Reading List

A profoundly moving memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question: What makes a life worth living? At thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles his transformation from doctor treating the dying to patient struggling to live, wrestling with what makes life worth living in the face of death.

Nietzsche called The Gay Science "the most personal of all my books." It was here that he first proclaimed the death of God and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence.

Putnam deals with fundamental persistent problems in philosophy: the nature of truth, knowledge and rationality. His aim is to break down the fixed categories of thought which have always appeared to define and constrain the permissible solutions to these problems.

Since Socrates, the problems of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy. Today the idea of 'first-person authority'—the claim of a distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental life—has been challenged from a number of directions.

The essays in this collection deal with the way in which we know our own minds. Professor Shoemaker opposes the "inner sense" conception of introspective self-knowledge. Among the topics covered are the unity of consciousness and qualia.

One of the top ten books of the year at The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, Vulture/New York magazine. The acclaimed, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a groundbreaking exploration of mental illness and the mind.

A bold book revealing how we can tap the intelligence that exists beyond our brains—in our bodies, our surroundings, and our relationships. A growing body of research indicates we need to think outside the brain.

Plato's most significant work, expressing the political, ethical and societal framework for the nature of justice and human organization. Much of traditional Western thought began here.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024. A singular novel offering an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours.

Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, Wuthnow brings us into America's small towns to understand what is fueling rural America's outrage toward the federal government and the growing rural-urban divide.

The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other nation. This book offers a novel, in-the-trenches perspective to explain the factors—historical, political, and institutional—that led to the current system of mass imprisonment.

A foundational text in Western philosophy. Descartes's radical skepticism and reconstruction of knowledge from first principles. Essential reading for understanding epistemology and the mind-body problem.

Written over the last 18 months of Wittgenstein's life and inspired by his interest in G. E. Moore's defense of common sense. Collects Wittgenstein's reflections on knowledge and certainty, on what it is to know a proposition for sure.

A very nice book!

New York Times Bestseller. One of today's most insightful and influential thinkers offers a powerful exploration of inequality and the lesson that generations of Americans have failed to learn: Racism has a cost for everyone—not just for people of color.

If you're a dinosaur, all of your friends are dead. If you're a pirate, all of your friends have scurvy. If you're a tree, all of your friends are end tables. Each page of this laugh-out-loud illustrated humor book showcases the downside of being everything from a clown to a cassette tape to a zombie. Cute and dark all at once, this hilarious children's book for adults teaches valuable lessons about life.

From the authors of the breakout best seller All my friends are dead (more than 100,000 copies sold) comes a brand-new illustrated compendium of the humorous existential ruminations of people, animals, legendary monsters, and inanimate objects.

The Book of Mormon- Another Testament of Jesus Christ (2014 Print)

You can get happier. And getting there will be the adventure of your lifetime. In Build the Life You Want, Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey invite you to begin a journey toward greater happiness no matter how challenging your circumstances. Drawing on cutting-edge science and their years of helping people translate ideas into action, they show you how to improve your life right now instead of waiting for the outside world to change.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America.

"Brilliant...as audacious as its title." A full-scale exploration of human consciousness. Dennett refutes the traditional, commonsense theory of consciousness and presents a new model, based on a wealth of information from neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence.

From the wildly popular Instagram account, Disappointing Affirmations hilariously counters the culture of relentless toxic positivity with a realistic take on a disappointing world where failure is always an option, but that's okay. Pairing lovely vacation photos taken by the author himself with sayings that are amusingly self-critical, encouraging, disillusioned, or all three at once.

Data is fundamental to the modern world. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias.

Written by a veteran of web development, this book focuses on the substance without hype or buzzwords. Walks through the key building blocks of agents: providers, models, prompts, tools, memory and how to break down complex tasks with agentic workflows.