Here, you can find more clues – to my interests, enthusiasms, what I think about – and just what I think, period. The clues are arranged in three lists – of movies, of fiction and of non-fiction. None is exhaustive. They are not lists of everything I’ve seen or read, not even everything I think is good. Among the novels, I have limited myself to a single work per author. If you like these, you may well want to look at some of their other works. The non-fiction list is not so restrictive. Basically, the items fall into three categories – works that have been important in shaping my thought, those I have found it important to respond to, and those that, though perhaps not influential in shaping what I think, do a good job of exposition of some important area. There may also be some that don’t exactly fit into any of those. (Which are which? – figure it out.)
Movies
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Adaptation |
American Beauty |
An Inconvenient Truth |
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Apocalypse Now |
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Blade-Runner |
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Contact |
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Donnie Darko |
Fearless |
Fight Club |
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Fracture |
House of Games |
Iris |
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Jacob’s Ladder |
Marjoe |
One Hour Photo |
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Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead |
The Cell |
The Dead Poets Society |
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The Shawshank Redemption |
The Silence of the Lambs |
The Wall |
Fiction
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale
Greg Bear: Blood Music
Orson Scott Card: Ender’s Game
John Dickson Carr: The Burning Court
Phillip K. Dick: The Penultimate Truth
Fyodor Dostoevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
Umberto Eco: Foucault’s Pendulum
M. J. Engh: Arslan
William Gibson: Neuromancer
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling: The Difference Engine
Thomas Harris:
Robert Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land
Marshall Jevons: The Fatal Equilibrium
C.S. Lewis: Till We Have Faces
Ken MacLeod: The Star Fraction
Francine Prose: Blue Angel
Tom Robbins: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Dorothy L. Sayers: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
J. Neil Schulman: The Rainbow Cadenza
Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson: Illuminatus!
Upton Sinclair: Elmer Gantry
Neal Stephenson: The Diamond Age
Donna Tart: The Secret History
John Kennedy Toole: A Confederacy of Dunces
Vernor Vinge: True Names
T.H. White: The Once and Future King
F. Paul Wilson: Black Wind
Non-Fiction
Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics; Politics; Rhetoric
Robert Axelrod: The Evolution of Cooperation
Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln: Holy Blood, Holy Grail
Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (eds.): The Adapted Mind
Pascal Boyer: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
David Brink: Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics
Martin Buber: I and Thou
James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock: The Calculus of Consent
James Burnham: The Machiavellians; The Suicide of the West
A.G. Cairns-Smith: Seven Clues to the Origin of Life
James Carse: Finite and Infinite Games
Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven: Regulating the Poor
Aleister Crowley: The Book of Lies; Magick Without Tears
Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species
Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene
Daniel Dennett: Content and Consciousness; Darwin’s Dangerous Idea; Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting
Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Why Americans Hate Politics
Eric Drexler: Engines of Creation
Peter Drucker: The End of Economic Man
Ronald Dworkin: A Matter of Principle; Law’s Empire
Gail Eisnitz: Slaughterhouse
Robert Ellickson: Order Without Law
John T. Flynn: As We Go Marching
Robert Frank: Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions
Charles Frankel: The Case for Modern Man
Francis Fukuyama: The End of History and the Last Man
John Taylor Gatto: The Underground History of American Education
R.M. Hare: Moral Thinking
Gilbert Harman: Thought
Marvin Harris: Cannibals and Kings
H.L.A. Hart: The Concept of Law
Van Harvey: The Historian and the Believer
Bruce Hauptli: The Reasonableness of Reason: Explaining Rationality Naturalistically
Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
Douglas Hofstadter: Gödel, Escher, Bach; Metamagical Themas
David Hume: Treatise of Human Nature; Essays: Moral, Political and Literary
William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience; A Pluralistic Universe
Julian Jaynes: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Paul Johnson: Modern Times
Immanuel Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Pure Reason
Walter Kaufmann: Critique of Religion and Philosophy
John Kekes: A Justification of Rationality
Arthur Koestler: The Act of Creation
Gabriel Kolko: The Triumph of Conservatism
Christine Korsgaard: The Sources of
Normativity; Creating the
Saul Kripke: Naming and Necessity; Wittgenstein on Rules and the Private Language Argument
Jonathan Kwitny: Endless Enemies
Suzanne Langer: Philosophy in a New Key
Don Lavoie: National Economic Planning: What is Left?
Bruno Leoni: Freedom and the Law
C.S. Lewis: The Abolition of Man
Walter Lippmann: A Preface to Morals; The Good Society
Loren Lomasky: Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community
John Stuart Mill: On
Ruth Millikan: Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories
Herbert J. Müller: The Uses of the Past
Thomas Nagel: The Possibility of Altruism
Robert Nisbet: The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought
Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State, and Utopia; Philosophical Explorations
Martha Nussbaum: The Fragility of Goodness
Onora O’Neill: Constructions of Reason
Franz Oppenheimer: The State
Heinz Pagels: The Cosmic Code
Camille Paglia: Sexual Personae
Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason
Stephen Pinker: How the Mind Works; The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Robert Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Plato: The Republic
Michael Polanyi: The Tacit Dimension
Karl Popper: Conjectures and Refutations
Hilary Putnam: Reason, Truth, and History
Carroll Quigley: The Evolution of Civilizations
Earl Ravenal: Never Again
John Rawls: A Theory of Justice
Matt Ridley: The Origins of Virtue
Michael Rothschild: Bionomics
Mark Rowlands: Animals Like Us
Samuel Scheffler: The Rejection of Consequentialism
Jonathan Schell: The Fate of the Earth
David Schmidtz: Rational Choice and Moral Agency
Joseph Schumpeter: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
Michael Scriven: Primary Philosophy
Brian Skyrms: Evolution of the Social Contract
Adam Smith: Theory of Moral Sentiments
Horacio Spector: Autonomy and Rights
William Strauss and Neil Howe: Generations:
The History of
Robert Sugden: The Evolution of Rights, Cooperation, and Welfare
Paul Tillich: A History of Christian Thought
Alan Watts: The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Alfred North Whitehead: Adventures of Ideas; Religion in the Making
Robert Anton Wilson: Prometheus Rising
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations
Robert Wright: The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology; Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny
