It's Easier Than You Think - Sylvia Boorstein

 Subtitle: The Buddhist way to happiness

This is a book that introduces the philosophy of Buddhism.  I'll keep it for reference as the ideas and principles resonated with me a lot.  I can pick this up and find thoughtful practices and insights that ease my mind.

Quotes:

"Gossiping is talking about someone who is not present. Talking disparagingly about a third person is inviting the listener to share your grumbly mind space."

"Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience."

"Friendliness is not hard.  We don't need to learn to be friendly.  We need to remember to be friendly."

Published: 1995  Read: September 2026  Genre: Philosophy

Being Good - Simon Blackburn

 Sub-title: A Short Introduction to Ethics

Reading philosophy texts can be dense, with lots of vocabulary to grasp and concepts to unpack.  This slim book attempts to simplify the task, covering Aristotle, Kant, Plato and others.  The focus of the book is to address criticism of different ethical philosophies.  I don't know that I grasped all of its arguments, but it exercised my thinking and helped me understand some of the issues in the field.

Quotes:

"The Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen has calculated that there are over 100 million "missing women"..birth rates indicate that here should be slightly more females than males [but there aren't] because of inequalities in medical care, and sustenance as well as deliberate infanticide."

"Many philosophers argue, and I agree, that belief in the afterlife is an indefensible metaphysics; a false picture of how we as persons relate to our physical bodies. It imagines the soul as only accidentally and temporarily lodged in a body, like a person in a car. Whereas many philosophers think of the distinction between mind and body as much more subtle than this. They might say it is  much more like the distinction between a computer program and the machine it runs on. There is a distinction, sure enough, but not one that gives you any license to imagine the software running, but without any hardware at all."

Published:       Read: July 2026  Genre: Philosophy

The Sovereignty of Good - Iris Murdoch

 

I can't remember where I got the recommendation for this slim book.  It took me several months to read. It's dense, convoluted writing and I don't know that I grasped all her points.  What I took away is that the philosophies of life of other philosophers and schools of thought were being criticized in favor of her viewpoint on goodness.   In the 70s, existentialism was advanced, the focus was on making the right moral choices when a decision was required.  Her argument is that we need to get out of ourselves and see reality aside from our own egotistical view to be Good and to then act accordingly.  

Quotes:

"We are men and we are moral agents before we are scientists and the place of science in human life must be discussed in words.  This is why it is and always will be more important to know about Shakespeare than to know about any scientist and if there is a 'Shakespeare of science' it is Aristotle."

"...the idea of the Good as the source of light which reveals to us all things as they really are."

Published: 1971  Read: March 2026  Genre: Philosophy

God, Human, Animal, Machine - Meghan O'Gieblyn

 This was a deeply philosophical read, a book created from a series of essays and new material. The author was raised a fundamentalist Christian and in college began questioning the teachings and now considers herself a humanist. However, her background allows her to draw parallels to humankind's creation of an omnipotent being and our speculation about the evolution of machines into sentient beings.  

I found in interesting how her spiritual beliefs evolved and as she left her fundamentalist roots brought a unique perspective to humanism. The book exposed me to many philosophers old and new and provided a context for their writings. I also learned about several technology contributors. The author wove both into a view of where we are going from where we have been.

Quotes:

"I can trace my interest in technology to Ray Kurzweil's 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines"

"...belief in an immanent transformation (resurrection) persisted, improbably, century after century... Dante in the Divine Comedy makes up an entirely new word [translated as] transhuman. It was the first time the word was used in the human language." 

"In addition to our physical bodies their exists -- somewhere in the ether -- a second self that is purely informational and immaterial...that lingers in the shadowy dossier of third party aggregators. It is they, not we that are the most valuable and real,"

[Poem by Swinburne] 

From too much love of living,

    From hope and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

    Whatever gods may be.

That no life lives for ever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

    Winds somewhere safe to sea.

"Technology companies learned long ago that their products ar for more appealing -- and more profitable -- when humans manage to bond with them."

"reality is "that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away" - Philip K Dick sci-fi writer.

"...how much of our science and philosophy has been colored by the justifications of shitty men?"

"people become trapped within the mirror of their digital reflection, a process that Google researcher Vyacheslav Polonski calls 'algorithmic determinism'."

"Elon Musk - a man who once referred to humanity as the biological bootloaders for AI.  'Bootloader' is a computational term that refers to the minimal line of code that is used to start up a computer.  It is a tiny, insignificant program whose sole purpose is to initiate larger, more complex program."

Published: 2021 Read: September 2023 Genre: Philosophy

Enlightment Now - Steven Pinker

 Subtitle: The case for reason, science, humanism and progress.

I've enjoyed other books by Pinker and this one came highly recommended.  It makes a case for the world situation being much better than we think because we have reached and are exceeding the goals of the intellectual movement called the Enlightenment.

I read the first 100 pages, had several sticky tags, but I just couldn't keep reading.   It was laborious and repetitive and written in 2018, so pre-Covid it felt naive.  I'm putting it aside and I'll see if I can finish it some other time.

Quotes:

"conatus (effort or striving) defined as 'an endeavor to persist and flourish in one's own being' which was a foundation of several Enlightenment-era theories of life and mind."

"Human cognition comes with two features that give it the means to transcend its limitations.  The first is abstraction....the second ..is its combinatorial, recursive power."

"The nature of news is likely to distort people's view of the world because of a mental bug that psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind." 

"Autobiographical memory.  Though we tend to remember bad events as well as we remember good ones, the negative coloring of the misfortunes fades with time, particularly the one that happened to us.  We are wired for nostalgia.  Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things ain't what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times."

"As we care about more of humanity, we're apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen."

Published: 2018 Read: July 2023  Genre: Social Philosophy Non-fiction

Elizabeth Finch - Julian Barnes

 This was quirky.  It speaks to the impact a teacher can have on us for the rest of our lives.  A 30ish man attends a class taught by Elizabeth Finch.  She challenges her students to think and her lessons stick with him.  They become friends and we she passes he seeks to find out more about her.  There were many noteworthy quotes that made it enjoyable but not a particularly satisfying story; rather a comment on what we can do with our lives.

Quotes:

"We must certainly consider, not just in this class, but outside it, in our own turbulent and fretful lives, the element of chance.  The number of people we deeply meet is strangely few.  Passion may mislead us furiously.  Reason may mislead us just as much.  Our genetic inheritance might hamstring us.  So might previous events in our lives.  It is not just soldiers in the field who later suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.  It is often the inevitable consequence of a seemingly normal sublunary existence."

"I have quite as many friends as I need.  They do not, on the whole, interconnect.  Which makes some of them imagine that they are more central to my life that they are.  Others, the opposite."

[After she is slandered in the rag newspapers] "They choose to understand nothing.  It was kind of you to be upset on my behalf, but unnecessary.  They choose to understand nothing."

[on the quote she repeated from the Handbook of Epictetus] Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us.  The things that are up to us are by nature free, unhindered, and unimpeded; while the things that are not up to us are weak, enslaved, hindred, not our own.  You can only be free and happy if you recognise this essential difference between what you can change and what you can't.  Among the things not up to us are our bodies, our possessions, our reputations and our public offices."

"Does civilization progress? Elizabeth Finch like to ask us that question.  Undoubtedly it does in terms of medicine, science, technology.  But in human, moral terms?  In terms of philosophy?  In terms of seriousness?"

"[I] ...turn my life into a story.  We all do it.  EF wasn't like that.  She'd give you the conclusion but not the narrative.  Why?  The obvious, normal reason would be a sense of privacy, of discretion.  But I decided that it was also perhaps something bigger: a sense that a life, much as we would like it to be, does not amount to a narrative---or not a narrative such as we understand and expect".

Published: 2022  Read: March 2023  Genre: Philosophy 

Poison for Breakfast - Lemony Snicket

 

This was cute and quirky.  The main character finds a note under his door that says "you had poison for breakfast".  We goes on a journey to find out how and why and when and in the process reflects on life in all its bewildering glory.  

Published: 2021  Read: March 2022  Genre: Fiction, Philosophy

The Midnight Library - Matt Haig

 I think this might be my favorite read so far this year!  A 30 something woman welcomes death as a way out of what she perceives as a miserable life.  She finds herself in the midnight library - a purgatory where infinite rows of books representing all her possible lives allows her to chose the ones she regrets having missed.  As she re-lives her life with various different choices she gets to experience the "what-ifs" that plague the results of our actions.  

Quotes:

"There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe.  So it gets very messy.  And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything.  Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living."

"That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair.  Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut.  Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you."

"She realized that you could be as honest as possible in life but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.  As Thoreau wrote 'It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see'."

Highly recommended unique way of exploring the "could have been" of life.

Published: 2020  Read: August 2021  Genre: Fiction, Philosophy

Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari

Sub-title: A Brief History of Tomorrow

This was a heavy book, figuratively and literally!  Harari has a PhD in history and specializes in world history.  He wrote an earlier book on the history of mankind called Sapiens.  This book is a sort of sequel, describing the future of the human species.  He presents many provocative ideas based on the evolution of industry and technology in the modern age.  I was fascinated and fearful of some of his predictions.  Here are some quotes and snipets I wanted to keep:

Page 54 - "A baby was conceived using the mitochondrial DNA of a 3rd person so she has biologically three parents (this procedures was subsequently banned in the U.S.)"

Page 58 - "This is the paradox of historical knowledge.  Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless.  But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses it relevance.  The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated."

Page 132 - "...the crucial factor in our [humans] conquest of the world was our ability to connect many humans to one another."

Page - 143 - "All large-scale human cooperation is ultimately based on our belief in imagined orders.  These are set of rules that, despite existing only in our imagination, we believe to be a real and inviolable as gravity [examples, God].  As long as all Sapiens living in a particular locality believe in the sames stories, they all follow the same rules, making it easy to predict the behaviour of strangers and to organize mass-cooperation networks."

When he talks of "imagined orders" he's referring to a belief that is intersubjective - a belief that depends on communication among many humans, money being an example.  He posits that religious and nationalistic beliefs are also intersubjective and cease to exist if we cease to believe in them.

He goes on from this explanation of how the species acts based on commonly held beliefs to describe "The Modern Covenant" - an agreement we have made "to give up meaning in exchange for power".  Religion and nationalistic beliefs gave meaning to human life but restricted their power.  By letting go of a belief in a great cosmic plan life has no meaning.  "The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause.  If modernity has a motto, its 'shit happens'."  From this, he surmises, humans can do anything we want. "On the practical level modern life consists of a constant pursuit of power within a universe devoid meaning."

Page 304 - "If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable".

Page 350 - "Most scientific research about the human mind and the human experience has been conducted on people from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies.  The study of the human mind has so far assumed that Homo sapiens is Homer Simpson."

Page 366 - "Modern humanity is sick with FOMO - Fear of Missing Out and though we have more choice than ever before, we have lost the ability to really pay attention to whatever we choose."

He ends with three challenging questions:

1. Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
2. What's more valuable intelligence or consciousness?
3. What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?

Published: 2015   Read: March 2018  Genre: History, Science

Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis

Sub-title: Adventures on the Appalachian Trail

I picked this up on the library's "Get Outdoors" shelf.  My husband has hiked the trail to various lengths for several years and I was interested in reading another person's account.

Before reading, I knew nothing about the author.  The jacket told me she'd become a record holder in hiking the trail in the fewest number of days.  This story is about her first hike at the tender age of 21 after finishing college.  She was naive and inexperienced and sheltered and the hike changed her life.

I enjoyed the fast pace of the story, with each chapter beginning with an introduction to the next stretch of the trail and then her experiences traversing that stretch.  She chose to hike alone for most of the way, reflecting on her reactions, her thoughts and her ability to persevere.

As my husband, who also read the book, pointed out, everyone hikes their own hike.  Just like life; we all have our own view of how we experience our existence and those with share it with.

Published:  2010  Read: March 2016  Genre: Adventure, auto-biography

Spinoza in Love - Martin Skogsbeck

I enjoy choosing odd looking books at used book stores.  This one caught my attention because of the description on the back cover.  It is a fictional account of the life of Spinoza, a 17th century philosopher written based on the known facts and accounts of his life.  His story is told from the point of view a a school friend who reflects back on their friendship while at the same time unveiling the evolution of his philosophy.

With philosophy being obscure and difficult to read for me, especially in the original texts.this story spiked an interest to research more about Spinoza and his influence.

There are several places in the story where his thinking is described through the interactions of the characters.

Quotes:

"...you form judgements by applying reason.  You don't allow handed down dogma, 'accepted wisdom' nor other people's opinions to dictate what you should believe.  The only truth you accept is the truth you arrive at yourself.  To me, this is the very definition of philosophy: seeking knowledge through reason".

"Love is nothing else than the enjoyment of a thing and the union with it.  Some of these things are transient, others eternal and imperishable.  The greatest love of all  is the love of God."

"You will not have a problem [with not showing gratitude to someone] as long as they understand that they made you happy.  Be aware that those who nevertheless expect gratitude are not concerned with your happiness.   Their aim is rather to have you indebted and get you under their power.  In this case, you are better off not accepting the gift in the first place."

[asking him on his death bed if people will read his books] "Do you really think that in three centuries...people will understand that God and Nature are the same?  And that all that happens is determined?  Will they agree that scripture cannot be taken literally; that revelation, prophecy and miracles are merely symbolic and never actually happened?"

A challenging and thought-provoking read.

Published:  2014  Read: January 2016  Genre: Fiction, philosophy

To Have or To Be - Erich Fromm

This one has been on my TBR (To Be Read) list for a long time, I'm sure it was a recommendation from one of the blogs I follow on simplicity or finances.

The original text was written in 1976 and this version was published in 1997 as part of the World Perspective Series.

Fromm's thesis is that if we understand the difference between having and being we will see the advantages of simplicity and realize spiritual wealth.  He begins with illustrating how the idea of possession has crept into our language (example - "I have a problem" instead of "I am troubled") and leads to alienation from who we are.

"The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole world.  The consumer is the eternal suckling crying for the bottle".

He suggests that reading a novel can be done in the mode of having or being and when read in the being mode the reader "enhances their knowledge and deepens their insight into human nature or gains knowledge about themselves".

He explains that in the being mode "private having (private property) has little affective importance, because I do not need to own something in order to enjoy it or even in order to use it" Sharing creates "one of the deepest forms of human happiness: shared enjoyment".

He contrasts pleasure and joy with joy being "not the ecstatic fire of the moment...but the glow that accompanies being".

He suggests that "most consumption engenders passivity; that the need for speed and newness, which can only be satisfied by consumerism, reflects restlessness, the inner flight from oneself...that looking for the next thing to do or the newest gadget to use is only a means of protecting oneself from being close to oneself or to another person".

The book is complex, addressing not only the individual but society and government.  Definitely food for thought.

Published: 1976  Read: December 2015  Genre: Philosophy, Sociology

Coincidence - J. W. Ironmonger

The perfect book to take on a cruise; philosophical yet not too heavy. A young woman comes to a professor who analyzes the probability of what seem to be coincidences, to assert her belief that she is predetermined to die based on the coincidences that have aligned in her life.

The professor takes on her case to disprove coincidences as a case for predetermination and the existence of a God.  The book explores the meaning of serendipity, luck, miracles and our tendency to look for non-randomness in a random world.

The woman advocates coincidences as evidence of someone being in control claiming that "everything happens for a reason but not always a good reason"and argues that he "can't dismiss my views simply because they make no sense to you".

The professor points out the lazy logic of claiming something was caused by something that happened before it just because the result occurred after the initial event; the Latin being "post hoc ergo propter hoc" literally "after this, therefore because of this".

There's a lot of strange happenings in the woman's life and the story gets messy and runs down some dead ends making for a sloppy path to the end.  The professor falls in love; he confesses that someone must be in control of everything but finds it hard to believe.

My take away was that we are all responsible for our own problems or at least the attitude we take toward them.

Published: 2014  Read: October 2015  Genre: Fiction, Philosophy

ISBN-13: 978-0062309891