Books like Kant — picked by fans

First published in 1958, this is one of Hannah Arendt’s most influential books and in it she attempts to define the human condition in the aftermath of World War II, developing her concept “natality.” 

It’s a challenging book that I’ve wrestled with and argued with and never forgotten. It includes some of her most powerful and frequently cited passages about birth. Lately, I’ve been returning to its opening pages, in which she discusses the launch of Sputnik into space. 

She saw this launch not as an exciting technological breakthrough, but as a fateful repudiation of our earthly existence, an existence that was defined by birth with possibilities and limitations.

Don’t say you’re not a feminist until you’ve read this brilliant book. 

70 years ago, Simone de Beauvoir kick-started the gender revolution with her iconic, insightful analysis of how men perceive and relate to women and vice versa.

The book is, however, not written in a strident or angry style but hopeful–mostly. Indeed, not until 30 years after publication did de Beauvoir personally adopt the feminist label, even though she managed to write what is arguably the greatest feminist text ever. De Beauvoir aimed to empower women by waking them up to the realities of being the (inferior) ‘Other’ to men.

As de Beauvoir shows, gender identities are laden with myths but also the power to persuade, oppress, and enslave. Only by removing these myths from the mind and imagination can women achieve true freedom. An inspirational book for every thinking person–and as important today as it was… show more.

In her groundbreaking Gender Trouble, Judith Butler develops the idea that we today call gender fluidity. Butler knows queer life intimately, and Gender Trouble speaks to much of the difficulty queer people, myself included, face in the world. It is thus not only brilliant but also generous and caring.

Butler set the stage for a philosophical problem I address in my book, namely that her type of position cannot fully explain (philosophically) why some people identify as gay, straight, lesbian, or bisexual – just as they cannot explain why it’s existentially important for some trans people to transition.

I only recently discovered the work of Anna J. Cooper, but I find myself reading and thinking about and with her a lot. She’s not an obvious philosophical love for me in that she never writes about LGBTQIA life and does write about men and women from a relatively conservative, Christian, cis, and straight point of view. However, Cooper gives voice to and insight into the struggles of Black women, and her work helps me, as someone who is both racialized as white and an immigrant to the US, perceive and feel important dimensions of the reality in which I now live.

Thus, in her writings about the things she knows about, I find a friend and a colleague as I’m trying to think about intersectional issues that go beyond the life I know first-personally.

This book, which I read in my first year as an academic, has powerfully influenced my thinking ever since – more than any other scholarly book, probably.

It is the best treatment I know of that not only diagnoses and explains the futility of modern moral thinking – an ailment that is as apparent in public political debates as in academy philosophy – but also explains how we got here.

In addition, the book offers cogent insights into much else that is wrong with modern culture and politics. And although After Virtue is not exactly light reading, it is succinct, occasionally eloquent, and sometimes wickedly funny.

I know and admire Paul Woodruff, a noted philosopher at the University of Texas. His worldview has been shaped by his experiences as a young soldier in the Vietnam War and he has spent much of his professional life trying to make sense of those experiences.

The book begins with Woodruff remembering a time, 50 years ago, when he was lying in ambush in Vietnam, pondering the question that he attempts to answer in this book: “What makes the difference in a human being between acting ethically and not? Specifically, in a soldier, between committing atrocities and holding back?” He realized at that moment that all his philosophy training at Princeton had not helped him answer that question.

Much of his discussion in this book, written half a century later, finds useful guidance by focusing on the psychological influences of behavioral ethics rather than the philosophical musings of Socrates.

The team of renowned scholar (Professor Borowitz) and popular educator (Francie Schwartz) have produced a friendly, welcoming guide to living an ethical life, based on traditional Jewish virtues. Topics include trustworthiness, lovingkindness, compassion, humility, and contentedness. This book is really a guide to musar—the practical wisdom that has guided Jewish conduct throughout the centuries. 

One of my favourite books from a few decades ago is Jane Jacobs’ Systems of Survival. 

She is best known for her work on cities, but this has a wider canvas. It explains how all working societies, and organisations, combine contradictory moral syndromes, what she calls the guardian and trader syndromes. She also shows the pathologies that result from mixing them up too much, like when businesses become like governments or governments become too much like businesses. 

It is one of the rare books that changes how you see the world – and helps you understand the errors in much social thought.

The novel that started the mania for novel reading that is, in some ways, still with us. Pamela is a lowly servant and yet a heroine with gumption. She made readers aware that anyone could be an individual with choices and will. We take it for granted now; it wasn’t then. Try to imagine yourself as an eighteenth-century reader.

As the title suggests, Williams’ book focuses on identifying the Moral Premise at the heart of your story idea and building around it. It’s a very thematic approach to storytelling. This Moral Premise essentially breaks the story into four components: a positive “virtue”, a negative “vice”, desirable consequences (success), and undesirable consequences (defeat). You can use this to create a simple structure of “Vice leads to undesirable consequences (defeat), while Virtue leads to desirable consequences (success)”. I'm admittedly oversimplifying it, but it's a great tactic to get to the heart of your story's theme and strengthen your narrative.