100 Books Like The Shape of Ancient Thought

Hadot’s book was a rare confirmation for me of an alternate approach to ancient philosophy. My earlier work on ancient sceptics had led me to appreciate the centrality of personal therapy aimed towards peace of mind. Hadot persuasively demonstrates that this was, in fact, the aim of virtually all ancient Greek philosophy.

Modern philosophers have presumed that the ancients, like themselves, are engaged in an objective search for truth. Hadot shows that philosophers from Plato and Aristotle, Epicureans and Stoics, to Plotinus and St. Augustine, focused not on truth but on easing pain and suffering through a variety of therapeutic strategies, including self-control through meditative practices.

The result is an entirely new and revolutionary understanding of ancient philosophy.

Batchelor’s book rocked the Buddhist world. He stripped away the mysticism and institutional superstructure which, over the centuries, has turned Buddhism into an organized religion.

Bachelor presented Buddhism not as something to believe in but as a down to earth practice available to anyone seeking on their own to relieve the stresses and anxieties of modern life. His work, coming out of the Buddhist community (Batchelor started off as a Buddhist monk), provided further evidence of the common approach to practical, personal liberation explored in my own work based on comparing Pyrrhonism and early Buddhism. 

I read this book when I was a teenager, and it taught me two very important things: that Enlightenment is possible—even for a Westerner—and that living Spiritual Masters exist out in the world who can help to guide you there. This helped me gather the courage to leave home and travel throughout Asia in search of my true teacher, who I eventually found in Japan. My own Remarkable Man.

Zen and Japanese Culture, the twentieth century's leading work on Zen Buddhism, completely changed my life when I read it at sixteen. This classic text, a profoundly simple introduction to Japanese art and philosophy, held the key to my young compulsion toward the transcendent aesthetic perfection of Japan and began to prepare me for understanding the world of the Geisha. It awakened the need within me to move to Japan to study Zen Buddhism in an authentic Zen Temple. Which I did. 

Finally, the mechanisms that undergird the transformation of consciousness in all mystical traditions, whether East or West, are explained in language that is easy to understand. In this ground-breaking work, Motoyama combines the psycho-spiritual wisdom of Chinese medicine, Kundalini Yoga, and Esoteric Japanese Buddhism to create a model of spiritual evolution that can be utilized to good effect by anyone. 

This is one of the first, and still one of the best, comparisons of Buddhist thought and Western psychology. In contemporary times, the lines between psychology and spirituality have become indistinct, and many seekers are finding benefit within both disciplines (a subject I discuss in my article "When Mindfulness is Not Enough"). Dr. Epstein illustrates how tools learned from Buddhism and psychotherapy can be used together to create a “healthy emotional life.”

I first encountered Spengler’s theories in work by science fiction writers such as A.E. Van Vogt and James Blish, who were enticed by Spengler’s notion that there was no single history of human civilization. Instead, distinct “Cultures” were born and slowly decayed into mere “Civilizations” by roughly predictable stages. Each Culture began with a fresh way of seeing and conceiving the world and our place in it, expressed in new art, politics, technology, and even mathematics.

The original inspiration was then lost and replaced by merely imitative and rule-governed art and society. Spengler certainly got a lot wrong, but I remain inspired by the notion that there are really different ways of being human and that—even if “the West” is bound, as other writers of the time expected, to decay—new lives, new Cultures will still emerge and flourish.

“Out of the spent and unconsidered earth,” in the poet Kipling’s words,… show more.

I first encountered Herodotus—the “Father of History”—when studying Ancient Greek for the UK A-level exams. I read the Greek text laboriously, with help from Aubrey de Selincourt’s translation. My teacher and fellow students could hardly believe that I didn’t find Book Two, which covers the customs of the Egyptians, boring. They were also surprised that I wasn’t contemptuous of Herodotus’s willingness to record what he was told without judgment.

The myth Herodotus created—of a Western world devoted to the rule of law and the freedom of individuals under that law, in opposition to a “despotic” East—has echoed down the years. It has also been accompanied by a skeptical, even cynical, approach to any claims of miracles or almost divine insight. However, what I learned from Herodotus was that the Greeks were conscious of other, older, and sometimes more impressive “barbarian” cultures all around them. I thought… show more.

I first encountered Otto’s book just before going to Oxford University in 1964, and there, I discovered a way of understanding ancient Greek devotion to their gods.

By Otto’s account, those gods were whole worlds of meaning, from sexual joy (Aphrodite) and homicidal fury (Ares) to more subtle visions of the world (Hermes, the traveler in Twilight) and (finally) Zeus as the guarantor of promises, and of hospitality.

He also introduced me to the idea that the Greeks saw “gods” in moments of sudden joy or inspiration: the lucky moment when–in the poet Pindar’s words–a god sheds a shining light on our usual dreamy life.

The earliest philosophers in both Greece and India—it is a fact usually ignored—were poets. Kingsley’s work is a deeply engaging challenge to more “prosaic” interpretations, especially of Parmenides, whom most modern scholars interpret as someone struggling to articulate elementary logical distinctions, posing puzzles about negation and the many meanings of “is” in a way later resolved by Plato.

By taking Parmenides’ poetry seriously as a record of contemplative experience—even of ritualized sensory deprivation—Kingsley helped me to question my own assumptions and to explore ways of changing one’s own mind and motivation that are more effective and more disquieting than merely argumentative discourse. Other books by Kingsley bring an acute scholarly and historical sensibility to bear on what has been treated as merely marginal elements of ancient culture.