Books like The Metaphysical Club — picked by fans

What really attracted to me about this book was Jenny Uglow’s ability to bring the eighteenth century alive in her biographies of five men – Josiah Wedgwood, Mathew Boulton, James Watt, Eramus Darwin, and Joseph Priestley – who met every month near Birmingham when the moon was full (so that they could see their way home).

These men genuinely transformed the world with their discoveries that created and powered the first factories and revolutionized our understanding of the natural and chemical worlds. For some reason I always remember Uglow’s description of Wedgwood, who invented the process for mass producing china, being so scientifically curious that he insisted on sitting up to watch his own leg being amputated.

This book is a wonderful, personal introduction to the English Enlightenment.

Cohen spent a year driving through America accompanied only by two crates of books. She realised, reading them, how many of their authors had met, more or less significantly, one another, from Mark Twain and Henry James to James Baldwin and Elizabeth Bishop. The result was this daisy-chain book. It’s fascinating, illuminating, and utterly charming.

I read this 1963 novel in college, adored it, and have re-read it many times since.

The book opens in 1933, as a group of eight women are graduating from Vassar during the Great Depression, and one announces her engagement. From there, the book functions almost like a work of journalism, following their lives until they gather again for the bride’s funeral in 1940, just as America is on the verge of war. In between, their stories demonstrate the different possibilities for women during a time of enormous social change (the period parallels the Makioka Sisters).

McCarthy’s writing has great range: while describing some figures, she’s biting and acerbic; with others, she’s empathetic, and they all seem very real, even today. I’m still looking for a love story like Polly’s.

John Aubrey’s gossipy Lives allow us to glimpse the unofficial side of his famous contemporaries and near-contemporaries, among them Thomas Hobbes (whom he knew), Shakespeare (who died ten years before he was born), Sir Walter Raleigh, and many others. You can dip in and out, and if you haven’t read them, this is a treat in store.

This is a popular, reliable, wide-ranging introduction to metaphysics by two respected philosophers. It covers topics such as personal identity, fatalism, time, God, free will and determinism, possibility and necessity, and criticisms of metaphysics itself. It asks why there is something rather than nothing, and whether distinctions between good and evil and between right and wrong have any objective reality. Ted Sider is a leader of new developments in contemporary metaphysics.

Pippin’s book impresses me because it makes clear how the modern German philosophy of Kant, Hegel and others, may fail to get to grips with deeper questions concerning why things matter at all.

Western philosophy is concerned with reconciling thinking and reality, but this neglects the fact that meaningfulness is not fully grasped by what can be rationally known and explained. Our sense of things mattering precedes whatever we may come to know about them: think of how music can grip us in ways which we can never fully explain. This issue leads Pippin to a hugely enlightening account of the difficult (and problematic) work of Martin Heidegger that I find the most plausible interpretation of his work.

This book shows how one can question the very status of philosophy in the modern era, and think about alternative ways of making sense of things.

Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, by many accounts, is the most accurate and true portrayal of Hell. It has been long speculated whether or not Dante, by means of dreaming or some other metaphysical affair, was truly able to visit Hell—the ways in which he describes the deadly sins of human life proves to be both very emotional and very comprehendible, in a way that can push one to both care more for the way that they choose to live, care more for the ways that they treat others, as well as understand the burdens of life and thus realize that it could, in some way, be worse off than it presently seems. 

The worn and dog-eared copy of Strange News From Another Star has graced my bookshelf for almost 50 years. (Note that this and not the more recent edition, which is missing some of the best original stories, is what I’m recommending.)

Hesse spoke to me at a time in my life when I didn’t realize fiction existed that could reflect my own metaphysical experiences. His stories mirrored my own dreams and visions and confirmed that I wasn’t alone in the world. And he did this in a timeless way that embraced the philosophical along with the political.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics marks the beginning of attempts to articulate the philosophy of metaphysics as a science. Retrospectively applying Kant’s division of metaphysics as transcendental philosophy to Aristotle’s writings: Aristotle’s Metaphysics is an in-depth examination of cosmological and theological metaphysics.

I personally enjoy Aristotle’s Metaphysics because it is mysterious. It is difficult to read, and the fact that it was written with an entirely different alphabet is exciting. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is his attempt to systematically blend his particular preference for empiricism with metaphysical insights learned from Plato’s philosophy.

The history of Aristotle’s Metaphysics – in terms of, for example, its title and organization – is fascinating in itself; however, what always stood out for me was recognizing Aristotle’s own excitement. Book 5 of his Metaphysics is often thought of as a kind of metaphysical dictionary, and shortly after this summary of vocabulary terms, it is as if Aristotle grabs hold of… show more.

Golding was living in Salisbury when he wrote The Lord of the Flies, and his day job as a teacher at a local boys' school left a clear imprint on his dystopic view of young men left to their own hierarchical devices. But the classroom also provided a very literal view of the inspiration for The Spire, a dense and disturbing parable in which rationality and physics crumble under evangelical mania and corporal lust. It is the story of Jocelin, Dean of a medieval cathedral, who, obsessed with a divine “vision in stone,” insists that the spire be raised to impossible heights. There is no happy ending in this cautionary tale of construction hubris, yet I return to it regularly in search of solace.