• _db
    3.6k
    I am most interested in hearing about philosophical or scientific works, but feel free to share your favorite cookbook too. I'll start:

    • Better Never To Have Been, David Benatar
    • The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul
    • The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
    • Essays and Aphorisms, Arthur Schopenhauer
    • The Birth and Death of Meaning, Ernest Becker
    • The True Believer, Eric Hoffer
    • The Divided Self, R. D. Laing
    • The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
  • Manuel
    4.1k
    In no specific order, omitting political stuff and obviously having some bias towards my present recollections, I'd say:

    Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee
    The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
    Real Materialism and Other Essays by Galen Strawson
    What Kind of Creatures Are We? by Noam Chomsky
    The Knowing Animal by Raymond Tallis
    Cosmosapiens by John Hands
    Novel Explosives by Jim Gauer
    V. by Thomas Pynchon
    Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of The World by Haruki Murikami
    A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
  • Ying
    397
    -"Outlines of Pyrrhonism" by Sextus Empiricus
    -"Phenomenology of Perception" by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
    -"Discipline and Punish" by Michel Foucault
    -"Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn
    -"Conjectures and Refutations" by Karl Popper
    -"Gestalt Psychology" by Wolfgang Kohler
    -"De Oratore" by Cicero
    -"I Ching" (Wilhelm translation)
    -"Zhuangzi"
    -"Liezi"

    Some other honorable mentions include: "Institutio Oratoria" by Quintilian, "Critique of Pure Reason" by Immanuel Kant, "Art of War" by Sunzi, "Hereditary Book on the Art of War" by Yagyu Munenori, "Book of Five Rings" by Miyamoto Musashi, "The Unfettered Mind" by Takuan Soho, "Daodejing", "Huahujing", "Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint" by Franz Brentano, "Psychological Types" by CG Jung, "Laboratory Life" by Latour and Woolgar, "Die Weisheit der Hunde" by Georg Luck (collection of most if not all fragments from the cynics), "The Ego and His Own" by Max Stirner, "One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse ...
  • schopenhauer1
    10.9k

    I'm liking the Schopenhauer :up: .. And Benatar ain't bad either, darth.
  • Foghorn
    331
    One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

    Jiddu Krishnamurti

    but mostly....

    San Felasco State Park - that is, the real world.
  • jgill
    3.8k
    Introduction to Topology and Modern Analysis by George F. Simmons (1963)
  • Snakes Alive
    743
    The World as Will and Presentation – Arthur Schopenhauer
    Outlines of Pyrrhonism – Sextus Empiricus
    Ficciones – Jorge Luis Borges
    The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man – Robert Price
  • Gladiator of Truth
    8
    Two novels, offhand:

    • The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
    • Hold Back This Day - Ward Kendall
  • T Clark
    13.9k
    Hold Back This Day - Ward KendallGladiator of Truth

    I hadn't heard of Hold Back This Day, so I looked it up. Most of the reviews I found are in white nationalist publications/websites. You won't find much sympathy for those views here on the forum. Most people who follow that path quit or are banned pretty quickly.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    Probably the most 'landmark' books for me:

    William Connolly - Identity\Difference
    Slavoj Zizek - The Sublime Object of Ideology
    Maurice Merleau-Ponty - Phenomenology of Perception
    Gilles Deleuze - Difference and Repetition
    Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations
    Hannah Arendt - The Human Condition
    Ellen Meiksins Wood - The Origin of Capitalism
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    My mind draws a complete blank. Either I've forgotten all that I've read (Alzheimer's :sad: ) or never read any (Moron :sad:) or I read but couldn't understand a damn word (Voynich manuscripit, Rohonc codex :sad: ) or the book was blank from cover to cover (A Record Of The Statesmanship And Political Achievements Of Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, Regular Democratic Nominee For President Of The United States (1880) :sad: ).

    Didn't realize there were so many ways to fuck up! There's more than one way to skin a cat - many was of becoming the (village) Idiot (Dostoevsky. I recall borrowing that book, maybe I have it on a shelf somewhere, never got around to flipping through it though).
  • 180 Proof
    15.3k
    Which books have had the most profound impact on you?

    "Iyyôbh" & "Qōheleth" (Tanahk)
    Ping fa, Sunzi
    De rerum natura, Lucretius
    Outlines of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus
    Ethics, Benedictus de Spinoza
    Friedrich Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann transl.)
    Beyond Good and Evil
    On the Genealogy of Morals
    Twilight of the Idols
    The Conquest of Bread, Pyotr Kropotkin
    The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois
    "The Last Messiah" (essay), Peter Wessel Zapffe
    Ludwig Wittgenstein
    Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    On Certainty
    I and Thou, Martin Buber
    The Rebel, Albert Camus
    Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
    Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt
    Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas
    Oeuvre of George Steiner
    Gnostic Religion, Hans Jonas
    Oeuvre of E.M. Cioran
    From Being to Becoming, Ilya Prigogine
    Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, O. Patterson
    Albert Murray
    The Omni-Americans
    The Hero and the Blues
    Stomping the Blues
    James Baldwin
    Notes of a Native Son
    Nobody Knows My Name
    The Fire Next Time
    No Name in the Street
    Why We Can't Wait, Martin Luther King, Jr.
    God in Search of Man, Abraham Heschel
    The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels
    Dreamtime, Hans Peter Duerr
    Dao De Jing, Roger Ames, David Hall & Laozi
    Critique of Cynical Reason, Peter Sloterdijk
    Natural Goodness, Philippa Foot
    The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch
    The Fragility of Goodness, Martha Nussbaum
    Oeuvre of Carl Sagan
    Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot
    Joyful Cruelty, Clément Rosset
    Being No One, Thomas Metzinger
    "Three Pound Brain" (blog), R. Scott Bakker
    God: The Failed Hypothesis, Victor J. Stenger
    After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux

    (short list)
  • Iris0
    112
    Cant say - have at this stage in life an entire library inside and I am not the librarian --- sadly. So to know exactly within my notions and to know which one of the thousands and thousands I have read within science, philosophy, psychology, novels and straight garbage - I do simply not know.

    Because "profound impact" requires that you also know how this particular book changed you, altered your behavior and you person and in what way.
    I would say that I was very very impressed by the books of Kant - all of them. The one that I read first: the first Critique was difficult due to the language he uses and thus understanding the concepts - but then when I had a grasp of it - I did not find the other all that difficult. What impressed me is the diligence that man had in explaining, thus the vast knowledge he possessed and the insights and the ability to explain this thoughts in a stringent and coherent manner.

    I know - that reading his books sort of put my own neurons in "order" --- and that reading him helped me understand a lot that I did not know before I read his books - but I also held a critical approach to what he wrote and thus I read books of Jung and others in order to verify or find flaws - like Freges books that do refute some thoughts in Prolegomena (thus the first Critique ...) but...
    Still...
    Deep impact?
    How am I to do "soul search" within that? I know that all I have lived, all I have read, and all that I have picked up and "put into my own rucksack" has formed me - but what particular part gave me more than others?
    Maybe the books of HC Andersen, the brothers Grimm and the narratives (children's version) of Thousand and one night - when I was preschool - impact me in my core?
    Who knows... no idea...

    I started readin before school and never stopped and have been a reader of - all that I found interesting and were I could learn something about humans and life.
  • bert1
    2k
    Mental Capacity Act 2005 - UK legislation
    Waterland - Graham Swift
    Contributions form a Potential Corpse - Eugene Halliday
    Article 12 of the UNCRPD (and General Comment 1)
    The Once and Future King - T. H. White
    Defence of the Devil - Eugene Halliday
    The Silmarillion - Tolkien
    Loud Hands - collection of autistic writing
    The Jungle Books - Kipling
    The Marriage of Heaven and Hell - Blake
    The Grey King - Susan Cooper
    The Farseer Trilogy - Robin Hobb (and all the books set in that world)

    Most of these affected me profoundly both emotionally and intellectually.
  • counterpunch
    1.6k
    The Magpie Annual 1974.
    The Littlewoods catalogue lingerie section.
    TV guide.
    The Bible.
    Pear's Cyclopedia.
    Dune - Frank Herbert.
    Energy for Survival - Wilson Clark.
    Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Daniel Dennett.
    A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking.
  • _db
    3.6k
    "The Last Messiah", Peter Wessel Zapffe180 Proof

    Not quite a book, but certainly a profound read.
  • _db
    3.6k
    Dune - Frank Herbert.counterpunch

    Agreed, what a great book.
  • _db
    3.6k


    That's three people who have said Outlines of Pyrrhonism. I have it on my shelf, but I have not read it yet. I'll have to read it soon.
  • _db
    3.6k
    I figured you'd appreciate the schop, he's pretty dope
  • counterpunch
    1.6k
    Dune - Frank Herbert.
    — counterpunch

    Agreed, what a great book.darthbarracuda

    TV guide is pretty good too - but I find you have to stay current!
  • 180 Proof
    15.3k
    I included that essay and the two "books" from the Hebrew Bible thinking more broadly of "philosophical readings" than mere books. I couldn't be bothered with also adding fiction, poetry, works of science, histories and fuck all to my list which is long enough as is.
  • Shawn
    13.2k
    Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus
    Enchiridion
    Meditations
    Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
  • Albero
    169
    The Lord of the Rings-JRR Tolkien
    The Silmarillion-JRR Tolkien
    Dune-Frank Herbert
    The Ethics-Spinoza
    The World and Will as Representation-Schopenhauer
    Beyond Good and Evil-Nietzsche
    Enchiridion-Epictetus
    The Tao Te Ching-Lao Tzu
    Nietzsche and Philosophy-Gilles Deleuze
  • Cuthbert
    1.1k
    According to my parents, it was the only book that would get me to sleep. The profound impact was that I was not put up for adoption, I suppose.

    md30694998038.jpg
  • fdrake
    6.6k
    -"Conjectures and Refutations" by Karl PopperYing

    That one is delicious.

    The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis

    (Screwtape is a devil instructing his nephew Wormwood on how best to turn humans away from God)

    It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very “spiritual”, that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism. Two advantages will follow. In the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards as her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself. Thus you can keep rubbing the wounds of the day a little sorer even while he is on his knees; the operation is not at all difficult and you will find it very entertaining. In the second place, since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother—the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table. In time, you may get the cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling from his prayers for the imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one. I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment’s notice from impassioned prayer for a wife’s or son’s “soul” to beating or insulting the real wife or son without a qualm.
  • Thinking
    152
    All of the Ringing Cedars of Russia books
    Tao Te Ching
    One straw revolution
    Tales from the night rainbow
    Dantes divine comedy
    The kin of Ata
    the hobbit
  • CountVictorClimacusIII
    63
    Which books have had the most profound impact on you?

    In no particular order:

    The Sickness Unto Death - Søren Kierkegaard
    Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
    The Will to Power - Friedrich Nietzsche
    Paradise Lost - John Milton
    The Conquest of Gaul - Julius Caesar
    Perdido Street Station - China Miéville
    A Brightness Long Ago - Guy Gavriel Kay
  • Noble Dust
    7.9k
    The Meaning Of The Creative Act - Nikolai Berdyaev
    The I Ching
    The Witch - David Lindsay
    The Master and Margarita - Mikail Bulgakov
  • Benkei
    7.7k
    The way of Man - Martin Buber (ended up being a self-help book for me trying to be a better person)
    Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (my first English book, so it taught me to read English and sparked my love for fantasy and sci-fi)
    The Law - I try not to break it, I work with laws when monitoring compliance, for product development and writing contracts
    The Republic - Plato (my first philosophical text, created a friendship with my professor and got me interested in philosophy)
  • Wayfarer
    22.5k
    In no particular order and off the top of my head:

    The Magus - John Fowles
    The First and Last Freedom - Krishnamurti
    Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintainance - Robert Pirsig
    1984 - George Orwell
    Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind - Shunryu Suzuki
    The Central Philosophy of Buddhism - T.R.V. Murti.
  • Mww
    4.9k
    How can a singular superlative be a list?
bold
italic
underline
strike
code
quote
ulist
image
url
mention
reveal
youtube
tweet
Add a Comment

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.