Reviews

Length: 6hrs Summary Written in 1767 ten years before America’s independence Rousseau give’s his version of the social contract theory. Social contract theory in a nutshell is that individuals give up certain rights to attain a higher level of security than they could have in a state of nature. Rosseau is probably most famous for his optimistic view of this “state of nature” in opposition to his predecessor Hobbes who described it as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. The focus of this book was on what types of governments make for the best quality of life when you are past the state of nature. As you probably guessed the answer is “it’s complicated”. He starts by attempting to demonstrate that even though governments and institutions are man-made and thus arbitrary they can have some legitimacy and should be followed excepting certain circumstances. Another difference from Hobbes is that he argues that the freedom that men give up in order to enter a social contract is returned with interest in the form of civil freedoms. So while the social contract removes natural liberty which gives unlimited ownership to what you can take by force, it replaces it with civil liberty in which ownership is decided via convention and enforced via an entire group. This is a neat trick we human’s played because unlike the rest of the animal kingdom we seem to like fighting to the death over the smallest things. In Rosseau’s view the social contract aims to equalize nature’s inequalities. He interestingly observes that almost all governments require a god in their formation as an anchor point that gives a leader authority initially, but after the government is well underway the authority of god can fade into obscurity. He then talks about different types of governments. An important distinction he makes is that between the sovereign and the legislature. Like church and state these two should be kept separate. To Rousseau the sovereign is every citizen in a state (or body politic, a new term to me, thanks Jacque) together that form this magical thing called the general will. The legislature on the other hand is the people, one or many that implement the general will. A legislature made of one would be a monarchy a legislature of many approaches a direct democracy. These two branches should be kept separate because if the sovereign (the people) attempt to implement particular things they lose their generality (general will poofs out of existence). This separation also allows for the sovereign to overthrow the legislature if it is not following the general will. He argues that smaller the state is the bigger the government should be, and the larger the state is the smaller the government should be. Because small governments are efficient and large governments are slow (think bureaucracy). He says that small states with big governments (like Geneva where he was living) allow freedom to flourish the most of any type of government. He argues (mistakenly as I think the following 200 years has shown) that states should be self-sufficient and not reliant on other countries for trade. ...

Written in 1903 the book opens with W.E.B Du Bois central thesis that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.” This book is a collection of essays that lays out Du Bois’ views on race relations. Poetically written and very moving at times. The essays cover a variety of topics ranging from black farmers in a post-civil war south, the death of his first child and his views on education. What is most surprising to me about reading this book is that although many of the things he fought for (i.e allowing black people in universities, general equal rights) have been accomplished many of his issues with race relation still remain unmoved. This is also interesting because in an early chapter he likened the bill of emancipation to a “promise land” or “second coming” for the black folk who had been waiting on it for so long. But when they got it, it didn’t solve the problem. They instead realized that the power to be free lied in being able to vote. So, then they pushed towards that goal. Achieving that and still finding themselves not free. It seems like you are only as “free” as everyone that is around you thinks. Du Bois describes his experience as living in a veil with whites on one side and blacks on the other. Himself having been able to go to university and having overcome the three temptations of a black life (hate, despair, and doubt) had given him a unique vantage point. He uses this point of view to write the book to in his words “Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses, the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls.” Overall, a very interesting, well written and balanced take on the current standing of the race problem in 1903 and still seems very relevant today. ...

This was a short story about a man who seemed to float through life mostly detached. You could almost say a stoic not by philosophy but by personality. Most things that attach people to this life didn’t seem to be there for him. A French man living in colonialized Algiers. Meursault is like Dostoevsky’s Idiot. He tells the truth, but instead of having a good heart, Meursault’s heart seems indifferent. Written by Albert Camus while Hitler occupied France, this book places the character in the most extreme of human situations. Meursault and the reader are forced to realize they are condemned to death and to try to find a way to enjoy the time they have in the face of absurdity and meaninglessness. I liked this book because just when you think you have a handle on it you remember a new detail that makes you look at it from a different angle. It is similar to no country for old men in that sense and in the fact that the ending leaves it up to the reader to write the conclusion. This book was not written from a place of answers, the character is just as clueless as the reader. That is valuable and leaves it open to many interpretations. Camus had this one sentence summary: ...

I put this on the list because I had heard that in this book there was a conversation between Socrates and Diotima about love. The book is set where a group of friends get together and throw a party for a friend that had won an award for a play that he had written. At this party they all decide that they should go around in a circle and give a speech praising the god Eros (God of love). So, they go around in a circle and each character gives their speeches. On the whole speeches were mostly unenlightening although they raised very interesting realizations about homosexual relationships between older men and younger “boys” (re: modern authors believe that they were all over the age of 18 of course crossed fingers). This side of the story I did not expect. Yet another time when history sneaks up on you from “behind”. One of the speeches contained a story about how in the beginning hermaphrodites were running around doing crazy stuff and the gods got mad and split them in half to make male and female. As a result, men and women roam the earth in search of their “other half”. Socrates’ speech was pretty interesting. i.e., Plato) makes the argument that love happens in stages. One first learns to love details about a specific person. Then realizes that these details exist in many people. They then begin to love many people. Then they begin to love the details in and of themselves abstracted from people. In this final stage if they are lucky, they will get a glimpse of beauty (the thing which they have desired all along) un-encumbered by humanity’s “fleshiness”. This fits in with Plato’s idea of a world of “Forms” pretty well. Where basically everything we see and interact with is an imperfect clone of something perfect that exists only in this world of forms. I.E the world in which a perfect triangle exists, which for now can only be accessed by thought. ...

Summary As was the fashion in 1759, Adam Smith endeavors to explain what we call right and wrong, as well as why we arrive at these conclusions. The cornerstone of his theory is based on the concept of sympathy. Smith posits that, just as humans are endowed with the sense of sight, they are also equipped with a sense of sympathy. The brief definition of sympathy is the ability for one human to “enter into” the experience of another. This “entering in” does not perfectly mirror the original experience, but critically, it is perceived through the lens of an impartial spectator. This impartiality forms the foundation of all morality. ...

Summary We are all familiar with the scientific method: observe, theorize, experiment, and repeat. This algorithm is humanity’s most effective tool for understanding the universe. However, Bill Hammack introduces readers to what he calls the “engineering method.” While it’s commonly believed that scientists create knowledge and engineers apply it, Hammack argues that this perspective greatly underestimates the engineer’s role in discovery. He asserts that engineers must be the ultimate pragmatists, unable to wait for perfect knowledge. Instead, they often operate by “rules of thumb” that push the boundaries of what is known. Hammack illustrates this through various examples, from the thickness of cathedral supports to the invention of the O-ring. Unlike scientists, engineers are constrained by cultural contexts, limited resources, and, most critically, the need to deliver solutions within time constraints. A compelling example is the ‘100-year wind’ concept, where engineers must design structures, such as skyscrapers, to withstand rare but severe events predicted to occur within the next century. The challenge is that we often lack a century’s worth of wind data for an area, forcing engineers to rely on modern “rules of thumb,” involving complex, yet pragmatic, statistical predictions based on limited or incomplete data. The crux of Hammack’s argument is that while a mathematician might balk at the imprecision of these methods, engineers must proceed not in a world of perfect knowledge, but in one driven by experiential understanding. Often, the only way to answer a question is to build the answer. ...

Another suggested book that I probably wouldn’t have stumbled across normaly. Provided a decent break from the last book I read. The three-body problem refers to the difficult mathematical problem of predicting the orbit of a 3-planet system. It turns out there are very few stable configurations of these, and predicting their orbit is difficult because of all the variables that go into their movement. This ambitious sci-fi book is the first of a trilogy. It starts in China during communist revolutions in the 70s and progresses to modern day where the fate of humanity is threatened by disenfranchised humans and a dispassionate race of advanced ETs whose home planet is about to be destroyed. The author seems to be very familiar with quantum physics, computer science and basic radio wave theory. This knowledge imbues the book with a believable “almost within reach feel”. Where you could imagine some of the inventions described being created in our lifetimes. All in all, very light reading but pretty entertaining.

This is about a guy named Joseph K. who wakes up one morning to find out that he is under arrest. But no one can tell him why. This is a very surrealist novel in which everything in the world seems to operate by complex systems that are hidden both to the character and the reader. One of the most interesting parts of the book is that it really gives you no one to relate to. Out of habit you initial attach your view to the main character, but the way in which he navigates the world quickly becomes somewhat alien and hard to understand. In its own way his actions are just as confusing as the court system’s. This book does a great job of making the reader uneasy and never sure of what will happen next as the connection between action and consequence is hard to decipher. I read this because of Camus’ recommendation, and I can see why he liked it as one could imagine the book ‘The Outsider’ as being a descendant of ‘The Trial’. The last words of Joseph K. “like a dog” have stuck in my head ever since. People/Franz Kafka Albert Camus

I had been meaning to read Wendell Berry for a while as he lives less than 30 minutes away. Without much research I chose ‘The Unsettling of America’ which is his critique of modern agricultural and its effects on society. Written in 1977 it seems like not much has changed. To me Wendell Berry sounds like a modern-day Jeremiah. It was really coincidental to have read Grapes of Wrath just prior to starting this book, as it deals with similar content. The central theme of the book is that modernity has up-ended the natural patterns and cycles and replaced them with destructive and exploitative practices. The book opens with: ...

Schopenhauer has been on my radar for a while because like Donald Trump, Schopenhauer was a Kantian. To better understand how Trump will complete German idealism, one must first wrestle with this great thinker. While some philosophers content themselves with attempting to explain a single concept Schopenhauer decides he would rather explain everything from magnets to women ☕. Combining Kant’s distinction between idea of a thing vs thing in itself (in short, your idea of a car is not the car) and Platonic Idea (there is a single tree in a realm of forms which all trees in our world are representations of) he comes up with his own spin on things stating that the world presents itself to our experience as individuations of a single thing. That thing is Will. So hypothetically the process could go something like this Will encounters a subject and gets objectified into a Platonic idea. This platonic idea then encounters space and time where it is objectified once more into a perception, like a tree for example. So, what exactly is Will? Will is actually very similar to the Buddhist concept of desire. This is no coincidence as Schopenhauer calls the translation of the Vedas one of the greatest gifts of the 19th century. Will can be considered the universal principle that animates the universe. A blind insatiable striving. One outcome of this is that everything that wills, suffers. And since everything that exists is a manifestation of will it means that everything suffers. This plants Schopenhauer squarely in the school of pessimists. To Schopenhauer life can be broken into two experiences. One is either striving after something or bored (read depressed). Schopenhauer would say that the happiness we feel when accomplishing a goal isn’t actually happiness it is merely the cessation of suffering that was caused by the desire. Once this desire is gone a new one almost instantaneously takes its place. He also has some interesting ideas about art that somewhat resonated specifically that good art lifts a person out of their subject-ness for brief periods of time. It opens them up to look at the world more universally. For example, you hear a sad song and can join in not with particular sadness, but sadness at a universal level. He ends the book by talking about ethics ...