Sunday, September 19, 2004 at 1:27 PM

READING LIST
My Life’s An Open Book

Back to PhilosophyForum Home Page.

Back to Reading List Page.

S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.[1]

Loosely translated, this means if I thought anyone would really read my comments, I would not have been so candid.

*          *          *          *

TABLE OF CONTENTS

This document has simply gotten to be too long to open as one HTML document. So if you are viewing this on screen in HTML format, it will be divided into two parts: (1) Philosophy through Psychology, and (2) Science through Travel. Please visit both, or easier still, simply download the Word or RTF version, and view it off-line.

You should be able to go directly to the particular category in which you are interested by clicking on its Table of Contents Entry.

01 philosophy

02 Religion

03 History

04 Biography

05 pOLITICS/sOCIOLOGY

06 Psychology

07 Science

08 LITERATURE, DRAMA, POETRY, ETC.

09 Humor

10 Fine Arts

11 Computer

12 Language

13 Recreation

14 Music

15 Movies

16 Travel

This is started out as a partial list of the books that I have read since 1989, and which I remembered to write down. I occasionally supplement it with reviews of movies and music.

Recently I have discovered the Teaching Company’s series of audio lectures by renown professors. I cannot recommend this company highly enough. Click on http://teach12.com/ to go to their website, or call them at 1-(800) TEACH. The problem is figuring out what not to get, because virtually everything in it is intriguing. I only buy the items that are on sale. I use a high speed tape recorder designed for the blind that allows me to listen to these lectures at double speed (a trick I have been using for years to stay current in the law by listening to seminars), and I have managed to cram in over 1000 hours of lectures in less than a year, in half that time, which is about how much time I spend in my car or in otherwise puttering around the house or garden or bath, when I can’t be reading or preparing legal documents for someone, or before falling asleep, when I am too tired to read. I will be adding these lectures and my comments on them to this list, as time permits.

The dates in the list are in most cases approximate, and I know that there are many items that I never got around to memorializing, not always for good reason and often simply because I forgot to. I intend to go back and add books I forgot to record, as and if I remember them, and to add comments, again as time permits. Every day or so, I recall something else worthy of mentioning, but which I had either previously forgotten or which, having recalled, don’t have time to add to the list. Sometimes I think life is too long; at other times, too short.

I listed the books in an attempt to find a common interest with anyone who wishes to establish a dialog. Also perusing the list brings back fond memories and occasionally worthwhile thoughts, which from time to time serve as an inspiration to add to the “comments” column.

As a partner in a large law firm, I do not have much free time on my hands. If I had more, I would devote it to writing, and in particular to making my comments below more thoughtful. Please forgive the typagraphical (sic) and grammatical errors of which there are certain to be many. If I had world enough and time I would spend some of it proofing.

As I review the list, I see a number of books that I have read that were worthy of note, but which I read before 1989, when I first started making a note of a book’s title and author when I finished reading it (on any odd piece of paper that was handy). As my thoughts take me to any of those books, I will add them, from time to time, undated.

Since some of the books fit into more than one category, I have listed those books an extra time for each extra category. That way when I look in a specific category, I will find the book listed. If it is in more than one category, I note that fact at the beginning of the comments section.

Because some of the works fit into more than one category, I was forced to consider how best to handle the issue, and decided that it would be easiest for you, but harder for me, if I simply remember to copy —comments and all— an entry fitting more than one classification. This makes this list look longer (and perhaps more impressive) than it really is. A better approach would be to have a column for each category, and let you sort the table, as I sort it from time to time; but I know that that would take more explaining than the attention of most people who surf the internet would hold. Accordingly, after the first few entries, which I haven’t gotten around to sorting (and if need be duplicating), you can simply jump to a category that interests you and see if there is anything that piques your interest enough to drop me an email teleice@philosophyforum.net and start a dialog.

One of the reasons for compiling the list is so that in the future when I have more time, I can devote it to commenting on the books that are of interest. In the meantime, I have left most of the comments brief or blank. Later, later.

Again, the categories are

01 philosophy

02 Religion

03 History

04 Biography

05 pOLITICS/sOCIOLOGY

06 Psychology

07 Science

08 LITERATURE, DRAMA, POETRY, ETC.

09 Humor

10 Fine Arts

11 Computer

12 Language

13 Recreation

14 Music

15 Movies

16 Travel

Last year I read lots of fiction, for the first time in a while. See 08 LITERATURE, DRAMA, POETRY, ETC.

Date	Name	Author	Category[2]	Comments
01/01/2010	aaa	aaa	01 Philosophy
01/15/04	Synaptic Self, How Our Brains Become Who We Are.	LeDoux, Joseph	01	01.07. This is a fairly technical work by a renown neuroscientist.
06/01/03	Mavericks of the Mind, Conversations for the New Millennium	Interveiws by David Jay Brown & Rebecca McClen Novick	01	01.05 Stimulating.
09/01/2001	Matter and Consciousness, Rev. Ed.	Churchland, Paul M.	01	01, 06. Good stuff in this classic work. I am particularly interested in what is sometimes called the Philosophy of Mind. In this field Paul Churchland is at the head of the class, especially when it comes to the physiological-biological side. I believe that his wife too has contributed much to the field.
11/01/2001	World Philosophy	Higgins, Kathleen UT Austin	01	01.02. This was a series of twenty-four 30-45 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company. These tapes were well worth listening to, and were adequate as an introductory course, which was all that they were probably intended to be. I needed a little more depth, since I had been around this block several times already.
08/01/03	Introducing Ethics	Robinson Dave and Garratt, Chris	01
11/03/03	The Problem of the Soul	Flanagan, Owen	01	One of the best books I have ever read. It encapsulates my views entirely.
08/01/04	The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness	Husserl, Edmund	01	Not an easy read, of that I can assure you.
12/25/03	Rationality in Action	Searle, John R.	01	I am starting to tire of Searle, and find myself agreeing with him less and less.
10/01/02	Elbow Room-The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting	Dennett, Daniel C.	01	Whatever I may have said bad about Daniel Dennett and his various books, which I have read, on the subject of the philosophy of mind, I now blame entirely on John Searle who must have influenced me unduly against Dennett. No, I don’t entirely agree with Dennett on the free will issue either, but I agree mostly with him. Two cheers. Again, I am saving my comments for a very lengthy chapter in my Notes From the Undersoul.
12/01/2001	Free Will	Kane, Robert, Editor	01	What I have to say about this book and the subject would fill a volume, and so I will defer my comments until later.
09/01/2001	The Philosophy of Mind	Searle, John R. UC Berkeley	01	01. This was a series of twelve 30-45 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company. Searle is, of course, one of my favorites, so when I saw that he was among the list of professors whose lectures were available from the Teaching Company you can be sure that I had to have it.
11/01/2001	No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life	Solomom, Robert UT Austin	01	01. This was a series of twenty-four 30-45 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company. My daughter Rachel told me that Prof. Solomon was very popular among her fellow Plan II students at UT. I have another series by him on Nietzsche which I haven’t listened to yet. I haven’t read much of the existentialists. This is because, like Jacob Bronowski, I think of myself as the very opposite of one. I need to spend much more time studying this branch of philosophy before voicing too strongly my prejudices. I believe in will, but think that free will is at best an illusion, and at worst a meaningless collocation of terms. My mind is not entirely made up on this point, but I have a strong prejudice in that direction. Before one can be a thorough going existentialist, one has to come to grips with the free will problem, and I have not entirely done so as of yet.
02/01/2001	The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age	Lukacs, John	01	03.01.05 See critique in History  section.
09/22/2001	The Self Under Siege: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century	Roderick, Rick	01	This was a 8 lesson audio tape series, a part of the SuperStar Teachers Series, produced by the Teaching Company (1-800-TEACH-12). Prof. Roderick is a philosophy professor at Duke. He is quite entertaining, but his lecture style is eccentric, even for a philosopher. The series is as much of an introduction to Prof. Roderick’s peculiar views as it is to the philosophers he discusses: Heidegger, Sartre, Marcuse, Habermas, Foucault, Derrida, etc.. He does not do the subject justice, but in six hours of so, how could he? Roderick sees absurdities in people’s quest for physical fitness (he particularly does not like people who use treadmills (presumably because they could have been reading Being and Nothingness instead) . One gathers that this is in part because he is not very physically fit himself. I am only guessing, but if true, it makes his criticism less profound. I found him provocative because he falls short of what I would have liked. This is good; otherwise I would have merely been satisfied. His discussion of Foucault was quite good, but I wanted more. I suspect that I am simply more radical than Roderick, and by that I am hardly implying that he is conventional. I get the impression that he thinks that the audience should be shocked at some of Foucault’s views. This would be a reasonable assumption. Unfortunately for me, I am not at all shocked, and although I consider Foucault’s observations to be well worth drawing the world’s attention to, I consider them, by now, almost trivial, or at least obvious, and am yearning for an “okay, so now that we all know these things, what should do we do [with that knowledge]”[3] type of discussion. This criticism is, of course, unfair, given the format; but perhaps not entirely so. I really do think that it is time to just take some things for granted that were thought to be profound when introduced, and to look behind them, and to ask questions such as, “Given that the world is never what it seems, that whatever it is nothing short of absurd at virtually every level (thank goodness! else it would not work), that the subconscious is constantly tricking us, that the majority of humankind (or at the very best a significant minority) will never fully appreciate this; given the fact that the world has evolved along these lines (and that it has evolved at all), what can we, what should we, make of it?” Socrates said that the unexamined life was not worth living. After listening to his comments, I am sure that Roderick would subscribe to this. He would make this statement as a fiat, and then support it with sarcasm. I am more radical. I do not necessarily even subscribe to Socrates statement or to what I am quite sure would be Roderick’s version of it. In fact, I think that the opposite may, at times, be the case. I would like to hear articulated clearly, without reference to previously shared cultural assumptions or personal predilections, why it is better to read Shakespeare than to play pushpin (pin-ball), why it is better to watch a sporting event than to exercise. (I thought I heard Roderick say he liked to watch or read about sports, but even if I mistaken, I am sure that that he wastes as much time doing something that is equally useless, metaphysically or otherwise.) What it all may boil down to is that he smokes, is overweight and therefore smugly looks down upon those who don’t want to be. Whereas I would smoke if it didn’t give me headaches, am overweight, but like to listen to his tapes while exercising on a treadmill. Pretty absurd, don’t you think.
04/01/2001	Freedom: The Philosophy of Liberation	Dalton, Dennis	01	This was an 8 lesson audio tape series, a part of the SuperStar Teachers Series, produced by the Teaching Company (1-800-TEACH-12). Prof Dalton, of Barnard College/Columbia U., compared Plato with Aristotle, Hegel w/ Mill, Emma Goldman, Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. w/ each other. I was impressed enough with what he had to say about Emma Goldman that I intend to seek her out.
04/01/2001	The Concept of Willing	Lapsley, James N., Ed.	01	01;02
03/01/2001	The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology	Wright, Robert	01	06.07.01 See Critique in Psychology section.
11/01/2000	Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness	Bergson, Henri Tr. by Pogson, F.L.	01	I thoroughly enjoyed this book, because it introduced me to a way of thinking that had never occurred to me before, something that is rare in philosophy for me. Hume’s concern with the nature of causality was a similar epiphany, though on a grander scale. It took me more than one reading to grasp this book, simply because I hurried through it the first couple of times. Bergson has a fairly simple notion: that space is homogeneous, but that pure duration is not; and that human nature objectifies time by projecting it into space. This projection of time into space is useful, but leads us into mistakes, since time is heterogeneous and is not space. He hammers away at this rather basic notion over and over, examining it from different angles, throughout the first 2/3rds of the book. Whether he is right or not, I am not sure yet, but I found the distinction between homogeneous space and heterogeneous time to be fascinating and will probably reflect on this for years to come. In the last third of the book Bergson attempts to relate his earlier distinction between time and space to our concept of free will. I am less impressed by this attempt to apply his insights than I am with the insight itself, on which the truth of his thesis depends. He admits that, for the most part, our actions are determined mechanistically, yet insists on the existence of the occasional free act. In making his case for freedom he denies that mechanistic determinism is applicable to conscious acts, since consciousness is pure duration and not in space. This is a logical argument, but if thoroughly true, then no conscious act is mechanistically determined. In this regard he seems to be wanting it both ways. Better to have denied mechanistic determinism altogether, perhaps. Or maybe his admission is applicable only to unconscious acts, with the further observation that most of what we do falls into this category. Ultimately, he makes a good case for conscious willing to be free from determinants, and for all I know he may be right. But if so, all he has said is that freedom means acting without reasons, or that the free act is an irrational one. I suspect that this is right, but I wonder if Bergson would admit to phrasing it that way if cornered, as I believe he ought. My own position is that few philosophers have distinguished willing from free willing. I believe that mysterious as it is, the verb “to will” has meaning and that it only has meaning exercised by conscious beings. This much is interesting enough and can be understood, if only just. However, when the word “free” is coupled with the verb “to will” I am not sure just what can be meant. I am quite sure that there are reasons that people will some things. Perhaps, the quantum basis of nature is such that some part of willing is causeless. If so, this does not trouble me particularly. Like Kant, I believe that the only good is the good will, but I do not blame anyone for having been born without one, even if the bad will was uncaused.
11/01/2000	The Identity of Man	Bronowski, Jacob	01	I am a Bronowski fan, and enjoyed his reflections on the topic suggested by the title. They were the observations of one of the century’s finest humanists, and therefore useful, However, this is not a deep treatment of the subject, or one in which Bronowski was particularly well qualified to write about. It is more of a reflection by a humanist scientist of particularly refined sensibilities, than a major work on the philosophy of mind. I particularly enjoyed his occasional trenchant remarks against existential self-centeredness.
10/01/2000	Looking Backward	Bellamy, Edward	01	5.8.1. This is a noble but misguided work. I am interested in utopian literature, and that is why I sought it out to read.
10/01/2000	Babbitt	Lewis, Sinclair	01	8.1 I did not realize that someone had written a book about me before I was born. The jacket to my copy of the book said that it was about one of the most unlikable characters ever. However, I think that this book is better understood as being a book about the superficiality of the American bourgeoisie, than as a denigration of George Babbitt individually, who probably had a good will, which is all either Kant or I demand. I had a certain sympathy for old Georgie, and see him as not all that different from most people I know, myself included. In fact I would go so far as to say he is better than most. I don’t like the world that created Babbitt, and I think it more proper to read the book as being about that world than as being about one misguided individual living in it, particularly if one realizes, as one should, that Babbitt is neither unique nor evil.
10/01/2000	Symposium	Plato	01	I had heard, but did not fully appreciate, until I read the Symposium, how explicitly and unabashedly gay the Greeks were. I supposed that the persistence of this attitude is what allowed Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to join the army, something they would have been prohibited from doing in modern times, since the presence of people like Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar are thought to be inconsistent with an effective fighting force. Tell that to the Gauls and Persians.
09/01/2000	The Philosophy of History	Hegel	01	1.3. Bombast and more bombast, though I agree with his thesis (which makes reading Hegel all the more frustrating).
09/01/2000	NonZero	Wright, Robert	01	1.2. The topic is one that interests me very much. The book was worth reading, but ultimately disappointing. Perhaps my expectations were too high. However, I was interested in the topic enough to read Wright’s critically acclaimed The Moral Animal, and found it to be exceptionally good. I discuss that book elsewhere in this document. I think I would have enjoyed NonZero more as a sequel to The Moral Animal, than as a stand-alone read. I suppose the reason is that I already pretty much agree with most of the points raised in both books, and got mostly confirmation, rather than new information for the most part. The confirmation is rewarding, but if I get both, I am really happy. The first book gave me more facts that I previously did not know than the second, and that may be why I liked it more. All in all, I would still recommend both books. But if you can only read one, read the first.
06/03/2000	The Dhammapada	Easwaran, Eknath, Translated and introduced by	01	2.1
06/03/2000	Without Guilt and Justice	Walter Kaufman	01	Kaufman, like Peter Singer (and to a lesser degree Hume), is someone with whom I almost never disagree, which is rare. I read them mainly for reinforcement and confirmation, as a form of self-indulgence, knowing that it would be more edifying to read others who are more likely to be a source for new ideas. Kaufman is right on target in this book, and I could not agree with him more.
05/23/2000	The Future of an Illusion	Freud, Sigmund	01	2.1. Not as good as I had expected, but as always, I enjoy reading Freud when he is philosophizing about life generally, than we he is analyzing the human mind. Of course, he is known mostly for the latter, but in my opinion, his real insights were general in nature, and that he should have stopped short of where he was wont to ultimately go. For example, his insights in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life are right on the mark. We are constantly deluding ourselves about our motives, about reality, and about others. Behind those delusions there lies another reality, one that we can glimpse the better we understand ourselves. However, when Freud gets more specific, as he was wont to do, I have no doubt that he was often way far of the mark.
05/01/2000	Practical Ethics, 2^nd Edition	Singer, Peter	01	Finally, someone with a clear mind. My favorite ethicist, bar none.
03/01/2000	Civilization and Its Discontents	Freud, Sigmund	01	6.1. I have always thought that Freud was way too dogmatic and probably just plain wrong about many of his diagnoses. Nevertheless, I have likewise always believed that he was correct about the role that the unconscious plays in our conscious opinions and views, and that until Freud gets too specific, his insights are profound. Perhaps that is why I do not read much of his purely psychiatric works, but think so highly of his anthropological/sociological works, such as Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, and to a slightly lesser extent Civilization and Its Discontents.
03/01/2000	An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding	Hume, David	01	I really like Hume, and intend to read his treatise one of these days.
03/01/2000	Principia Ethica	Moore, G.E.	01	I read this on our vacation to Arizona. Not bad, but hardly the last word on the subject.
02/01/2000	The Idea of History	Collinwood	01	03.01. I was fascinated by this at the time I read it, but in retrospect, I question whether it was profound or not.
10/01/1999	The Fountainhead	Rand, Ayn	01	01.08. I found this book to be very thought provoking and irritating. I think Rand is shallow, naïve, overly simplistic, and occasionally just stupid. I know that a lot of people like her, and I can still respect those people, because I am glad that Rand wrote, and I believe her works are a valuable part of philosophical-political discourse. But I still think that she is shallow, naïve, overly simplistic . . . Sorry.
06/01/1999	Ethics	Moore, G.E.	01
06/01/1999	Genealogy of Morals	Nietzsche, Friedrich	01
05/01/1999	The Writings of Martin Buber	Buber, Martin, Ed. By Herzog, Will	01	01.02. Buber is not easy to read. His thought is complex and deep.
04/01/1999	An Enquiry Concerning the Principals of Morals	Hume, David	01	Hume is one of my favorite philosophers. He is right on the money most of the time, and  writes  well to boot. I have more to say on this subject, but must pass for now.
04/01/1999	Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals	Kant, Immanuel Translated and Analyzed by Paton, H.J.	01
04/01/1999	Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics	Kant, Immanuel	01
04/01/1999	The World as Will and Idea	Schopenhauer, Artur	01
03/01/1999	Nicomachean Ethics	Aristotle	01
02/01/1999	Freedom and Determinism	Lehrer, Keith, Ed.	01	This is a good collection of essays on the subject indicated by the title of the book. That fact, however, is appalling. This is a very important subject, in my opinion one of the most important subjects in all of metaphysics. As such, the level of discourse and agreement in principle ought to be much higher than it is. I am shocked to find that the best and the brightest are so sophomoric when it comes to this subject. The general level of confusion of terms and concepts is astounding, as is the effort to reconcile things which cannot be reconciled simply by juggling terms around to the point where, at best, the audience is so confused as to believe the undertaking successful. The first indication that you are about to encounter yet another typical low-level discussion of the problem. Is where the author is horrified by the notion that free will might not exist because if true, we cannot in good conscience take satisfaction and pleasure in the suffering those who deserve it. The issue is usually not framed so coarsely, but that it what it usually amounts to. At the most basic level, I am shocked to find that the commentators do not routinely separate the psychological from the metaphysical. All is easily understood at a psychological level, and as long as we admit to clearly being in that realm, we can be gleeful when a bad person is hanged or otherwise tortured. It even serves a very useful sociological purpose (apparently), to be able to “hold people responsible”; i.e., to blame them and to treat their societally inflicted misfortunes as deserved. I have no problem with that. Fry the bastards for all I care, if it results in a greater good. However, to fry someone under circumstances where it is clear that no good will come of it, requires a metaphysical justification, and none but the religious have given a very convincing explanation of that, in my reading; and the religious explanations never count for much in a rational discussion, at least if the religion is “faith based.” Right. If the religion were based on rational principles, then we could discuss it rationally, but if it based solely on faith, then rational discussion is at cross-purposes. But enough of that. This book does not have much that is overtly theological in its treatment of the subject, but my contention is that the rabid free-willers might as well come out of the closet on this. Interestingly, there is a long tradition in theology on the subject of free will, not all of it in favor of the notion: e.g., John Calvin. But that too, is another subject. What is most frustrating is reading some of the compatiblists, who often tend to be very confused, and I am shocked that more people don’t call them on it (some do). In my opinion, no amount of word shuffling will make the problem go away. Here are a few ideas for an essay that would raise the level of discourse on this subject. First, distinguish between psychological/sociological and metaphysical notions of desert. Second, recognize that there is such a thing as willing, and that it is bound up with the notion of consciousness. More work needs to be done in articulating this. Actually, the philosophy of mind does appear to me to be advancing, not as fast as I would like, but advancing for sure, thanks in part to John Searle and others like him. Third, don’t call willing free, just because you don’t know why a person wills something; and recognize, for God’s sake, that there are a jillion factors that go into any decision, and that the human mind is only capable of comprehending (consciously) a pitifully small number of them. Willing is very real. You can deconstruct it all you want, but to say that the term is incoherent just won’t work. We use the term all the time to distinguish between states of mind and whatever miscommunication is involved in the process it is not total nor is it totally random. We must grant that. But to say that we have consciously willed something does not automatically mean that the decision was free (of causes, of constraints, or history, of genetics, of the environment, etc. This is point five, below.). Fourth, given that we will some things and don’t will, but nevertheless do, others, it would be useful to distinguish between willing the things we want to will and doing the things we don’t want to do, and having made the distinction, examine the differences. But be careful with that word “free.” It seems to me to get in the way. Examining the distinctions may or may not lead to a metaphysical justification for torturing someone for no (consequential) reasons, but I doubt it. Fifth, having accomplished the forgoing, don’t insist that determinism and free will or compatible, unless you are prepared to offer a radical redefinition of the terms as they are normally used. And what is the point in that. Quantum physics tells us that at the subatomic level, things are not determined. Nevertheless they are statistically invariable, given a large enough sampling. That whole subject is weirder than one can ontologically imagine the word weird to mean. It really cannot even be comprehended, but Kant has already explained that there are limits on our abilities to comprehend the real world, so we should be prepared to comprehend that we cannot comprehend it without concluding that non-causal relationships do not exist. But I digress. My point is that, while at a macroscopic level there is a whole lot of causality involved in willing, even if at some level there is something taking place that is completely random, we haven’t solved the metaphysical problem —indeed, it may be insoluble, in which case we should at a minimum not draw any rash conclusions regarding desert. Again, in analyzing the free will problem, keep psychological notions well distinguished from metaphysical ones. This is simply not done in the literature, and it frustrates me. There are distinctions that can be made here, and the literature does do a good job of illustrating the obvious. If we are in prison, we are not free to walk in the park, to fly in an airplane, etc. Duhh . . . That does not address the question of whether there are other, more subtle, factors, other than bars, that affect a so-called range of choices that a person has. Viewed psychologically, which is what most philosophers on this subject unfortunately appear to be doing —instead of viewing it metaphysically, which is what they should be doing, psychology being more appropriately addressed by psychologists— free will, ironically, is basically considered to be confined to those actions which can be affected (determined?) by rewards and punishments! You will definitely find this in the criminal justice system, with only a few people aware of what is actually going on. We tend not to punish, or to punish less severely, those who are “not responsible” for their acts. We, in turn, define “responsible for” in a way that turns out to really mean that the person or others similarly situated would be “amenable to the threat of coercion or punishment.” In other words, if Lizi Bordon was totally insane, and thought her parents were dead trees, and that she was chopping them up for fire wood, it is less likely that a jury would “hold her responsible” than if she intentionally and premeditatedly killed them. Makes perfect sense from a sociological point of view. Why confuse it with metaphysics? People who think other people are trees are not likely to be dissuaded from chopping them up unless the law imposes the death penalty on lumberjacks. So what would be the point in killing her too? What frustrates me, is that the point I am making ought not to be in need of making. It ought to be obvious, if not to the common person —for whom it need not be obvious, psychological interpretations of justice work just fine here—, then obvious to the philosopher, at the very least. But apparently it is not, and the subject of free will is not a whole lot further advanced now than it was in the Middle Ages; or at least that is the impression I had in reading this book.
02/01/1999	The Rediscovery of the Mind	Searle, John R.	01
01/01/1999	A History of the Mind	Humphrey, Nicholas	01	Not as good as the book jacket promised, but not a total loss either. The subject has proven itself to be extremely resistant to being represented in words, in part because of its inherently reflexive nature. Consciousness is irreducible, in my humble opinion, and that makes it very difficult describe in terms of something other than itself. Kant’s distinctions between concepts complete in themselves, which are tautological, and those which when expressed add something to what was otherwise known, come to mind. The one is analytic, the other synthetic (not like nylon).
12/01/1998	Free Will (Oxford Readings in Philosophy)	Watson, Gary, Ed. by	01	This was quite worth the read. I think that the problem of free will is at the heart of all philosophy. I am very surprised that the subject is so poorly understood. I hope to add to the subject, and I will have to, with great effort, restrain myself here, though I cannot resist a few words. First, the issue is no where near as straight forward and as matter-of-fact as most people assume. By most people, I mean non-philosophers. And they, mostly, take free will for granted, in many cases it not having even occurred to them that the notion runs directly contrary to all logic and reason, which does not mean it is not true, but which is a fairly important fact to note at the outset. Stranger still is the common mode of reasoning which goes something like this: A person is responsible for his or her own acts, and there therefore no causative forces that can be said to be responsible, and if we tell people that there are causes for their behavior then that will tend to cause them to misbehave. So, in an attempt to influence/determine people’s behavior, it is important to insist that behavior is not determined. Yes, I oversimplified the arguments. But this is because I am not going to give a full treatment of my opinion here. I merely give that one example to show that any reasonably intelligent approach to the subject would require the recognition of the issues that my example raises. The example was not intended to dispose of them. Another example: If behavior is not caused by anything (will being free and free being uncaused) then it what sense can a person be blamed for just happening to be the way the person is, for no causal reason. Finally, I think it is indeed important to recognize that will and volition are very important and coherent concepts, even if they too defy logic. In order to understand the notion of free will, one ought first to come to terms with the notion of what it means to will something in the first place. Once the idea of willing is understood (to the extent it can), only then should one consider its antecedents. Clearly there are antecedents to willing.
11/01/1998	Lacan For Beginners	Hill, Philip	01
11/01/1998	Philosophy of Mind	Shaffer, Jerome	01
09/01/1998	Consciousness Explained	Dennett, Daniel C.	01	It wasn’t.
07/01/1998	Utilitarianism— For and Against	Smart, J.J.C. and Williams, Bernard	01	Williams was almost pathetic. J.J.C.S. did a creditable job I thought.
07/01/1998	Starmaker	Stapleton, Olaf	01	08.01. 08.01. Truly great and classic science fiction, written when? I can’t remember. In the 20s I think; certainly not much later. I read another book of his a long time ago. Title reminds me of something by Nietzsche. Can’t remember. First Men Last Men. Yes, that was it; or, was it the other way around. Must check and add it to this list. Come to think of it, that was an astounding book in the breadth, tracing the possible evolution of humankind at great length. Not an easy read, but a memorable one, both books.
06/01/1998	Ethics	Ewing, A. C.	01	If this is the best Ewing can do, and if he is well respected, which I gather to be the case, then I am worried about the field.
06/01/1998	Hallucinogens and Shamanism	Harner, Michael J., Ed.	01	02.01
06/01/1998	Heidegger For Beginners	Lemay, Eric & Pitts, Jennifer A.	01
06/01/1998	Minds, Brains & Science	Searle, John R.	01	Searle is close to dead on, in my opinion.
06/01/1998	The Mystery of Consciousness	Searle, John R.	01
06/01/1998	The Ethics of Spinoza	Spinoza, Baruch	01
06/01/1998	How Free Are You	Ted Honderich	01
06/01/1998	Goethe, Kant & Hegel	Walter Kaufman	01
06/01/1998	Introducing Kant	Want, Christopher & Klimowski, Andrzej	01
05/01/1998	History of Western Morals	Brinton, Crane	01	I love whatever Crane Brinton writes.
05/01/1998	The Problem of Freedom and Determinism	D’Angelo, Edward	01	Not bad.
03/01/1998	Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, & Kafka	Wm. Hubben	01
02/01/1998	Way to Wisdom	Jaspers, Karl	01
01/01/1998	The Essential Talmud	Adin Steinsaltz	01	1.2. It would be a very good thing, in my opinion, if more gentiles were exposed to the ethical rigor of the Talmud. There is nothing quite similar to it in Protestantism, though there something like it in the Roman Catholic Tradition. I think that there are historical reasons why the study of the Talmud was kept so closely within the Jewish province (beyond the obvious fact that it is a Jewish Institution). This is evidenced by the paucity of books for secular readers devoted to the subject. In any case, I think that perhaps changing times now would more readily permit this knowledge to be shared with a wider audience, an audience which is largely ignorant of the depth and importance of the Jewish approach to ethics, which from what I can tell is far, far advanced in its attention to the nuance and subtleties of ethical and social issues.
11/01/1997	History of Philosophy Vol. 5, Part 2, Modern Philosophy, The British Philosophers, Berkeley to Hume	Copleston, Frederick, S.J.	01
10/01/1997	History of Philosophy Vol. 5, Part 1, Modern Philosophy, The British Philosophers, Hobbes to Paley	Copleston, Frederick, S.J.	01
09/01/1997	Assembling (Post)modernism—The Utopian Philosophy of Ernst Bloch, Vol. XI Studies in European Thought	Jones, John Miller	01
09/01/1997	Can’t We Make Moral Judgments	Midgley, Mary	01	The limits of relativism are demonstrated by compelling examples.
07/01/1997	Love’s Body	Brown, Norman O.	01
07/01/1997	History of Philosophy Vol. 8, Part 1, Empiricism, Idealism and Pragmatism in Britain and America	Copleston, Frederick, S.J.	01
07/01/1997	History of Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Vol. 8, Part 2, Bentham to Russell, Empiricism, Idealism and Pragmatism in Britain and America	Copleston, Frederick, S.J.	01
07/01/1997	Introducing Hegel	Spencer, Lloyd & ???	01
06/01/1997	Philosophy For Beginners	Osborne, Richard	01
05/01/1997	Michel Foucault For Beginners	Fillingham, Lydia Alix	01	So now you know that I am not above reading comic books, but I like the Philosophy for Stupid Idiots series. I look forward to reading Voting for Dummies before the next election.
05/01/1997	Philosophy Made Simple	Popkin, Richard H., PhD. & Stroll, Avrum, PhD.	01
04/01/1997	Socrates, Buddha, Confucius & Jesus, From The Great Philosophers, Vol. 1	Jaspers, Karl	01
04/01/1997	Kierkegaard For Beginners	Palmer, Donald D.	01
04/01/1997	The Mystique of Enlightenment	U.G. Krishna Murthi	01
02/01/1997	The Self Aware Universe—How Consciousness Creates The Material World	Goswami, Amit, PhD	01	1.7. I predict that, in the 21st Century, we are going to read much more in this vein. In the contrived and inaccurate taxonomy of philosophy (for which nevertheless there is no adequate substitute) Goswami describes himself (as would I if forced at this moment) as a monistic idealist (as opposed to what? materialistic realism, I think).
02/01/1997	The Self Aware Universe—How Consciousness Creates The Material World	Goswami, Amit, PhD	01	1.7. I predict that, in the 21st Century, we are going to read much more in this vein. In the contrived and inaccurate taxonomy of philosophy (for which nevertheless there is no adequate substitute) Goswami describes himself (as would I if forced at this moment) as a monistic idealist (as opposed to what? materialistic realism, I think).
01/01/1997	Kant, From the Great Philosophers Vol. 1	Jaspers, Karl	01	I had to read this twice. Jaspers is not easy reading. His chapter on Nagarjuna was good though.
01/01/1997	Forbidden Knowledge	Shattuck, Roger	01	I am in disagreement with much of what Shattuck had to say, but it was well written, and for both those reasons I liked it very much. At least it was thought provoking. Chapter V is entitled “Guilt, Justice, and Empathy in Melville and Camus.” Section 4 of that Chapter is entitled “Understanding, Blaming, Forgiving, Pardoning.” He quotes a French proverb, tout comprendre c’tout pardoner, which means something like “to understand is to forgive.” A variation is tout comprendre rend tres indulgent. Shattuck quotes Henri Michaux for a wry variation on the same theme: “If the wolf understands the sheep, he’ll die of hunger.” An aphorism with the opposite implication is from La Rochefoucauld: “If the world were aware of the motives behind them, we would often be ashamed of our finest actions.” G.B. Shaw, in the same vein, says, “If a great man could make us understand him, we should hang him.” This says more about us than about the great man, as far as I am concerned.
12/01/1996	Tao Te Ching, by Lao-Tzu	Mitchell, Stephen, Trans. by	01	This should be required reading in grade school, though the church/state separationists would probably maintain that the U.S. Constitution forbids it. Which makes me think at this moment: What would the school prayer advocates say about daily prayers to Kali the Destroyer, Shiva’s consort, especially if recited in front of her image, complete with skulls? The student body could all assemble in the auditorium at 8:30 and recite a standard prayer together, bowing being optional. However, as a token to the liberals who are against school prayer, the students would be permitted to be silent if they did not believe in Shiva.
12/01/1996	Ishmael	Quinn, Daniel	01	One of the most thought provoking books I have ever read. I have many problems with the book, but it definitely caused me to think about some things. In fact, I think about this book and the issues that it raised several times a month, or so it seems.
10/01/1996	Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Swami Prabhavananda and  Christopher Isherwood, w/ intro. by Aldous Huxley.	God, for all we know.	01	02;01. This is one of the most important works ever committed to paper. I cannot comment on the translation, which is one of many. But the story and the issues presented are truly profound, and equally terrifying. In praise of nuclear war? Careful here.
10/01/1996	Kinds of Minds, Towards an Understanding of Consciousness	Dennett, Daniel C.	01	I prefer Searle to Dennett.
07/01/1996	Kant	Jaspers, Karl	01
04/01/1996	On The History of Modern Philosophy	Schelling, F.W.J. Von	01	Schelling writes sentences that Faulkner would be unable to follow.
04/01/1996	Kant- Past Master Series	Scruton, Roger	01
07/01/1995	History of Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Vol. 7, Part 2, Schopenhauer to Nietzsche	Copleston, Frederick, S.J.	01
07/01/1995	History of Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Vol. 9, Part 1, Main de Biran to Sartre, The Revolution to Henri Bergson	Copleston, Frederick, S.J.	01
07/01/1995	History of Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Vol. 9, Part 2, Bergson to Sartre	Copleston, Frederick, S.J.	01
06/01/1995	History of Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Vol. 7, Part 1, Fichte to Hegel	Copleston, Frederick, S.J.	01
11/01/1994	History of Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Vol. 6, Part 2: Kant-Frederick The Great??	Copleston, Frederick S. J.	01
09/01/1994	The Blind Watchmaker	Dawkins, Richard	01	1.2.7. I am a Dawkins fan, and loved this book, though why he cannot accept his premise, and then ask why it is that evolution is part of the universal scheme is beyond me. I have much, much more to say on this subject.
04/01/1994	History of Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Vol. 6, Part 1: The French Enlightenment to Kant	Copleston, Frederick, S. J.	01
08/01/1993	Great Thinkers of the Western World	McGreal, Ian P., Edited by	01
07/01/1993	The Anti-Christ	Nietzsche, Friedrich	01	Nietzsche at his most provocative.
07/01/1993	The Portable Nietzsche, Viking Portable Library	Nietzsche, Friedrich	01
06/01/1993	The Brothers Karamozov	Dostoyevsky, Fyodor	01	8.1. One of the best novels I have ever read.
05/01/1993	Twilight of the Idols	Nietzsche, Friedrich	01
03/01/1993	Thus Spake Zarathustra	Nietzsche, Friedrich	01
10/01/1992	Journey to the Centers of the Mind	Greenfield, Susan A.	01	1.7. I was not impressed.
08/01/1992	We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse	Hillman, James and Ventura, Michael	01	6.1. A great read. Reminds me of My Dinner with Andre. So much can be done with simple dialogue.
10/01/1991	Out of Step-An Unquiet Life In The 20th Century	Hook, Sidney	01	4.3.1. I saw Sidney Hook on Firing Line, and was so impressed that I sought out and purchased the book that was the subject of much of the program. Come to find out, Hook is a renown philosopher as well as a former Trotskyite.
07/01/1991	The Western Intellectual Tradition	J. Bronowski & Bruce Mazlish	01	1.3. Bronowski, an anglicized Pole whose background is also Jewish which may explain the fact that he left Poland, is one of the 20th Century’s preeminent humanists. Perhaps you saw the BBC series The Ascent of Man. If not, go rent it from your public library. It is not to be missed.
05/01/1991	The Great Philosophers	Magee, Bryan	01
02/01/1991	Notes From the Underground	Dostoyevsky, Fyodor	01	8.1. One of my favorite books. If I had more time, I would definitely read more Dostoyevsky.
11/01/1990	Beyond Good and Evil	Nietzsche, Friedrich	01
09/01/1990	Living Philosophies	Fadiman, Clifton	01	Anything edited by Fadiman can be counted upon to be good.
	All of the Don Juan books, except the last, by which time it was getting too ridiculous, and I was getting too old to continue farther down this path	Castenada, Carlos	01	1.2.8. Pure fiction for sure, but a good read for a while, and he took in a lot of people.
	Dune, the entire series and most of what ever else Frank Herbert has written	Herbert, Frank	01	8.1. Yes, Herbert’s works go beyond being characterized as literature only. Read the Dosadi Experiment, for example.
	Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance	Pirsig, Robert M.	01	6.8.1. I read this on a flight back from Paris. I began as we left and finished as we landed. I couldn’t put it down.
	The Story of Philosophy	Durant, Will & Ariel		My first philosophy book.
	Atlas Shrugged	Rand, Ayn	01	1.8
	Philosophy in the 20^th Century	Ayer, A.J.	01	I remember reading at least half of this book, but I don’t remember finishing it.
	Virtually everything written by Bertrand Russell, other than his autobiography	Russell, Bertrand	01	These works were all read prior to 1990, and so really should not be on this list.
1/01/2010	aaa	aaa	02 Religion
11/01/2001	World Philosophy	Higgins, Kathleen UT Austin	02	01.02. This was a series of twenty-four 30-45 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company. These tapes were well worth listening to, and were adequate as an introductory course, which was all that they were probably intended to be. I needed a little more depth, since I had been around this block several times already.
11/01/03	The Historical Figure of Jesus	Sanders, E.P.	02	02.03 Quite good.
08/01/03	Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews, A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity	Fredriksen, Paula	02	02.03. I have no hesitancy in recommending this book.
11/01/03	Answer to Job	Jung, C. G.	02	02.06 Very interesting approach to the Book of Job. Myth is not fiction.
09/20/03	THE STORY OF B An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit.	Daniel Quinn	02	02.08 Daniel Quinn is as thought provoking as he is naive. (This is not the prequel to the Story of O.)
12/01/2001	The Historical Jesus	Ehrman, Bart D.— University of N. Carolina, Chapel Hill	02	02.04. This was a series of twenty-four 30 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company.  Ehrman is a great lecturer. I am reading E.P. Sanders The Historical Figure of  Jesus, and just finished Paula Fredriksen’s Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews : A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity, and so this series of lectures was timely for me. Ehrman is convinced that Jesus was an apocalypticist. I would rather he weren’t, but that is neither here nor there. Actually, I think that it is impossible to say just who Jesus was from reading the Gospels alone. There are so many different pictures that the Gospels give us of Jesus, and since each Gospel writer has a slightly different perspective on him, and in some cases a different message  to emphasize, it is probable that no one really knows all of the answers — which does not dissuade a good many people from acting as if they do.
	Jews, God, and History	Dimont, Max L.	02	02.03. I read this years ago, but it impressed me enough to stick in the list anyway as being especially good.
06/01/2001	The Knee of Listening	Adi Da, (Da, Adi?) Jones, Franklin Albert	02	02.04.06. This is the first book about the life of God that was, if you believe the author, actually written by God in his own hand. Wow. What a crock. A very interesting crock, but a crock nonetheless. This is the biography of a seeker who got carried away with himself. If you were wondering who God is, well it turns out that it is this guy, Jones. Now, according to St. Paul, we are all sons and daughters of God, including Jesus, presumably. But Adi Da does not claim to be related to God by mere descent. Is everyone God, in a sense? If that was his message it would be more palatable. I am a tolerant observer of different philosophies and religions; and there is a level at which I am even tolerant of this guy —more than tolerant, interested and obliquely accepting. In a sense much of what he says is probably true, but only in a sense. In another sense, most of what he says is pathological. But then so is much of life. There are, however, degrees of truth. Some come closer to approximating it than others. On this continuum, and in the final analysis, Adi Da (my wife calls him Ladi Da, I call him Da Da) is on the wacky side of the bar chart. His is the biography of an ego writ large —an interesting, a basically compassionate and well intentioned ego, it is true. How does a philosophy that one would think would emphasize every part of the psychic experience at the expense of the personal ego, get so perverted that the ego ends up as totally dominant. This is a phenomenon of cult psychology that interests me very much, as do certain other aspects as well. What makes people able to believe the preposterous things that they do. This book was very instructive in that regard.
06/01/2001	The Reel Line	Houston, Jimmy	02	02.13. I love Jimmy Houston’s fishing show. If you are going to read his books, however, be prepared for a good dose of Jesus along with the fishing. It is clever how he relates all life and religion to fishing. Well, to paraphrase Justice Scalia in his review of an ERISA[4] preemption case, where federal law purports to preempt all state law relating to ERISA: “philosophers will tell you that everything relates to everything, but we do not believe that Congress intended that definition in this case.”
04/30/2001	A History of God	Armstrong, Karen	02	02.03. I read this book three times between 1996 and 1999, twice thoroughly and once quickly. A typical page will list a half dozen names, at least, of people who I was not particularly familiar with, especially in the large sections that she devotes to Islamic culture and history, for which my Euro-centric education inadequately prepared me. In 2001, I decided to read it again, carefully. There is a lot of information in this book, and I got a lot more out of it this time. My opinion of Karen Armstrong has gone way up. I think she really knows what she is talking about. She was a frequent guest on Bill Moyers’ Genesis series, and I thought that the series was so superficial that for a while I think I let it taint in my mind everyone that participated in it. My one serious objection to Karen Armstrong is her repeated insistence that this or that passage from the Bible or the Vedas or the Bhagavad-Gita was never meant to be taken literally. That is a very different assertion from saying we ought not to take it literally. And is different from asserting that the original human author didn’t take it literally. It may be true that few seminarians and even fewer Rabbis believe that the Adam and Eve story or Noah’s Arc should be taken literally, but most people are first exposed to myths of this nature as children, and, speaking from experience, I don’t recall anyone going to great lengths to explain that they were allegories and not meant to be taken literally. That is something that you generally figure out for yourself as an adult. Moreover, it is also true that there are even some grown ups, (virtually all found in the Southeastern United States) who even today confuse biblical allegories with physical reality. Unlike Karen Armstrong, I think that there have always been a handful of people, admittedly not usually the most highly educated, who not only take these myths literally, but transmit them with the expectation that they will be so taken by their hearers. Did the Greeks believe Homer’s stories literally or not? Did any of them think they described actual events? How many? I don’t think Karen Armstrong knows. I would really like to know the answer to that question. A guess won’t do. I would like to see the issue argued, evidence presented, etc.
09/01/2001	Saint Augustine	Wills, Gary	02	02.03.04.
03/13/2002	RELATING WORLD RELIGIONS TO CHRISTIANITY: and details about some Christian Churches and a few Sect Groups Compiled and Edited by Ray and Donna Dykes September, 2001	Dykes, Ray	02	02. This is basically a compendium of pre-Nicene Christian “fathers” (and at least one mother), but it begins with a discussion of Zoroastrianism. There were a couple of interesting points in the discussion of Zoroastrianism that that I had not connected before, though they were there for all to see. The connection between the Iranians or Persia and the Arians of India is well known, and, although Dykes was not concerned with this, I am; and he mentioned a few points that jumped out at me, for the first time. The Zoroastrian holy book is the Avesta. The most ancient of the Hindu holy books is the Veda. The predecessors to the Zoroastrians indulged in a ritual intoxicant that Dykes calls haoma. The predecessors to the Hindus practically worshiped a drink they called soma (which, as usual, they deified). I didn’t know that the early Iranians shared this with the Vedic Hindus. They must have brought the practice with them during the Arian invasion of India around 1500. Neither Hindus nor Zoroastrians use this drink anymore, and to this day no one knows how it was made. According to Dykes, the name of the evil principle in Zoroastrian dualism is Angra Mainyu. I had never heard this name. I knew the Zoroastrian evil one as Ahriman, but my subsequent research (5 minutes ago, consulting R. C. Zaehner) says that Ahriman was originally known as Angra Mainyu. Now, the Hindu god of fire is Agni. Agni, Angra, angst, anxious, angry are all etymologically related. I find this very interesting. So not only was the ancient Iranian religion more closely connected with Vedic Hinduism than I had realized, but we can trace our word for angry and anxious back to a point when Hindus, Zoroastrians, and English speakers all shared at least a language in common, and with it a common idea of what was evil, signified by a word which is a clue to an ancient shared heritage, now lost. I had noted before that the Zoroastrian demons were called devas. In India , the devas simply became daevas, a class of minor gods. Devil, deva, daeva: all from a common root. What I didn’t know, until I read this work, was that there were six chief devils in Angra’s army, of whom “the best know is Satan, who is the expert in temptation.” As Dyke must be implying, this is an obvious syncretism between Zoroastrianism and post-exilic Judaism. Hindus, Zoroastrians, Jews, Muslims and Christians— none of us is unaffected by the other. Dykes says that Zoroastrianism was “founded by Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) around 500 BCE in Persia.” While the exact date of Zoroaster’s ministry is unknown, it is certainly older than 500 BCE, possibly as much as 1000 years earlier (according to several other sources). Since Dykes admits that Cyrus was a Zoroastrian, it is clear to me that the date given is too early. The earliest date I have seen seriously suggested is one used by the Zoroastrians themselves, who placed Zoroaster’s’ death 258 years before the death of Darius III. If he really did begin his mission at age 30 and lived to 77, as the Zoroastrians claim, his birth would have been in 628, and his death in 551 BCE. Most scholars think that Zoroaster actually lived much earlier than that. Who knows? The brief biographies of the principal ante-Nicene fathers (and in one case to be noted, mothers) was a good refresher. I recently purchased (used of course) a 20 (or so) volume set of all of the works of most of the persons mentioned. However, I confess that I was not familiar with Perpetua of Carthage, who was martyred in the amphitheater in the reign of Septimus Severus, around 203 CE. Perpetua is known from the writings of Tertullian, but I didn’t know about her until now. Dykes’ materials on the Nicene Creed were also illuminating. Every time I re-approach the subject, I learn —and am humbled— just a little more. I also gain more respect for the creed each time I study it. This is not to say that I don’t still have problems with it, but when one considers the alternative formulations, none of them is entirely satisfactory either, and I am continually awed by the seriousness with which the issue was taken at the time, a seriousness which the subject deserved.
12/01/2001	The Apostle Paul	Johnson, Luke Timothy— Emory University	02	02. This was a series of twelve 30 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company. The speaker, Prof. Luke Timothy Johnson, of Emory University, was quite good. He is one of the only scholars (or theologians, for that matter) who really believes that Paul probably wrote all 13 of the letters attributed to him in the New Testament. Most scholars and theologians would treat the Pastoral Epistles (1 & 2 Timothy, and Titus), together with Colossians, 2 Thessalonians and Ephesians as Deutero-Pauline, pseudonymous letters., although there is less agreement about the last three. Johnson argued that, although there are good reasons to suspect the six letters just listed as not being Pauline, the majority of scholars are failing to recognize that Paul was not a modern day professor of theology, and that he can be expected to be less than fully consistent. Further, he may have been adopting different styles of writing to fit the occasion, a practice encouraged by teachers of rhetoric at the time. Well, maybe. Who knows? I find it useful to read a text closely enough that these issues rise to the surface. If you don’t notice, then perhaps you are not paying the attention that the text deserves. Since most of Paul’s more misogynist statements are found in passages and letters that many scholars think were written by someone other than Paul, I would like the conventional opinion to be correct. But that is not a good reason for believing it, now is it?
12/01/2001	Thomas Aquinas: The Angelic Doctor	Adams, Jeremy— SMU	02	02. This was a series of twelve 30 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company.
12/01/2001	The New Testament	Ehrman, Bart D.— University of N. Carolina, Chapel Hill	02	02. This was a series of twenty-four 30 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company.  Ehrman is wonderful. He is not a fundamentalist, but most well-rounded, well-read people aren’t; so that should come as no surprise. He would definitely take issue with Luke Johnson regarding Pauline authorship and other matters. Listening to them both over the course of a week made for a good contrast. I like to hear both sides of an issue (assuming there is more than one, which is usually the case).
12/01/2001	The Old Testament	Levine, Amy-Jill —Vanderbilt	02	02. This was a series of twenty-four 30 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company.  Prof. Levine is not convinced that David is a historical figure. She says that the stories about him may be like the stories of King Arthur. Perhaps; but that would surprise me. There is so much in Samuel that strikes me as a genuine first person narrative, warts and all, that it never occurred to me that David would be a composite mythological personage. Abraham, certainly; Moses maybe; Joshua perhaps; but David? Not that it makes any real difference. After a few thousand years or so, a great person’s physical existence is quite outside of our world of experience anyway. Such a person lives on as an idea only. His or her DNA is lost to us. Nothing we say or do can affect that person’s physical interaction with the world. All that is left is the idea, and ideas are real enough, in any case.
11/01/2001	Great World Religions: Beliefs, Practices and Histories Part I Overview: The Christian Religions and Religious Fundamentalism.	Oden, Robert— President of Kenyon College	02	02. This was a series of ten 45 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company. Fundamentalist religions, whether they be Christian, Jewish, Islamic or even Buddhist, all share certain common characteristics. Think about it. This was a very good scholarly overview of a subject about which much more needs to be said.
11/11/2001	Great World Religions: Beliefs, Practices and Histories Part II God and His Prophet: The Religion of Islam.	John Swanson— The American University at Cairo	02	02. This was a series of ten 45 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company. This was a good overview in the apologia style. Islam cannot be given justice in so short a lecture series, but that is true of the other topics as well. I would have like to know more, and will make a point of pursuing the subject. For starters, I need to read the Koran again.
11/21/2001	Great World Religions: Beliefs, Practices and Histories Part III God and God’s People: The Religion of Judaism.	William Scott Green —University of Rochester	02	02. This was a series of ten 45 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company. This may be the best in the series. What a perfect medium a taped lecture is for presenting to the audience, of all things, examples of the musical recitations which are part of the Jewish liturgy. I have made a point of trying to learn more than the average Gentile about the Jewish religion and the Jewish people. Heritage, by Abba Eban; Max Dimont’s Jews, God, and History; The Essential Talmud, by Adin Steinsaltz; A History of the Jews, by Paul Johnson; Howard Fast’s, The Jews; Judaism, Ed. by Arthur Hertzberg, to name the ones in the list. I am currently reading Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History, by James Carroll. This is a story that really needs to be told. I believe that most Christians have no idea of the extent to which their religion has misrepresented Jews and Judaism, and can to some extent, though of course not entirely, be held responsible for the holocaust by creating an intellectual climate that allowed anti-Semitism to flourish. Why am I so interested in Judaism? Well, for one reason, I am interested in just about everything, as a quick perusal of this reading list would suggest. But in this case, there is more to it than that. When I was about 14 years old, and thoroughly unconscious (not to mention being a complete idiot), I participated in what could be interpreted as an act of anti-Semitism, for reasons which had nothing to do with anything Jewish at all, but merely out of total ignorance which latched on to some off-hand remarks by other similarly unconscious barely teenagers. Malice was not part of the equation, certainly not religious or ethnic malice. It was just shear stupidity and ignorance. Bad as it was, I am not the first to make this mistake, and I think that we would all be better off if mistakes like it could somehow be prevented. In my case, a little knowledge would have been all that was necessary. But I didn’t even have that much to work with. When I got a little older and realized the situation, I was horrified. Learning more about Jews and Judaism is certainly a feeble form of atonement, but this mini-essay is not about my neuroses. Whatever the impetus for my wanting to become more aware of the peculiar history of other peoples, I think that the undertaking in this case is one that it would behoove more of us Gentiles to do. I say this for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with my particularly embarrassing case. I say it because, my God, just look at European history. There is something very wrong there, which is nowhere more graphically illustrated than in Europe’s treatment of the Jews. If one could understand the roots of anti-Semitism, one would understand a lot. Of course, in today’s polite society, anti-Semitism would appear for all intents and purposes as not a problem. But the same can possibly be said of the late Enlightenment. And I am not just interested in anti- Semitism for its own sake, as much as I am in the phenomena and in its more universal application. It is simply that the example and the subject matter of the case of the Jews is so striking. I mean, it is there for all to see. You simply have to ask yourself “Why?” I was talking to a group of college students the other day about what it was that the WTO was doing to cause so much discontent including a near riot in Seattle. The answer was fairly vague, but the consensus seemed to be that there is a vast international conspiracy, managed and manipulated by an elite clique of sorts, to control the economies of all the world to the advantage of a handful of key players and their families. These students were too well educated to call it a Jewish conspiracy, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to have heard that it was the Elders of Zion behind the whole thing. And even if the conspiracy were not Jewish, it was the same thing all over again. Who knows, maybe it will be the Armenian money lenders this time. The point is that there was a theme in this discussion that sounded hauntingly familiar, and I didn’t like it.
12/01/2001	Great World Religions: Beliefs, Practices and Histories Part IV Confucius, the Tao, the Ancestors and the Buddha: The Religions of China.	Henricks, Robert —Dartmouth	02	02. This was a series of ten 45 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company.
12/01/2001	Great World Religions: Beliefs, Practices and Histories Part V Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh: The Religions of India.	Eck, Diana —Harvard Divinity School	02	02. This was a series of ten 45 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company.
4/01/2001	The Concept of Willing	Lapsley, James N., Ed.	02	01;02
02/28/2001	The Odyssey	Homer. Translated by George Herbert Palmer	02	8.2.
12/01/2000	James The Brother of Jesus	Eisenman, Robert	02	I am only half way through this 1000 page book. A fascinating piece of scholarship, this. There are at least four James that appear prominently in the Gospels, James the brother of John, and James the son of Alphaeus, both of whom are disciples; and James the brother of Jesus and James of Jerusalem, who are probably the same person (see Acts and Eusebius). The author of this work makes the case that all of the James’ are frequently confused. The book is over a thousand pages, and although I never intended to finish it, I can’t seem to put it down.
12/01/2000	The Rise Of Christianity	Frend, W. H. C.	02	As of this writing, I am not quite through, mainly because I have re-read the first 500 pages three times. This is undoubtedly one of the best books on early Christianity that has ever been written! It is a model of scholarship and lucidity. For our purposes, the first hundred and fifty-nine pages take us from the time of Christ to 135 C.E. The next hundred-pages, covering the years 135 through 193 C.E., are worth reading too, even though they cover a period of time that was probably after the canonical Gospels had been reduced to roughly their present form. The 800 pages remaining are wonderful also, but are outside the subject matter of this course.
12/01/2000	The Bible as History, 2^nd Edition	Keller, Werner	02	2.3 This is an old standby, which remains lively and entertaining. It’s a pretty fair history too, and a page turner to boot (if you’re in to this kind of thing). It is not confined to the New Testament.
09/01/00	NonZero	Wright, Robert	02	1.2. The topic is one that interests me very much. The book was worth reading, but ultimately disappointing. Perhaps my expectations were too high. However, I was interested in the topic enough to read Wright’s critically acclaimed The Moral Animal, and found it to be exceptionally good. I discuss that book elsewhere in this document. I think I would have enjoyed NonZero more as a sequel to The Moral Animal, than as a stand-alone read. I suppose the reason is that I already pretty much agree with most of the points raised in both books, and got mostly confirmation, rather than new information for the most part. The confirmation is rewarding, but if I get both, I am really happy. The first book gave me more facts that I previously did not know than the second, and that may be why I liked it more. All in all, I would still recommend both books. But if you can only read one, read the first.
07/01/2000	The Bible: Revelations	Human beings, known and unknown, and variously inspired	02	NRSV
07/01/2000	Breaking The Code	Metzger, Bruce M.	02	This was pretty low level stuff.
07/01/2000	Interpreting the Book of Revelations	Michaels, J. Ramey	02
06/03/2000	An Introduction to the New Testament	Brown, Raymond E.	02	Turns out that this book is very, very good. I have no hesitancy in recommending this book as a single (secondary) source New Testament introduction. It is both well researched and well written. It is a part of the Anchor Bible Reference Library, and nothing in that series has ever disappointed me. Brown is not a fundamentalist, or I wouldn’t be so effusive. True, he is more of a supernaturalist (my coin, I think) than am I, but so what. I appreciate good scholarship and an honest well defended point of view as well as the next person, and I expect you do to. Read this book! Although this book received the Vatican’s imprimatur, protestant’s will find little to object to.
06/03/2000	The Dhammapada	Easwaran, Eknath, Translated and introduced by	02	2.1
06/03/2000	Lives of the Popes	Walsh, Michael J.	02	4.2.3.
05/23/2000	The Future of an Illusion	Freud, Sigmund	02	2.1. Not as good as I had expected, but as always, I enjoy reading Freud when he is philosophizing about life generally, than we he is analyzing the human mind. Of course, he is known mostly for the latter, but in my opinion, his real insights were general in nature, and that he should have stopped short of where he was wont to ultimately go. For example, his insights in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life are right on the mark. We are constantly deluding ourselves about our motives, about reality, and about others. Behind those delusions there lies another reality, one that we can glimpse the better we understand ourselves. However, when Freud gets more specific, as he was wont to do, I have no doubt that he was often way far of the mark.
11/01/1999	History of Hell	Turner, Alice K.	02	The abominable fancy is proof that Nietzsche was right. Many humans are sadists at heart. Surely, many Christian advocates of Hell are, if they enjoy contemplating the fate of those whom the God they worship sends there. Some like, Augustine, did not attempt to hide their joy in contemplating the suffering of others at the hands of an all-merciful God. Hence the medieval term for Augustine’s form of sadism: “the abominable fancy.” Unlike Nietzsche, I consider the love of cruelty (or sadism) to be a severe form of mental illness. He would argue that this form of demonstrating power is healthy. I suppose many Christians, who believe both in Hell and in an all merciful God would of course agree, which is ironic, since Nietzsche was not fond of them either. I suppose they would each torture each other gladly if given the chance, loving every minute.
10/01/1999	The Jews	Fast, Howard	02	2.3
10/01/1999	The Bible: The Epistles of James, Peter and Jude	Human beings, known and unknown, and variously inspired	02	Translated w/ intro and notes by Bo Reicke. Anchor Bible Series
09/01/1999	Philosophy of the Buddha	Bahm, Archie J.	02	Bahm, who is from University of New Mexico I think, has a whole series of books on Eastern Religions. This book was a good overview, but I decided that for my purposes, I need a little more substance.
09/01/1999	Jesus Before Christianity	Noland, Albert	02	This is a good, easy read, especially for persons who have never before closely considered the question of what Jesus might have been like, before he was defined by organized Christianity.
08/01/1999	The Birth of Christianity	Crossan, John Dominic	02	John Crossan is a prominent member of the Jesus Seminar. I started skimming this book (it’s another long one), but can hardly put it down. His viewpoints are somewhat controversial –and should be‑, but I like him.
08/01/1999	The History of the Church	Eusebius of Caesarea	02	2.3. Anyone remotely interested in the first 300 years of Christianity should read Eusebius. Eusebius was Bishop of Caesarea and a close friend of Constantine. He writes in the early fourth century, and quotes many sources no longer available to us. Eusebius has a wonderful discussion of which books were universally thought worthy of being included in the Christian canon and which were not. At the time Eusebius was writing, circa. 325, there was still debate over the Gospel of the Hebrews, Revelation, 2 Peter, etc. He tells us why. In my opinion, Eusebius is generally reliable and an honest reporter of early church history. Without him, much of early church history would be lost to us. Eusebius is fascinating reading. As an example, he quotes Roman documents, no longer available to us, that describe the existence of some of Jesus’ siblings and their children. According to Eusebius, these relatives were interviewed after the fall of Jerusalem, when all purported descendants of David were being questioned on suspicion of disloyalty to Rome. (Apparently they were dismissed without punishment as being simple rustics, who, although they professed a belief in Christ’s Kingdom, maintained that it was not of this world, and did not seem to the authorities to pose any threat.) Among other fascinating tidbits of early church history, Eusebius tells us clearly that Jesus’ brother James the Just was the first Bishop of Jerusalem. (Could this James the Just be the Justus who was put forward to replace Judas in Acts 1:23, along with Matthias?)
08/01/1999	The Book Of The Lost Gospel Q	Mack, Burton L.	02	This book is by the same author as Who Wrote the New Testament. The book treats a fascinating subject; but, unfortunately, some of the conclusions the author draws from the subject matter border on the fanciful. The basic premise for the Q Gospel begins with the observation that there are two groups of material in Matthew and Luke that are almost word for word identical. Mark is thought to have been written first, and if so, the authors of Matthew and Luke would most certainly have had a copy at hand. Therefore, it was not surprising to find in Mark one set of parallel material found in both Matthew and Luke. However, there is another set of more or less identical material in Matthew and Luke that is not found in Mark. What was the source? Scholars think Q was the source. The discovery of the Gospel of Thomas at Nag Hammadi in the 1940s lends credence to the Q theory. Scholars are not in agreement about how old The Gospel of Thomas is. Some say that it is at least as old if not older than Matthew and Luke; others think it later. It contains much of the same language found in Matthew and Luke that is not found in Mark, as well as language common to all three. These and other facts strongly suggest there was another extant Gospel floating around the Greco-Roman world in the first century, which was known to the synoptic authors, and this Gospel has been given the fictitious appellation of Q.
08/01/1999	Who Wrote the New Testament‑The Making of the Christian Myth	Mack, Burton L.	02	This book is quite engaging, and is full of useful information and insights. Nevertheless, I think that the author overstates his case, and is a little too insistent on emphasizing the fictional aspects of the New Testament, without giving us the benefit of the truly historic information that a more balanced view would also take into account. Regarding the mythical aspects of the Gospels, I recommend Chapter III of  Paul Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith, entitled “Symbols of Faith.” It begins, with the following sentence, “[Humankind’s] ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.” Anyone who has read Joseph Campbell knows that myths play an important role in all religions. Christianity can hardly claim to be the only religion without any.
08/01/1999	Resurrection Myth or Reality?	Spong, John Shelby, Bishop	02	The first chapter, which treats the Gospels “as Midrash,” is wonderful. Although Spong’s works are often a little light on scholarship and too programmatic for my money, the first chapter of this book is terrific! It should be required reading. However, the arguments in favor of the conclusion he reaches strike me as very contrived, even if true, which is possible. The good bishop basically concludes that the resurrection myth was originated with Peter who had an experience of (or hallucinated) the risen Christ in Galilee, and that Peter was successful in communicating the experience to others as one having real eschatological significance —which it no doubt did, whether the event was physical or “merely” spiritual.. Perhaps so, but if true, Spong failed to make the case very persuasively.
08/01/1999	The Case For Christ	Strobel, Lee	02	Some may find this a very refreshing counter balance to the works previously cited. It is by an award winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune, who is definitely not a theologian, but who knows how to report what those who are have to say. The author makes a number of good points that needed making, and that is why I bought and read this work. The author sets off across the country to interview well credentialed scholars and theologians who will help convince him that the Jesus Seminar types and other liberals are all wet, and that the traditional fundamentalist approach to Christianity has a good scholarly base and would prevail if the case were put to a jury. The journalistic style makes for easy reading. However, the book suffers from the fact that the author chose not to interview anyone who disagreed with his conclusions. So, except for the occasional straw man, expect to find only one side of the “debate” presented here —the fundamental side. (Perhaps he will give us a sequel, argued from the other side of the bar, The Case Against Christ, but I doubt it.) Of course, programmatic works of this type are not the exclusive province of those of the fundamental persuasion (as any book by J. Shelby Spong will testify).
10/01/1995	Anchor Bible, Genesis	Speiser, E.A.	02	Truly a great work. Exceptional.
10/01/1995	Genesis 1-11	Westermann, Klaus	02	I don’t think that I ever made it quite through all of this work.
05/01/1999	The Writings of Martin Buber	Buber, Martin, Ed. By Herzog, Will	02	1.2. Buber is not easy to read. His thought is complex and deep.
01/01/1999	Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes	Hartshorne, Charles	02	I searched this one out. Rachel told me about it. I have always believed that the omnipotence notion was clearly wrong, and unbiblical to boot. For instance, Jesus could work no great miracles at home, or so the Bible says. In order to support the theological notion of omnipotence, one has to redefine the word, at which point I am not sure what is meant. Many, many theological difficulties, including the most troublesome of all, the problem of theodicy, are solvable if one is more charitable toward the deity. I have much, much more to say on this subject. My own belief is that the source of the error is at heart the same one that gave rise to the long discarded ontological argument for the existence of God. Because we are able to abstractly conceive of the idea of perfection (even though we have never seen it, it is a category of thought), we naturally ascribe it to the deity, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary that we see every day. Perhaps the circle could be squared if a different word were given to perfection and omnipotence, one for religious usage, which could reconcile that which is not perfect or all-powerful by any common sense human standards with what is perfect and all powerful theologically. Since the common sense everyday meaning of those terms obviously means something completely different from whatever it is that some religions have in mind, using different words would be very helpful. Can God make a rock that is so heavy he can’t lift it?
08/01/1998	The Five Gospels	Funk, Hoover and the Jesus Seminar	02	This work will be very helpful in comparing similar passages from the four Gospels, plus the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. I have no quarrel with the critical approach taken by the authors of this work and by the Jesus Seminar on which they are reporting. I would caution readers, however, to extend a critical view to the conclusions reached by the members of the Jesus Seminar regarding which passages are authentic and which passages are not. Although these scholars are perhaps in a better position than are we to make judgments on these points, it is obvious, to me at least, that their conclusions are largely speculative —although admittedly based on a good deal of relevant scholarship. As a result the work suffers from an air of pretension that might sully the work for some readers as it did for me (even though I am generally sympathetic to works of historic biblical criticism). Undoubtedly, there have been emendations, excisions and perhaps some wholesale additions to the Gospels by overly enthusiastic first, second and third century scriveners. Equally indisputable, however, is that that the Gospels contain material that is directly attributable to Jesus’ ministry and sayings. The truth is that the answer to the question of what was changed, and what was not, is in many cases quite beyond our capacity to really know. Although I think that guessing is fun and fair, particularly if the guess in an educated one —and the authors are educated—, my primary criticism is that the authors do not sufficiently stress the tentative nature of their conclusions, which gives the undertaking an unnecessarily pretentious affect. This failure frequently strikes me as ridiculous, and detracts from what is otherwise a laudable project.
06/01/1998	Hallucinogens and Shamanism	Harner, Michael J., Ed.	02	2.1
06/01/1998	Early Christian Heresies	O’Grady, Joan	02
01/01/1998	The Essential Talmud	Adin Steinsaltz	02	1.2. It would be a very good thing, in my opinion, if more gentiles were exposed to the ethical rigor of the Talmud. There is nothing quite similar to it in Protestantism, though there something like it in the Roman Catholic Tradition. I think that there are historical reasons why the study of the Talmud was kept so closely within the Jewish province (beyond the obvious fact that it is a Jewish Institution). This is evidenced by the paucity of books for secular readers devoted to the subject. In any case, I think that perhaps changing times now would more readily permit this knowledge to be shared with a wider audience, an audience which is largely ignorant of the depth and importance of the Jewish approach to ethics, which from what I can tell is far, far advanced in its attention to the nuance and subtleties of ethical and social issues.
11/01/1997	Religions of India—Hinduism, Yoga, Buddhism	Berry, Thomas	02
10/01/1997	Mahabharata	Buck, Translated by	02	2.8 The Mahabharata is one of the world’s great epics. Buck’s translation is very readable, but only because the original work, which I understand to be extremely lengthy, is here greatly truncated. The
09/01/1997	Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time	Borg, Marcus J.	02	I like to think of Borg as sort of middle of the road; but others, like Raymond Brown, think he is just a slightly less befuddled version of Shelby Spong.
05/01/1997	The Dynamics of Faith	Tillich, Paul	02
01/01/1997	Gnosis—The Nature and History of Gnosticism	Rudolph, Kurt	02
12/01/1996	Buddhism	Gard, Richard A., Editor, From the Series Great Religions of Modern Man	02
12/01/1996	A Layman’s Guide to Protestant Theology	Hordern, Wm. E.	02	A good old standby.
12/01/1996	The Origin of Satan	Pagels, Elaine	02	Disappointing. The obvious Zoroastrian, Persian, post-exhilic connection was hardly made, though most all would agree that it was a very significant part of the myth.
11/01/1996	Moses	Auerbach, Dr. Elias (Wayne State Univ. Press, Detroit, 1975)	02
11/01/1996	Who Wrote the Bible	Friedman, Richard Elliott	02
10/01/1996	Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Swami Prabhavananda and  Christopher Isherwood, w/ intro. by Aldous Huxley.	God, for all we know.	02	2.1. This is one of the most important works ever committed to paper. I cannot comment on the translation, which is one of many. But the story and the issues presented are truly profound, and equally terrifying. In praise of nuclear war? Careful here.
10/01/1996	The Book of J	Bloom, Harold and Rosenberg, David	02
10/01/1996	Is the Bible True, Understanding the Bible Today	Ord, David Robert and Coot, Robt. B.	02
09/01/1996	Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, Vols. 1&2, Old and New Testaments	Asimov, Isaac	02	I read this twice it was so good. Asimov is wonderful. I cannot speak highly enough of this work. Although his various non-fiction works cover a range of subjects so broad that one would think he could not possibly be an expert in all of these fields, he is almost always worth reading. What I find particularly useful about Asimov’s approach to the Bible is that he asks and answers questions that I would think that almost any curious person would want to know about; and yet, in other works on the same subject, these questions often go unasked and unanswered. Asimov’s most common source for biblical reference and information is the Anchor Bible Series, which I also recommend and which can be found in the Church library.
09/01/1996	Outline of the Bible, Book by Book	Landis, Benson Y.	02
02/01/1996	Ashes of Waco an Investigation	Reavis, Dick J.	02	3.2.
10/01/1995	Genesis and Exodus, a New English Rendition, With Commentary and Notes	Fox, Everett	02
08/01/1995	The Presbyterian Controversy, Fundamentalists, Modernists & Moderates	Longfield, Bradley J.	02
07/01/1995	Can Christ Become Good News Again	Cobb, John B., Jr.	02
05/01/1995	God and the World	Cobb, John B., Jr.	02
04/01/1995	Moses and Monotheism	Freud, Sigmund	02	6.2. I really liked this book. Freud has a number of fascinating ideas.
01/01/1995	Christian Doctrine	Gutherie, Shirley C.	02
12/01/1994	Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism	Spong, John Shelby, Bishop	02
10/01/1994	History of the Jews	Johnson, Paul	02	2.3
09/01/1994	The Gnostic Gospels	Pagels, Elaine	02	Very good.
09/01/1994	The Blind Watchmaker	Dawkins, Richard	02	1.2.7. I am a Dawkins fan, and loved this book, though why he cannot accept his premise, and then ask why it is that evolution is part of the universal scheme is beyond me. I have much, much more to say on this subject.
06/01/1994	Hinduism	Zaehner, R.C.	02	The best book on Hinduism that I have read.
08/01/1993	The Religions of Man	Smith, Huston	02	Very elementary, but good.
11/01/1992	A Survey of Hinduism	Klostermeir, Klaus K.	02
08/01/1992	Philosophical Scientists	Foster, David	02	7.2. This book has attracted an avalanche of criticism, some of it rabid, some of it deserved. Nevertheless, I predict that one day reasonable people will recognize that some sort of design must be at work. I assume that there is a scientific reason that the hemoglobin molecule formed itself, but event, so, I hardly thing that the mystery has been solved. After all, evolution itself, the fact that it exists as a universal principle, is pretty amazing and calls for some sort of explanation, even if it obviates the need for multiple interventions by the deity.
08/01/1992	History of Christianity	Johnson, Paul	02	2.3
07/01/1992	The Unauthorized Version	Fox, Robin Lane	02	One of the more interesting features of this critical work is the conclusion of an otherwise skeptical author that the Gospel of John may have been written much earlier than generally supposed, and that there are some indications that it was written by a first hand observer, or at least that a first hand observer may have orally transmitted such details to the author, for reasons that Fox explains.
06/01/1992	Transformation of Myth Through Time	Campbell, Joseph	02	What is the significance of the number 432?
07/01/1991	The Bible	Human beings, known and unknown, and variously inspired	02	Between 1991 and 1999, I read the Bible cover to cover at least four times. I read both the KJV, and the RSV twice. My favorite was the New  Oxford Annotated Bible, because of the footnotes, all of which I read twice.
01/01/1991	Among The Believers	Naipaul, V.S.	02	I have read several books by Naipaul. I will say this: his viewpoint and way of expressing himself if unique, truly out of the ordinary.
12/01/1990	Siddhartha	Hesse, Herman	02	3.2. Read for the second time..
	The Wonder that Was India	Basham, A.L.	02	A classic.
	All of the Don Juan books, except the last, by which time it was getting too ridiculous, and I was getting too old to continue farther down this path	Castaneda, Carlos	02	1.2.8. Pure fiction for sure, but a good read for a while, and he took in a lot of people.
	Moses	Daiches, David	02	2.3.4 Daiches is always good, and this book was no exception.
	The World of Ideas	Moyers, Bill	02
	The Iliad	Homer. Translated by Samuel Butler	02	8.2
	Judaism	Hertzberg, Arthur (Editor)	02
	Buddhism	Renou, Louis	02
	Hinduism	Renou, Louis	02
1/01/2010	aaa	aaa	03 History
11/01/03	The Historical Figure of Jesus	Sanders, E.P.	03	02.03 Quite good.
08/01/03	Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews, A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity	Fredriksen, Paula	03	02.03. I have no hesitancy in recommending this book.
11/01/03	Answer to Job	Jung, C. G.	03	02.06 Very interesting approach to the Book of Job. Myth is not fiction.
	Jews, God, and History	Dimont, Max L.	03	02.03. I read this years ago, but it impressed me enough to stick in the list anyway as being especially good.
04/30/2001	A History of God	Armstrong, Karen	03	02.03. I read this book three times between 1996 and 1999, twice thoroughly and once quickly. A typical page will list a half dozen names, at least, of people who I was not particularly familiar with, especially in the large sections that she devotes to Islamic culture and history, for which my Euro-centric education inadequately prepared me. In 2001, I decided to read it again, carefully. There is a lot of information in this book, and I got a lot more out of it this time. My opinion of Karen Armstrong has gone way up. I think she really knows what she is talking about. She was a frequent guest on Bill Moyers’ Genesis series, and I thought that the series was so superficial that for a while I think I let it taint in my mind everyone that participated in it. My one serious objection to Karen Armstrong is her repeated insistence that this or that passage from the Bible or the Vedas or the Bhagavad-Gita was never meant to be taken literally. That is a very different assertion from saying we ought not to take it literally. And is different from asserting that the original human author didn’t take it literally. It may be true that few seminarians and even fewer Rabbis believe that the Adam and Eve story or Noah’s Arc should be taken literally, but most people are first exposed to myths of this nature as children, and, speaking from experience, I don’t recall anyone going to great lengths to explain that they were allegories and not meant to be taken literally. That is something that you generally figure out for yourself as an adult. Moreover, it is also true that there are even some grown ups, (virtually all found in the Southeastern United States) who even today confuse biblical allegories with physical reality. Unlike Karen Armstrong, I think that there have always been a handful of people, admittedly not usually the most highly educated, who not only take these myths literally, but transmit them with the expectation that they will be so taken by their hearers. Did the Greeks believe Homer’s stories literally or not? Did any of them think they described actual events? How many? I don’t think Karen Armstrong knows. I would really like to know the answer to that question. A guess won’t do. I would like to see the issue argued, evidence presented, etc.
09/01/2001	Saint Augustine	Wills, Gary	03	02.03.04.
05/03/03	A Passage Through Pakistan	Linck, Orville	03	03.05.16 This book was written by my friend Dr. Linck, who was a Fulbright Professor (lecturer). Anyone who is interested in Pakistan today, ought to read this book, about Pakistan 50 years ago, not long after its independence from Britain.
006/01/04	Mapping Human History, Genes, Race and Our Common Origin		03	03.07. Great! See The Journey of Man, Mapping Human History, and The Seven Daughters of Eve.
0707/01/04	The Journey of Man	Wells, Spencer	03	03.07. Traces the history of the X-chromosome. Hence, the title. See Mapping Human History, Human Natures and The Seven Daughters of Eve.
0507/01/04	Human Natures	Ehrlich, Paul R.	03	03.07. See Mapping Human History, The Journey of Man and The Seven Daughters of Eve.
0407/01/04	The Seven Daughters of Eve, The Science that Reveals our Genetic Ancestry	Sykes, Bryan	03	03.07. I love stuff like this, and I loved this book. It is one of the best on the subject. See Mapping Human History, The Journey of Man and Human Natures.
08/01/2001	The Lost Heart of Central Asia	Thubron, Colin	03	03.16. This book, like A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, by Eric Newby, was read by me shortly before the 9/11 incident, which turned out to be an interesting coincidence. The author traveled through all of the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, and recorded his experiences, which were interesting, even if not profound..
07/01/2001	A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush	Newby, Eric Evelyn Waugh (Preface)	03	03.16. I need a new category for travel. I’ll use 16. As I think on it, the travel journal is a genre of its own, of which this book is a good example. Of the books I have recently read in this genre, Rebecca West, V.S. Naipal and Colin Tubrin all come immediately to mind. This book, like The Lost Heart of Asia, by Colin Thubron was read by me shortly before the 9/11 incident, which turned out to be an interesting coincidence. Newby is really quite funny. He is a typical Englishman, oddly at home anywhere in the world, without fitting in at all.. The introduction by Evelyn Waugh says it all.
03/31/03	An Autumn of War-What America Learned From September 11 the War on Terrorism	Hanson, Victor Davis	03	03. Vic Hansen is great to hear in person. He is very articulate and very persuasive. I currently have two more books by him on my shelf that have come highly recommended:  Carnage and Culture, and The Western Way of War. I have every expectation that those books will be worth reading; but the diatribe that makes up the book under discussion was little more than a ceaseless and very boring drum beat repeating a single theme endlessly and not very persuasively, in favor of war, in general. This tattoo wore out my patience. I went to the index to see how many time Thucydides was cited, but as there was no index I cannot say for sure, but I am guessing that Thucydides had something relevant to say on the subject every three pages on average. If you want to find good reasons for the War in Iraq and Afghanistan, I recommend you read Christopher Hitchens, and listen to Vic Hanson, but I do not recommend that you read this book. Speaking of the war. I have no objection in principle to intervention for the purposes of liberating people from oppression, or to protect ourselves, if we have very strong reasons for concluding that these purposes will be realized. I do have misgivings about the ability of the government to make reasoned judgments in these matters or to arrive at the correct answer to the questions posed, given history’s abysmal record in such matters. There is first, always the law of unintended consequences to consider. Second, one should presumptively doubt that the government’s motives, and mine as just expressed, coincide. If there is anything I am not, it is an ideologue; but I do want the world to be better place, above all else. This requires knowing, or at least having a reasonably sound notion of, what a better place is. Second it requires knowing how best to achieve that objective. Neither question should be treated flippantly, so I am not a knee –jerk anti-war activist, but neither am I all that confident that the course the United States has been embarking on is the best one. I have to confess that I am glad, in hindsight, that the Kosovars have not been expelled from the land on which they have been living for half a millennium or more; that Bosnia is not part of a greater fascist Serbia; that the Taliban is no longer in power; that the Kurds are not being oppressed; that Kuwait is not part of Iraq; and that Saddam is not in power. Would that be the case if the more radical of the peace activists had had there way? Probably not. Were there any other ways to achieve the ends achieved other than the use of force? I don’t know. I can’t think of any, but that does not mean that were none; nor does it mean that we acted or are acting perfectly. Of course the U.S. government did not and is not acting perfectly. No government ever does, even in theory. I can only hope that people like you and I share as a common objective that our behavior should, ideally and with full appreciation of our limitations, be directed toward the end of producing a better world for all (whatever “better” means). I have concluded, reluctantly and tentatively, that doing nothing (or never using force to stop evil) will not necessarily further that goal. I say “not necessarily” because I am still open to the idea that radical pacifism may do less damage in the long run than resorting to violence; it is just that for now I am unpersuaded that it will. For now, I am of the opinion that radical pacifism —of the sort that could sit by and not do anything violent to prevent the situation in Germany from getting out of hand in the 1930s; or, had it been feasible (which perhaps it was not), would have allowed Stalin and Mao from killing the millions and millions of innocent peasants that died at their hands, clearly unnecessarily— may simply not be the best option for lessening overall suffering, in the absurd Dosadi Experiment into which we have apparently been born. All we can do, is to do our best, through dialog and reasoned discourse, to figure out how best to achieve the objective of realizing a better word, with the least risk of having our good intentions backfire. This is best done, in my opinion, by not adhering too inflexibly to preconceived ideologies that say that all war is bad; or, as in Vic Hansen’s case, implying and suggesting too strongly that war is virtually always necessary and unavoidable.
03/01/03	Rule by Secrecy	Marrs, Jim	03	03. I have been dreading listing this book here, because I have much to say about it, some of it actually good, which is the problem, because much of it is very bad. My 16 predetermined categories are insufficient. Yes., it belongs in the History category, but I need new categories for delusional not very well documented history, with a subcategory for paranoid conspiracy histories. Where do I begin. I am going to resist the temptation to write at length about this book, but that is what it would take to do it (in)justice. There is much in the book that you are unlikely to find elsewhere, and for that reason I do not condemn it outright; and in fact, I have to admit that I learned a lot. Knowing what I know, I am able to say that there is much in here (about the Knights Templars, for example) that is well documented in history. Just as I was thinking that what I was reading was the type of thing that appealed to the people to whom The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was directed, I was pleased to find a very thorough debunking of that old anti-Semitic tract. Well good for him. I appreciated that. Nevertheless, this book exploits our worst fears (i.e., that groups to which we do not belong are secretly controlling the world of finance and politics to our prejudice in distant board rooms and other dark places) in precisely the same manner that the authors of such utter nonsense as The Protocols used to drum up an irrational hatred of all that their uneducated and unthoughtful readers were fearful. Therefore, I had a strong visceral reaction against this book, which was confirmed by the time that I got to the last chapter. This is at once the type of book that would appeal to the people who bring pyramids on chains to the grocery store to swing over vegetable in order to judge their freshness, the people who have either been abducted by extra-terrestrials themselves, or who are sure that their neighbors are. And yet, there was much in the book that is probably true and that you will not find written about in your average academic history, in some cases for the very reasons I mentioned above. Sometimes those reasons are good, and sometimes they are inadequate; but the failure to discuss more intelligently the facts and issues treated in Rule by Secrecy may be one reason why this type of book unfortunately has a market, and why, in the last analysis, I am glad I read it.
01/01/2003	From Dawn to Decadence- 1500 to the Present 500 Years of Western Cultural Life	Barzun, Jacques	03	03. An above average 500 year history of Western Culture presented in 850 pages, written by someone almost that old. Jacques Barzun certainly knows his stuff. There is something worthwhile in his observations, even if they do occasionally border on the reactionary. This book is like reading a compendium of the last two-third’s of Will and Ariel Durant’s 11-Volume, 10,000 page Story of Civilization (which I have done by the way). I knew that Barzun was somewhat of a curmudgeon when he began on page xiv of the Prologue by grousing about changes in language usage, focusing his attention for a page and a half on the current abuse of the word “culture,” as modernly found in phrases such as “teenage culture,” “popular culture,” and in The New York Times, where, for example, the bus culture is distinguished from the culture of plane travel. Other all but horrible usage transgressions include references to the police culture, ethnic cultures, the culture of the humanities as contrasted with the culture of science, the culture of a city’s police department, etc. After  inveighing at length against this usage, he concludes that there are other good words to use instead of culture to describe all of these things. Well, that is just the point. Language and usage change when there are no other good words. Barzun suggests ethos, which he considers narrower than culture. Substitute the worth “ethos” in each of the examples given, and see if that sounds like a more appropriate usage to you: ethnic ethos, police ethos, bus ethos versus plan ethos. I am not so much weighing in on this issue, since I don’t really care deeply about such things. Instead I mention it as an insight into the author’s ethos, which is, at time, a bit stodgy.
09/01/2001	The History of Hitler’s Empire	Childers, Thomas University of Pennsylvania	03	03. This was a series of eight 30-45 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company.  Charlotte and I listed to these on our trip through Colorado.
10/01/2001	Medieval Europe: Crisis and Renewal	Ruiz, Teofilo UC Las Anegeles	03	03. This was a series of sixteen 30-45 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company. There was an emphasis on the history of medieval Iberia which is often lacking in English texts.
11/01/2001	The History of the Twentieth Century, Vol. 2, 1934-1951	Gilbert, Martin	03	03. Wonderful! For some reason I thought that Gilbert’s treatment of the subject matter was much more cogent than in the first volume. I am not sure that I am right about this. These are very lengthy volumes, running about 1000 pages apiece, and I am not really qualified to critique them. Nonetheless, I came away from the second volume very impressed.
12/01/2001	The History of the English Language	Lerer, Seth— Stanford	03	03.12. This was a series of thirty-six 30-45 minute audio lectures presented by The Teaching Company. I am not quite through with this lecture series, but already I cannot say enough good about it. This is by far the best in the series that I have yet listened to.
05/31/2003	In the Wake of the Plague- The Black Death & the World it Made	Cantor, Norman F.	03	03. A good read, I guess. It will take you about one long afternoon to get through it, because it does not have much meat. I had expected more from the author of The Civilization of the Middle Ages. You won’t learn much about the plague in this book. It is pleasure reading, full of counter-factual speculations, such as what if Thomas Bradwardine —an Oxford academic, sympathetic to, but not a member of the Order of Franciscans (who inclined toward Augustine, as opposed to the Dominicans who favored Aristotle)—, had not died of the plague in 1349 on his way to being consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury, after having his appointment approved by the Avignon Pope Clement VI, and the English King Edward III, who, as you know, fought and won the Battle of Crecy in 1347, winning in much the same fashion as Henry V of England would do at Agincourt in 1415. Actually, that whole bit was quite interesting, come to think of it, particularly if you are familiar with the ecclesiastical history of the Dominican/Franciscan controversy, in which Thomas Aquinas came out the victor. But this was not a scholarly history of the plague. It was just an exceptionally good read. For a scholarly history of the plague, and the effect of diseases on history in general, read Plagues and Peoples by the always first rate William McNeil; or Black Death, by Philip Ziegler; or, The Black Death, Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe, by Robert S. Gottfried.
	The Story of Civilization Vol. 01 Our Oriental Heritage	Durant, Will & Ariel	03	03.
04/16/2003	The Story of Civilization Vol. 02 The Life of Greece	Durant, Will & Ariel	03	03.
02/16/2003s	The Story of Civilization Vol. 03 Caesar and Christ	Durant, Will & Ariel	03	03.
09/01/2000	The Story of Civilization Vol. 04 The Age of Faith	Durant, Will & Ariel	03	03.
04/01/2000	The Story of Civilization Vol. 05 The Renaissan