100 Books Like Philosophy of Liberation

What I love about this book is the fact that it indicates that an apparently apolitical metaphilosophical assumption agrees with an upfront right-wing policy.

The assumption is that when tackling disputes in metaphysics, philosophers should aim to achieve consensus. The policy is that of pressing one to respect the allegedly rationally undeniable standards of a “herd,” as Nietzsche puts it. While problematizing this view, Nietzsche argues that libertarian tendencies of expressing one’s uniqueness are more valuable than more egalitarian tendencies of following herds; to provoke dissensus would then be more valuable than to reach consensus.

This stance has influenced me, even though while problematizing Nietzsche’s works through Carnap’s (and vice-versa), I claim that libertarian and egalitarian tendencies are equally valuable so that one should aim for a balance between them.

This book strikes me as being a very lovely one. Despite countless right-wing readings, Cardenal indicates that the Gospels can be persuasively read as providing evidence that Christian metaphysics may reinforce left-wing practices of liberation (and vice-versa)

Besides, this book renovates Plato’s dialogues; it considers all sorts of stances from interlocutors who have not been usually taken to be legitimate philosophical peers: namely, the campesinos (peasants) who got together with Cardenal every Sunday to discuss the Gospels in Solentiname, a remote archipelago in Lake Nicaragua whose population is around 1000 persons.

I also love the fact that this book manages to do philosophy through poetic means (and vice-versa) while indicating the importance of utopic views for those who can no longer bear an actual and supposedly unavoidable situation.

I love this book because it problematizes a popular assumption among contemporary Anglo-American authors who like to call themselves “analytic philosophers” and who only care to acknowledge the existence of a few past philosophers, e.g., Russell and Ryle. The assumption is that philosophers, such as the latter two, tackled in an apolitical “noble” fashion metaphysical matters.

Akehurst, by his turn, indicates how the likes of Russell and Ryle aligned themselves with a right-wing British policy whose “vulgar” propaganda is echoed throughout works published by British philosophers in the first half of the 20th century.

Also, I appreciate Akehurst’s way of showing that while contributing to the creation of the so-called “analytic-continental gap,” this attitude helped to naturalize the attribution of the shortness of logos to German philosophers like Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. 

My love for this book is grounded by the fact that it shows how logical positivists like Carnap embedded their objections to metaphysics in left-wing policies.

Usually, these policies cannot be attributed to Anglo-American philosophers who published works on metaphysics after the 1950s and whose academic careers “curiously” began to flourish during McCarthyism. That was when the ones with power over universities in the USA persuaded many through not-so-subtle means that “serious” philosophical work can only be done by those who act as if political issues (e.g., McCarthyism) were philosophically irrelevant.

Ultimately, I love this book, for it provides an explanation concerning why metaphysics is currently dominated by authors who receive funding for handling, in supposedly apolitical fashions, supposedly pressing issues, say, the grounds for snow being white.

Marder’s book is a brilliant exploration of plants in a philosophical (not a botanical) sense. It’s one of the most eye-opening (and accessible) philosophy books I’ve ever read, illuminating a swathe of life on Earth I honestly had never thought much about before.

Marder writes clearly and cogently about how we’ve thought about plants and how we’ve been wrong: we’ve been blind to plants; we’ve shaped them as our absolute opposite; we’ve treated them only instrumentally, exploiting them for what they can do for us. And then he makes a real effort to think through what plants are–what vegetal being actually is. One of the most mind-blowing things, he argues, in my view, is that we are much closer to plants than we think–we have our own buried “vegetal being.”

Marder’s elaboration of plant life–and how we’ve misunderstood and abused it–is literally the theoretical scaffold of all fiction and film… show more.

If aliens land and ask me what it’s like to be a human, I’ll give them Heidegger’s first book, Being and Time. Of course, that might prompt them to destroy all humans out of frustration at the difficulty of his writing, but if they persevere, they will find the best description of what it’s like to live out your time on this planet (One Hundred Years of Solitude comes in second).

I recognize that Allen has become a divisive figure, but the stubborn fact is that in the course of making a handful of masterpieces, Allen built a truly unique career—for half a century, the singular writer-director made a movie nearly every year with total creative autonomy.

This book took me inside that process, albeit during the production of a minor film (Irrational Man), and it was captivating to read how Allen approaches writing, fundraising, casting, production, and the rest of the process. On the plus side, Allen, at his peak, was answerable only to the limits of his imagination and skill. On the minus side, he operated within strict budgetary limitations.

What I found most consistently interesting about Start to Finish was its dual nature—on one level, it’s about Allen as an individual artist, and on another level, it’s about the inherent difficulties of transforming screenplays into cinema.… show more.

David Blitz offers both a comprehensive selection of broadly diverse themes investigated by various theorists and the specific elements of the diverse theories these authors espouse.

This is a perfect “first book” in an emergence-theory reading list because it provides an encyclopedic account of both the variety of issues that have arisen in this area, as well a variety of responses...by such theorists as Lloyd Morgan, Samuel Alexander, Henri Bergson, C. D. Broad, R. W. Sellars, J. C. Smuts, Donald T. Campbell, Roger Sperry, Mario Bunge, and others (numbering close to a hundred individuals in all).

This variety allowed me to develop a broad view of this entire problem area and identify those issues that were most relevant to my interests.

Mary Midgley was in her nineties when she wrote this book, yet it’s alive with ideas and energy – and the insistence that philosophy should be “for” something in the most urgent, practical sense; that it should help us explore such questions as to how to live and to do good. Midgley was both highly scientifically literate and fiercely opposed to the claim that science will ever answer every question. We humans, she believed, are brilliant animals who need to understand our biological heritage as richly as possible if we’re to grapple fruitfully with our planetary future. I can think of few more urgent themes for the present century.

In this book, one of the great philosophers of the first half of the 20th century sketches his take on two central philosophical tasks -- explaining what kinds of things exist in reality, and how they are related, and delineating what we can know and how we know it.  In so doing, Russell illustrates the new method of logical and linguistic analysis he used in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918), to lay the foundations of an epistemological and metaphysical system rivaling the great systems of the past. A key transitional figure linking the history of the subject to contemporary concerns, he raised logic and language to central subjects of philosophical study in their own right, without losing sight of their relevance for more traditional philosophical quests.