philosophy authors

My friend Keith offers an interesting list of authors who have influenced him, oriented towards his field of philosophy.

A similar list for me must include Douglas Adams, for his comments on the nature of faith, which were particularly insightful to me as a believer even though he came at it from atheism). Adams always comes up when I’m talking about philosophical questions, on this blog anyway.

Cognition is more complicated than IQ.
Cognition is more complicated than IQ.

Also, 20 years later, Douglas Hoftstader still makes my list, more so for Metamagical Themas than G.E.B. The fundamental idea I took from this was that there are fundamental limits to Reason. Thanks to his writing, I eschew binary thinking about cognition, I believe there is no such thing as being “super-rational,” and 15 years ago I even setup a group blog experiment dedicated to this idea. A good discussion ensured here at Haibane about it, too. I credit the Hoft with also introducing me to Godel in general, and thinking about the implications for faith, a topic i have explored several times since.

The third book I need to mention here is Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue. He died before finishing it, but the incomplete story is published, thankfully. The entire idea of an asymptotic ideal is at the heart of my understanding of god (and the religious concept of jihad) and there is a strong component of Platonic thought embedded within. Alas, I no longer have a copy of this book, having lent both of mine away and forgotten to whom I lent them.

Let’s also give credit to Yoda – or rather, George Lucas, for the incredibly meaningful “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter” line. Such a simple message, but so powerful, and inheritor of a vast body of thought on its own.

More recently, I read (audiobooked) Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel; Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, and (heh) On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt. These count as philosophy for me because they try to answer the question of who we are and WHY we are. Next up on my list is On the Shortness of Life by Seneca, since generally compatible with the Stoicism worldview.

Ultimately though, philosophy is about the exploration of what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, what it means to BE. And as a genre, I have found more interesting explorations of these ideas in science fiction than I have in philosophy texts or authors. But that is a separate list entirely.