Nonfiction November-- Week 3: Be/Ask/Become the Expert

Week 3: (Nov. 16 to 20) – Be The Expert/Ask the Expert/Become the Expert (Rennie of What’s Nonfiction): Three ways to join in this week! You can either share 3 or more books on a single topic that you have read and can recommend (be the expert), you can put the call out for good nonfiction on a specific topic that you have been dying to read (ask the expert), or you can create your own list of books on a topic that you’d like to read (become the expert) 

I'm going to use a mix of all three this week. My friend and I have been reading philosophy books together for a few years now. I've been learning a lot about Western philosophical origins, specific philosophers and their philosophies, and even ones on whole movements and the philosophers involved. I'll share a few that are on my list and hope you share any books you've read that fit the topic!

For an interesting and somewhat entertaining overview of Western philosophy I highly recommend The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance by Anthony Gottlieb. Gottlieb really dives into the ancient Greeks and how their ideas were syncretized and adopted by Christian thinkers. It was quite an eye-opener to see how the threads connected. I highly enjoyed this one.

For individual philosophers and their movements/philosophies I can't recommend enough Sarah Bakewell. I'm in the process of reading At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, which is all about Existentialism and its philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl. She blends history and thought and biography seamlessly.

Her book on Montaigne is also quite good How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. You truly get a sense of what France was like, how it affected Montaigne and his philosophy, which is pretty revolutionary. His essays are on the mundane and day-to-day. As one person's inner thoughts are important so are others and we can gleam humanity and what's like to be human from that.

Another fantastic book on a specific philosopher is Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. She goes into some history of the Spanish Inquisition and the displacement of Jews either outside of their jurisdiction or as conversos (forced Catholic conversion). So we end up getting the history of Spinoza and his Jewish community in Holland in the mid-1600s. Fantastic history and it was incredibly interesting about Spinoza and how his ideas changed so many things.

 

Anthony Gottlieb has another book The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy. My friend and I will probably read it after we're done with At the Existentialist Café. Since I enjoyed Rebecca Goldstein's book on Spinoza, I'd like to read her Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away. And due to my Existentialism reading I'd really like to pick Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Albert Camus' The Plague and The Stranger. And then there's Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith that looks fascinating.

There are so many more I'd like to get to but if anyone has any philosophy-type books they've read and really enjoyed, I'd love to hear them!