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Parfit and the Philosophical Life
Reasons and Persons may be the most extraordinary book I have ever read. Yet the why behind that statement isn’t easy to articulate. It isn’t the best book of philosophy I’ve read. It’s an important and influential book, but not on the level of something like A Theory of Justice. It’s a grind to read.…
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A Year in Books – Readings From the Last Year
A year covers a lot of books when you’re an avid reader. Old favorites, too much sci-fi, a few Great Courses on audio, and some truly great books. Here’s everything I read with quick notes, highlights and links to the ones that got written about in detail.
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Exhalation: Transformative Experience and AI
Ted Chiang’s Exhalation is one of the best collections of short science fiction that you can find. It also happens to have several stories directly concerned with transformative experience and decision-making. That’s unusual. Most short science fiction stories are idea driven. They take a concept and run with it. In Exhalation, for example, Chiang writes…
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A Daughter of the Samurai: A Memoir
Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto’s memoir from the early twentieth century lives inside one of the great cultural collisions of the modern era. It spans her girlhood in Japan living through the final collapse of the samurai tradition and the Western-mania that swept Japan to her arranged marriage and life in America. Much was lost and much…
We are not rational animals, we are animals that must work to be rational
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