Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt
Published in 1958, “The Human Condition” is Hannah Arendt’s take on how “human activities” should be and have been understood throughout Western history. Arendt is interested in the vita activa (active life) as contrasted with the vita contemplativa (contemplative life) and concerned that the debate over the relative status of the two has blinded us to important insights about…
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Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
The Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle’s best-known work on ethics, the science of the good for human life, which is the goal or end at which all our actions aim.
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Tao Te Ching (Daodejing) by Lao Tzu
The “Tao Te Ching”, roughly translated into The Book of the Way and of Virtue, is a Chinese classic text written around 400 BC and traditionally credited to the sage Laozi. The text’s authorship, date of composition and date of compilation are still debated. It is a fundamental text for both philosophical and religious Taoism and…
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I Am Because We Are by Fred L. Hord
I Am Because We Are has been recognized as a major, canon-defining anthology and adopted as a text in a wide variety of college and university courses. Rene Descartes is often called the first modern philosopher, and his famous saying, “I think, therefore I am,” laid the groundwork for how we conceptualize our sense of…
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The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
“The Second Sex” is a 1949 book by the French existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. It is a hymn to human freedom and a classic of the existentialist movement. It also has claims to be the most important book in the history of feminism. One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. Simone de Beauvoir
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Naming and Necessity by Saul Kripke
Kripke’s most important philosophical publication, Naming and Necessity (1980), based on transcripts of three lectures he delivered at Princeton in 1970, changed the course of analytic philosophy. It provided the first cogent account of necessity and possibility as metaphysical concepts, and it distinguished both concepts from the epistemological notions of a posteriori knowledge and a priori knowledge (knowledge acquired through experience and knowledge independent of experience,…
Got any book recommendations?
