Here are 100 books that Follow the Devil / Follow the Light fans have personally recommended if you like
Follow the Devil / Follow the Light.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I love to read (full stop). And especially, I love to read Plato in English and in Greek, by myself and with others. I studied Plato for my doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge (in England) because in his dialogues, one finds all the dimensions of philosophy coming together. Why does thinking about how to live lead not only to ethics and political philosophy, but also epistemology (what we can know), aesthetics (what is beautiful), and metaphysics (what is the nature of reality)? Having read Plato with third graders, graduate students, business leaders, and retirees, I find that people of all kinds respond to his works.
Who would have expected a chapter on money in a book on Plato?
This book persuaded me that the effects of money on souls and societies alike were central to Plato’s ideas. Money distracts from deeper values. It produces false equivalences. It enslaves our reasoning power to the aim of mere accumulation. At a social level, it drives imperialism and war, as Plato saw that it did in ancient Athens.
While there is so much in this book, I find myself going back to this chapter again and again, and finding new insights about Plato’s world and ours each time.
The Founders of Modern Political and Social Thought series presents critical examinations of the work of major political philosophers and social theorists, assessing both their initial contribution and their continuing relevance to politics and society. Each volume provides a clear, accessible, historically informed account of a thinker's work, focusing on a reassessment of the central ideas and arguments. The series encourages scholars and students to link their study of classic texts to current debates in political philosophy and social theory.
In this authoritative general account of Plato's political thought, a leading scholar of ancient Greek philosophy explores its key themes:…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Who knows why, but I have always been enticed by absurdities, paradoxes, incongruities — I use them in my talks, articles, and books — of everyday lives, our humanity, and mysteries of our ‘going on.’ Reflections on being human can be triggered by humour such as Cambridge’sBeyond the Fringe and New York’s sitcom Seinfeld— within which I wallow — as well as by lengthy philosophical works and novels. My work draws on bafflements: for example, shampoo instructions “Lather, rinse, repeat” (making shampoo-ing infinite?); Barmaid to Peter Cook, “Bitter?”, reply being “Just tired”— and Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Yes, I go on.
I frequently return to Plato and his portrayal of Socrates. The Phaedrus intrigues me. It is a difficult work for piecing together, yet with fascinating thoughts, taking us from rhetoric to erotic love to the search for Beauty, Truth, the Good. What it is to be human continues to baffle me — not least because we often do have a sense of 'going beyond' the mystical. Yes — I do write as an atheist.
Phaedrus is widely recognized as one of Plato's most profound and beautiful works. It takes the form of a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus and its ostensible subject is love, especially homoerotic love. This new translation is accompanied by an introduction, further reading, and full notes on the text and translation that discuss the structure of the dialogue and elucidate issues that might puzzle the modern reader.
Our history is spoken through the voice of the conqueror – notably white male. My work seeks to balance our narratives through insight from women’s perspectives. I support my creative writing with extensive research in history, archeology, and myths, and include in situ interpretations of the relevant landscape. There are many truths to be told, not simply one ordained story and I wish to shine the light on stories that have been hidden and/or silenced. The themed series title, Women Unveiled, pertains to this.
I chose this book for its interesting exploration of spiritual resurrections that were common throughout ancient civilizations including the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greek, Persian, and Indians. Silva says these mystical rituals lead initiates (including Plato and Socrates) onto a path of self-empowerment and spiritual awakening. Silva includes the gnostic teachings practiced by the Cathars, who claimed the literal resurrection of Jesus was a lie, and were persecuted by the Church to suppress such gospel teachings by Mary Magdalene and Phillip.
“Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error,” states the once banned Gospel of Philip. For centuries, every esoteric and Gnostic sect was aware that the literal interpretation of the resurrection of Christ promoted by the Church was a fraud. And with good reason: thousands of years before Jesus, initiates from Egypt and China to Celtic Britain and North America practiced a mystical ritual, and its adepts — from Zoroaster to Plato —regarded the experience as the pinnacle of spiritual development: a life-altering awakening that disclosed insights into the nature of reality and the self.…
In 1913, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found dead of apparent suicide. Dr. James Wilson, a new graduate and the first doctor ever to start a practice in this rural town, feels guilty over her death because of his delayed intervention.
I experienced being a parent as a return to my own childhood. As much as I enjoyed teaching my children, I loved learning from them as well. That got me thinking about how one might recapture the joys and insights of childhood. As a philosopher interested in education, I have long wondered whether we leave childhood behind or somehow carry it with us into old age. I discovered that several important philosophers, such as Aristotle, Augustine, and Rousseau have keen insights about the relation of childhood to adulthood. And the biblical Jesus seems to have been the first person to suggest that adults can learn from children.
“Never rush childhood but let it ripen in the child”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first philosopher to see children as more than adults-in-training. As someone who loved revisiting childhood as a parent, I simply adored this celebration of the world of a child.
In this philosophical novel, Rousseau is tutor to Emile from infancy to adulthood, and we watch Emile discover the world without any use of schools or books: “I hate books!” says the world-famous author. Purely through experiential learning, Emile matures, falls in love with Sophie, and becomes a model citizen. Rousseau pioneers the idea of learning through natural consequences: if Emile breaks the window in his room, he gets to enjoy a cold room.
Alan Bloom's new translation of Emile , Rousseau's masterpiece on the education and training of the young, is the first in more than seventy years. In it, Bloom, whose magnificent translation of Plato's Republic has been universally hailed as a virtual rediscovery of that timeless text, again brings together the translator's gift for journeying between two languages and cultures and the philosopher's perception of the true meaning and significance of the issues being examined in the work. The result is a clear, readable, and highly engrossing text that at the same time offers a wholly new sense of the importance…
I love to read (full stop). And especially, I love to read Plato in English and in Greek, by myself and with others. I studied Plato for my doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge (in England) because in his dialogues, one finds all the dimensions of philosophy coming together. Why does thinking about how to live lead not only to ethics and political philosophy, but also epistemology (what we can know), aesthetics (what is beautiful), and metaphysics (what is the nature of reality)? Having read Plato with third graders, graduate students, business leaders, and retirees, I find that people of all kinds respond to his works.
This book blows the cobwebs off Plato. It shows him to have been a force in remaking the terms of the Athenian political imagination and public life.
Allen tracks how images and words that Plato crafted made their way into the public speeches through which Athenians pursued personal vendettas and debated public policy. This book proves that Plato was no ivory tower philosopher. On the contrary: “Plato wrote unacknowledged legislation” and was “the western world’s first think-tank activist and message man”.
Why Plato Wrote argues that Plato was not only the world's first systematic political philosopher, but also the western world's first think-tank activist and message man. Shows that Plato wrote to change Athenian society and thereby transform Athenian politics Offers accessible discussions of Plato's philosophy of language and political theory Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2011
I have studied the ancient world for over 50 years and have found that there are always new things to discover. Everyone thought that all that was known about Socrates had already been said, so I was excited to discover new evidence for his relationship with Aspasia - a woman of extraordinary influence and intellect - hiding in plain sight. I am a Professor of Classics at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford.
This book provides a series of translations of ancient texts relating to the life of Socrates, raising questions about his earlier trajectory among other things. The scattered sources gathered in this volume tell a very different story about the philosopher from that normally obtained by concentrating almost exclusively on his trial and death.
Socrates (469 399 B.C.) is one of history's most enigmatic and intriguing figures. He is often considered the father of Western philosophy, yet the four most famous accounts we have of him present a contradictory, confusing picture.
Just who was Socrates? Was he Plato's brilliant philosopher, at times confounding and infuriating, morally serious and yet ironic; the ever-worldly man, sometime mystic, and uncommon martyr? Or did Plato conflate Socrates' views with his own startling genius, as Aristotle suggests? Was Socrates instead the less impressive, more mundane man whose commonsense impressed the laconic Xenophon? Or could Socrates have been the charlatan,…
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
I'm currently an Honorary Fellow in Social Theory at the University of York, U.K. For more than five decades I've been working to promote more reflexive perspectives in philosophy, sociology, social theory, and sociological research. I've written and edited many books in the field of social theory with particular emphasis on questions of culture and on work in the field of visual culture. Recently these have includedInterpreting Visual Culture (with Ian Heywood), The Handbook of Visual Culture, and an edited multi-volume textbook of international scholars to be published by Bloomsbury,The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture. My own position can be found in my Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms.
This early study of the young Nietzsche is probably the most personal choice as it returns me to an earlier self who first encountered Nietzsche as an undergraduate in the 1960s. In one sense this was my first introduction to what later became known as `Continental Philosophy’. But more than this, it demonstrated that there were fundamental issues and problems that were simply evaded and occluded by the standard histories of philosophy and European culture. The passion to return to the ancient world as a way of understanding the modern world has remain with me to the present. Nietzsche’s reflections on tragedy and `the tragic age’ struck me as a vital source of radical questions and pointed toward problems that remain with me to the present day: the Indo-European language roots of the first thinkers, the seminal role of Homer and Homeric poetry within the problematics of thought, the rejection…
For Nietzsche, the Age of Greek Tragedy was indeed a tragic age. He saw in it the rise and climax of values so dear to him that their subsequent drop into catastrophe (in the person of Socrates - Plato) was clearly foreshadowed as though these were events taking place in the theater. And so in this work, unpublished in his own day but written at the same time that his The Birth of Tragedy had so outraged the German professorate as to imperil his own academic career, his most deeply felt task was one of education. He wanted to present…
I’m a professor of cognitive psychology at UCLA, and also a poet. Growing up on a dairy farm in British Columbia, I immersed myself in the world of books. My mother showed me her well-worn copy of a poetry book written by her Scottish great-great-aunt, and I longed to create my own arrangements of words. Later, as a student at the University of British Columbia and then Stanford, my interest in creativity was channeled into research on how people think. I’ve studied how people use analogies and metaphors to create new ideas. In addition to books on the psychology of thinking and reasoning, I’ve written several volumes of poetry.
If you love Borges, and thought you’d read everything he wrote, this is the book for you—a collection of his “lost lectures,” delivered at Harvard in 1967-68 and finally published in 2000. And if you want to hear the actual voice of a creative genius, as if risen from the dead, the recordings are also available. Best known for his intricate short stories and essays, Borges was also—perhaps foremost—a poet. As he puts it in the book, “The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.” Starting from the creation of poems, Borges explores the creation of metaphors, meaning, and life’s irreducible mystery.
Through a twist of fate that the author of Labyrinths himself would have relished, these lost lectures given in English at Harvard in 1967-1968 by Jorge Luis Borges return to us now, a recovered tale of a life-long love affair with literature and the English language. Transcribed from tapes only recently discovered, This Craft of Verse captures the cadences, candor, wit, and remarkable erudition of one of the most extraordinary and enduring literary voices of the twentieth century. In its wide-ranging commentary and exquisite insights, the book stands as a deeply personal yet…
It’s often said that humor can’t be translated. I’m a translator of more than thirty books, and I know that’s wrong! However, publishers rarely consider funny books for translation. I’ve made this list to point out to you all that sometruly great books that are really funny have broken through the wall protecting English-language readers from the wit and humor of the rest of the world. I’m also a literature professor, and I’m keen to get people to understand that literature does not have to be boring. If Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, Kurt Vonnegut, or David Sedaris make you laugh, then so will Voltaire, Pekic, Hašek, Voinovich, and Gary!
Andrija’s a lifeguard on the river in a small town in the Balkans. During the war, he jumps in to save a man from drowning. Turns out he wasn’t a local, or even a partisan, but a high-ranking Nazi officer. Labelled a collaborator, Andrija flees at the end of the war and ends up an odd-job man in West Germany. When his employer falls into his own swimming pool, Andrija is convicted of his murder—for the man who died was the officer he’d once saved. In prison, Andrija discovers a book by Plato and he tries to write his own defense as if he were a philosopher too. The contortions he gets into as he tries to undo the tangle he’s been put in by history get funnier and funnier every time you reread this forgotten classic.
Originally published in 1975, The Apology and the Last Days is the final volume in a trilogy of novels-also including The Rise and Fall of Icarus Gubelkian and How to Quiet a Vampire-about the aftermath of World War II, by Borislav Pekic, one of the former Yugoslavia's most important postwar writers. The narrator tells his story from prison, where he is serving time for the murder of a former Nazi official. As the novel unfolds, we learn that the victim was the same person whom the narrator, while a lifeguard during the war, saved from drowning, thus making him vulnerable…
Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…
Scotland has a proud tradition of philosophical enquiry and I studied closely the work of most of these authors and benefited from almost all of them for my own Ph.D. work. Pirsig uses the old Scots word “gumption” for know-how and initiative and, in his honour, I use his related term “gumptionology” as my handle on social media. I also write my own mystery books series set in Scotland (the Bruno Benedetti mysteries) and they are often inspired by musing on philosophical and metaphysical matters but even my books on ethics contain some philosophical fiction. Our shared stories are fundamental to our humanity—and to our philosophy!
Martha Nussbaum’s book isn’t written asroman à thèse(thesis told as story) but it focuses on the dialogues of Plato and her work helped me understand a possible intention behind his philosophical fiction—when I was writing my own thesis on a more modern philosopher—especially how it tries to avoid the conflicts and suffering that compose Greek tragedy. Spanning millennia of muse-inspired myth about people under pressure, from Antigone in Ancient Crete (who just wanted to bury her traitorous brother) to Sophie in Nazi Germany (who had to choose between her children’s lives) this movingly-written and erudite book has the disturbing but very human insight that the howling Furies don’t let us off the hook just because we had no choice. And neither does our conscience.
This book is a study of ancient views about 'moral luck'. It examines the fundamental ethical problem that many of the valued constituents of a well-lived life are vulnerable to factors outside a person's control, and asks how this affects our appraisal of persons and their lives. The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of them have received the attention they deserve. This book thus recovers a central dimension of Greek thought and addresses major issues in contemporary ethical theory. One of its most original aspects is its interrelated treatment…
