Catalogue of things that I’ve loved or have influenced me; updated when I’m procrastinating
Bernard Williams — Moral Luck and Problems of the Self (collection of papers)
[I especially love The Makropulos case and Deciding to believe; on the former see also Immortality and Boredom]Iris Murdoch — The sovereignty of good
especially the first chapter ‘The Idea of Perfection’ [here]
“If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over… the exercise of our freedom is a small piecemeal business which goes on all the time and not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments.”Jon Elster — Sour grapes – utilitarianism and the genesis of wants
[from Utilitarianism and Beyond, a wonderful collection of econ + phil essays edited by Bernard Williams and Sen]John Broome — Weighing goods: equality, uncertainty, and time
[Ethics out of Economics is also wonderful]Amia Srinivasan — Genealogy, epistemology and worldmaking
WG Sebald — The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo
Dov Monderer & Dov Samet — Approximating Common Knowledge with Common Beliefs
[also Shin — Logical Structure of Common Knowledge]Benjamín Labatut — When We Cease to Understand the World
Partha Dasgupta — Time and the generations: population ethics for a diminishing planet
Andrew Miller — On Not Being Someone Else
[lovely essay by Joshua Rothman [here] !]Iris Murdoch — Against Dryness
“Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like" facility; whereas what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being; it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that moral progress takes place… We need a new vocabulary of attention.”Simone Weil — Gravity and Grace
Derek Parfit — Reasons and Persons (especially parts 3 & 4!)
[also David Lewis — Survival and Identity]Mark Grief — Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop
Clark and Chalmers — The Extended Mind
Samuel Scheffler — Death and the Afterlife
[this influenced me enormously in college!]Chris Marker — Sans Soliel
James Salter — Lights Years
Robert Aumann — Correlated Equilibrium as an Expression of Bayesian Rationality
Susan Sontag — On Photography
David Lewis — Attitudes De Dicto and De Se
Deleuze and Guattari — Anti-Oedipus
Legg and Hutter — Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence
Anuk Arudpragasam — A Passage North
Martin Weitzman — Gamma Discounting
[also Why the far-distant future should be discounted at its lowest possible rate]Virginia Woolf — To the Lighthouse & The Waves
Adam Elga — Self-locating belief and the Sleeping Beauty problem
[also Piccione and Rubinstein — On the interpretation of decision problems with imperfect recall & Elga — Defeating Dr. Evil with self-locating belief]John Berger — And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Fudenberg and Levine — Self-confirming Equilibrium
Italo Calvano — Invisible Cities
Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis — We can’t disagree forever
D McCloskey — The Rhetoric of Economics
Martin Weitzman — Prices vs Quantities
[one of the greatest economists of all time!!!]Scanlon — What We Owe to Each Other
[also Contractualism and Utilitarianism in the Sen/Williams volume]Solvej Belle — On the Calculation of Volume I
Dov Samet — Iterated Expectations and Common Priors
Arif Ahmed — Evidence, decision and causality
[also Rationality and Future Discounting]David Lewis — Prisoners' Dilemma Is a Newcomb Problem
Kawabata — Beauty and Sadness
LA Paul — Transformative Experience
[also Are Desires Interdependent? and Richard Pettigrew — Choosing for Changing Selves]Elizabeth Anderson — What is the Point of Equality?
TS Eliot — The Cocktail Party and Four Quartets