100 Books Like The Palliative Society

I’m interested in how mathematicians create mathematics but this book made me realize that learning mathematics is also a form of creativity. Each of us has created our understanding of mathematics as we were growing up. We are all creative!  

What is amazing about this book is that even children as young as six months possess rudimentary mathematical concepts, in particular, the concept of number. (Actually, Carey shows children have two distinct ways of thinking about numbers). The concept of number is built-in. That’s amazing to me! The mastery of counting numbers, 1,2,3,… is a great creative leap in the development of the child. This leap is followed by a series of further amazing accomplishments, for example, the insight that a fraction like 2/3, is a completely new kind of number (and not just a problem in division). How do kids manage to accomplish such radical changes in their concept… show more.

Reuben Hersh is responsible for a revolution in the way we look at mathematics. His main idea is very simple: mathematics is something that is created by human beings. Isn’t that obvious, you say? Not if you believe that mathematics is there even before life itself, that it is built into the nature of reality in some way. In philosophy, this view is called Platonism. Hersh had the radical but obvious idea that if we want to understand what mathematics is we should look at what mathematicians actually do when they create mathematics. Like all great ideas it can be stated very simply but the implications are enormous.  His ideas are what got me started writing my own books about math and science.

Lots of people have a priori ideas about what mathematics is all about but Lakatos had the brilliant idea of looking at what actually happened. His book is all about one famous theorem: “for all regular polyhedra, V – E + F =2, where V is the number of vertices, E is the number of edges, and F is the number of faces.  Think of a cube where V=8, E = 12, F = 6.  

We tend to think that mathematics proceeds from a well-defined hypothesis to conclusion. But that is only the finishing step. Along the way the definitions keep changing as do the hypotheses and even the conclusion. Everything is moving! This is what makes doing mathematics so exciting!

What if children are not little adults but a different species? Perhaps children are butterflies who develop into caterpillars? Child psychologist Allision Gopnik asks wonderful questions about human development. She notes that most of us produce our best art and ask our deepest questions (“Why is the sky blue?”) as small children.

Childhood, she says, is our time of basic research; adulthood is the time for practical applications. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she celebrates the unique gifts of childhood, but she does not offer suggestions about how we might recapture those gifts. 

During the early 1990s, I had the good fortune to participate in Habermas’ legendary Monday night philosophy colloquium at the University of Frankfurt.

The experience transformed my understanding of the raison d’être of Critical Theory. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is not a book about fascism per se. Instead, it tells the story of how, after the war, the titans of interwar German Kulturpessimismus – Nietzsche (albeit, posthumously), Carl Schmitt, and Heidegger – were canonized by the leading advocates of “French Theory” as the new maîtres à penser or “master thinkers.”

Yet, the canonization of German philosophy came at a high cost. After all, historically speaking, the philosophies in question stood in close proximity to fascist ideology.

Hence, the question arises: to what extent did such pro-fascist “ideologemes” infiltrate and inform the basic tenets of French poststructuralism?

The famous British philosopher A.C. Grayling tells the story of a hard-fought struggle over the past five centuries for the rights and freedoms now enjoyed in Western democracies. He emphasizes that our rights and freedoms are both precious and precarious: they could easily be lost if governments and citizens don’t adequately appreciate them or don’t understand how difficult they are to win.

For Grayling, our rights and freedoms began to contract around the beginning of this century. He points, for example, to the rise of state surveillance, particularly in response to terrorism but often just for the convenience of policing.

Maté asks why chronic illness and general poor health are on the rise in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems.

Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, one person in five has high blood pressure, while in Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And adolescent mental illness is on the rise everywhere.

Despite medical knowledge and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person by not considering how contemporary culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines our sense of emotional balance.

Maté dispels common myths about what makes us sick, connecting the dots between the maladies of individuals and the progressive malaise of society, and offers some suggestions for healing. 

This is the one classic text on my list. Marcuse’s book was like a bible to protesting students in the 1960s, and its critique of the psychic levelling that occurs under capitalism remains just as germane today, if not more so. This is the most successful marriage of Freud and Marx that emerged from the famous Frankfurt School, which was a group of cultural Marxist invested in psychoanalysis. Marcuse grasps how capitalism employs technology to ensure its psychic dominance. 

While The Swerve is not exactly a book about posterity, it nonetheless provides a wonderful case study of a text that remained on the verge of destruction for centuries, before going on to play a tremendously influential role in shaping our modern world. This book is none other than On The Nature of Things by Lucretius –one of the foundational texts of Western culture, whose impact was postponed to the fifteenth century, as it would not have seen the light of day without its serendipitous rediscovery in a German monastery by Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459). This gripping work offers a fascinating example of the delayed reception of a prominent cultural object, a proof of its extraordinary resilience, and, at the same time, an illustration of the role played by chance and accidents on the transmission of texts to posterity. 

I love how Dipesh’s book shows a historian at the height of his powers explaining how history has become geological. Decades ago, Chakrabarty began as someone arguing for a history that made Europe “provincial”. Now he argues that all human history is relative to planetary time. His writing is infused with humanism and is up to date on Earth System Science.