100 Books Like The Government of Self and Others

This is the most readable philosophy book I know. Nietzsche wrote it in his brilliantly witty, epigrammatic style. Each episode is about a page long.

Concentrate on "Book Four." There, Nietzsche famously tells us that God is dead. Find out what he really means. (We criticize everything and can feel no true reverence.) Consequently, we seek convenience and flexibility over and over again. Stunningly, Nietzsche sets out four contrarian, incompatible good lives. (Philosophers have always sought to define one good life.)

If you read nothing else, read epigrams 290, 295, and 303: "The life of constant revision to perfect a style," "The life of short stories," "The life of brilliant improvisation," and "The risk-taking life." I use Nietzsche’s model of good lives to help business leaders restore their businesses and themselves.

This book is based on Hubert (Bert) Dreyfus’s famous undergraduate philosophy course at U. C. Berkeley, affectionately called “From Gods to God and Back.” Like me, Sean was Bert’s teaching assistant for the course. We all loved this course because it draws out of our Western literary traditions a form of spirituality that we believe is essential for good lives today.

The book begins by looking at the relationship between Athena and Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. It’s a friendly mentoring relationship without any suffocating philosophical-theological pretensions such as omnipotence or omniscience. Later, we join St. Augustine as he tries to undermine (though unsuccessfully) the theological pretensions. The book ends with Melville’s polytheism in Moby Dick.

The book inspires us to look for “attainable felicities”: simple divine experiences without pretensions. 

Since Aristotle, friendship has seemed a pure, unadulterated good. Our friends bring the best out of us. End of story. We all have known enough betrayal, mixed purposes, and painful incompatibilities to suspect the tradition, as does the philosopher Alexander Nehamas.

I particularly love the parts of the book where he takes, as an example of friendship, that between Thelma and Louise in the film of the same name. By virtue of their friendship, Thelma helps Louise gain self-confidence, and Louise helps Thelma get beyond her neurotic self-composure. Aristotle and Montaigne would be happy. However, the cost is murder, robbery, and ultimately suicide.

With this and other engaging examples, Nehamas shows that friendship is always morally risky. The good life involves struggle and is not safe.

I love this book because Albert Borgmann shows that focal practices are at the core of any good life today.

Consider the end-of-day, carefully prepared family meal: the parents and children together showing gratitude, reviewing the day, arguing over bits, and resolving those arguments. Such moments do not always work.

When they do, they give each participant a sharp identity. There’s no place the participants would rather be, no others they would prefer to be with, and nothing they would rather do. When it works really well, participants sense they will remember it forever. These moments are heaven on earth.

We can make huddles and resource trading meetings play the same role in business. Borgmann writes of the woes of technology first; the focal practice solution comes at the end. 

In these extraordinary lectures, Foucault offers a comprehensive social history of neoliberal theory from the 1920s to 1980 in Germany, France, Britain, and the U.S. While this work does not focus on racism, Foucault critically elaborates neoliberalism’s defining ideas: the attack on the state and dissipation of the commons, the privatization of everything, and the individualizing of all responsibility; financializing all social and individual choice, while redefining social subjectivity as “the Man of Enterprise,” of innovation and self-making. Foucault opened me to seeing how the liberal in “neoliberalism” signals the elevation of individual freedom as a counter to state power and social support. The question this raised for me is how these shifts in social thought suggest new developments in racist expression.

This consummate French philosopher explores the lineage of psychiatry as an intertwined field of knowledge and form of power. For Foucault, moving beyond asylums, in the nineteenth and twentieth century armies called on psychiatry to assert the reality of military power and the functioning of military purposes. A similar relationship has taken place with the family in relation to nation-states and military establishments. The author provides many useful concepts to appreciate the psychiatrization of soldiers as shocked, exhausted, hysterical, neurotic, and traumatized, among other diagnostic categories. From this work, a significant value I gained is a historical understanding of how modern psychiatry developed in relation to armed forces and warfare.

Coincidentally this scholarly collection of essays appeared in the same year as my 2nd Book Pick. The original versions of the papers were delivered at ‘Penn’ (the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Rosen’s home) at the second ‘Penn-Leiden Colloquium on Ancient Values’ (Leiden being Prof. Sluiter’s base). Free speech had two distinct terms and expressions in ancient Greece, one more expansive than the other. Parrhesia could be understood as frankness of expression, not necessarily political. Isegoria, on the other hand, was narrowly political and applied only to adult male free citizens: it’s best translated exactly as equal freedom of public political speech. One reviewer of the collection picked up on the existence of a rivalry between an official/state version of historical facts and the—more truthful—version given by an individual writer, explicitly referencing Salman Rushdie.

I'll be honest, when I received Benoit Peeters' book on Derrida I was a little worried.

A 600-page tome about one of the most notoriously difficult philosophers. Fortunately, Peeters does not write in a Derridean manner and makes the life journey of the most influential thinker of postmodernism accessible and even entertaining.

Peeters covers Derrida's formative years in Algeria, his academic career, and his development of deconstruction—a philosophical approach that challenged traditional notions of language, meaning, and text interpretation. 

This is one of the most important books I have ever read. It changed the way I think about Socrates, Plato, Foucault, and Nietzsche. It gave me a deep appreciation of the philosophical and ethical importance of irony as a way of being in the world. It convinced me to spend all my free time for several months reading Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and it made me see the relationship between ancient philosophy and modern life in a fundamentally new way. It is simply one of the most beautifully written and suggestive books of modern philosophy published in English in the last fifty years.

Foucault’s groundbreaking work from the 1960s looks at how systems of order and classification came into being during the age of rationalism with Descartes, culminating in the 18th-century Enlightenment’s project of subjecting every field of knowledge to its own self-enclosed order. It remains of the great works of theoretical synthesis, patiently dissecting the structures of knowledge, of order and priority, that western learning continues to take for granted. At half a century’s distance, Foucault is the one French thinker whose legacy remains intact for his lucidity, polemical edge, and refusal of esoteric linguistic games.