See this post for the beginning of the list, and the premise.
6. Upheavals of Thought - Martha Nussbaum
A thoughtful and emotional book arguing that emotions contain more thought than they're given credit for.
7. Descartes's Error - Antonio Damosio
Sort of the flipside of #6: rational thought requires emotions -- contrary to the traditional belief that reason and feelings are distinct mental faculties that "d[on't] mix any more than oil and water."
8. Ruling Passions - Simon Blackburn
Similarly, this would go very well with #6 and #7. The basic position is: ethics depends on emotions, yet this doesn't mean that ethical principles are "relative" or "subjective." There's also an intriguing tangent on the connection between aesthetics and ethics.
9. Is There a Duty to Obey the Law? - Christopher Heath Wellman & Alan John Simmons
Well? Is there?
10. Lifting the Fog of Legalese - Joseph Kimble
Trying to send "null and void" into the void.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
My reading list, part 2
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3 comments:
As the man says:
Although I do not mean to assert that it is usually the practice of renowned and learned sages, to shorten the road to any great conclusion (their course indeed being rather to lengthen the distance, by various circumlocutions and discursive staggerings, like unto those in which drunken men under the pressure of a too mighty flow of ideas, are prone to indulge) ; still, I do mean to say, and do say distinctly, that it is the invariable practice of many mighty philosophers, in carrying out their theories, to evince great wisdom and foresight in providing against every possible contingency which can be supposed at all likely to affect themselves.
It seems as if your list contains titles meant to publicly flatter yourself, and put forth a certain type of image.
But, what if your 'to-read' list contained some truly vile, compromising, and disreputable selections... Would you have the nerve to reveal that in a blogpost ?
JAC said...
"Is There a Duty to Obey the Law? - Christopher Heath Wellman & Alan John Simmons
Well? Is there?"
That's certainly what the legal process school contended. They said that "human societies are made up of human beings striving to satisfy their respective wants" -- rationally acting to maximize their satisfactions, to couch the same point in another approach's argot -- "under conditions of interdependence.... [T]his common enterprise inevitably generates questions of common concern which have to be settled, one way or another, if the enterprise is to maintain itself and continue to serve the purposes which it exists to serve. To leave decision of these questions to the play of raw force would defeat these purposes. The alternative to disintegrating resort to violence is the establishment of regularized and peaceable methods of decision. The principle of institutional settlement expresses the judgment that decisions which are the duly arrived at result of duly established procedures of this kind ought to be accepted as binding on the whole society unless and until they are duly changed." Hart & Sacks, The Legal Process 4 (Eskridge & Frickey, eds. 1994) (emphasis added).
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