresses over and over again the importance of focusing on the needs of the employee. This is also reflected in his objective of creating a vehicle for the average man, making his life easier and happier. If we would have listened and learned from him long ago we may not be rehearing these same messages again coming from Japanese automakers.

I am tempted to say: Because Frank is a delightful writer and leave it at that.

This book reiterates similar themes in discussing how a variety of supposedly non-economic factors affect economic decisions.

In this book Frank discusses how noble human tendencies (moral sentiments) may have not only survived the pressures of the material world, but actually have been nurtured by them. The title is a play on the David Hume quote that “Reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

To those interested, I also recommend any of Frank’s other books including Choosing the Right Pond, The Winner Take All Society, and The Darwin Economy. 

I’ve been wanting to dive more deeply into Ted Chiang’s fiction since seeing the movie Arrival and reading his essays in The New Yorker. This collection did not disappoint.

I happened to be reading it in the hours and days after the birth of my second child, stealing minutes to do so while breast pumping.

I kept remarking to my husband, “This man’s mind…his mind!” Dazzling. And when, a few days after birth, our baby had a serious health scare, the message of “The Story of Your Life”—that if given the chance to see a horrible future in which you outlive your child, you’d make that baby anyway—gave me the strangest, most profound comfort.

I found this work to be a complex and nuanced introduction to the much-debated and poorly understood intellectual revolution that was the Enlightenment.

Although the book lies outside my own area of academic expertise, I could easily follow its sweeping narrative as it moved through both familiar and obscure writers and thinkers. Few subjects escape its attention, and the volume is particularly strong in exploring the complex relationship between Enlightenment rationalism and Christianity. 

Arguably the greatest work of moral philosophy of the 20th Century.  It’s rich with vivid thought experiments – including Parfit’s famous tele-transporter, which can make an exact copy of us and transport us to another planet. Is this copy of me the same person as me? The book makes us question some of our deepest assumptions - such as what it means to say that David Edmonds today is identical to David Edmonds yesterday or tomorrow. Parfit was my first supervisor, and I’m now writing his biography.

In this book, Horty uses tools that were originally developed in the fields of artificial intelligence and non-monotonic logic in order to develop an explanatory theory of how reasons compete with one another. The main thing that has led contemporary moral philosophers to be so interested in reasons is that they seem to be able to compete. For example, if on the one hand, you promised your friend to keep a secret, that is a reason that counts against telling anyone else, but if the secret is that they are having an affair with the spouse of another of your friends, that is a reason that counts in favor of telling, and to figure out what you should do, it seems like we have to weigh these reasons together to see which one is more important. But very few ethicists have gotten very far in thinking about the distinctive challenges… show more.