Thinking of Necessity

Three Well-Tested Ways to Undermine an Autocrat

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How long would it take to read the greatest books of all time?

The Economist no paywall: “The Economistconsulted bibliophile data scientists to bring you the answer. precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short,” wrote Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher of the 19th century. People are living longer than they did in Schopenhauer’s day, but the number of books has increased by a much bigger factor. So his dictum ought to carry even more weight now than it did then. In issuing it, the famously pessimistic philosopher was uncharacteristically optimistic. 

He thought that readers could reliably discern which books deserved their time and which did not. That faith has waned. The idea of a literary canon has come under attack. Some readers would pry it open to admit more works by women and non-white authors; others would just sink it. 

Critics have lost cultural clout. The number of newspapers with book-review sections has dwindled. These days, it seems, everyone has their own personal canon. And yet the need for winnowing persists, so much so that book recommendations seem to be almost as popular as the books they suggest. Influencers on BookTok, a bookish corner of TikTok, a video app, have replaced the credentialled judges of yore. 

Thousands of readers rate and review books on Goodreads, a website with tens of millions of members. Rebind, an app that is now in a test version, will let readers of classic books use artificial intelligence to question experts about the texts. The Economist periodically publishes best-book lists, plus reviews and recommendations on specific subjects. Still, the number of texts that people are told they should read seems overwhelming. 

One way to prune is to see where best-book lists overlap, on the theory that books that appear most often must be really worth your while. That is what a website called thegreatestbooks.org has done. Its creator, Shane Sherman, a computer programmer in Texas, has used more than 300 lists to come up with a list of lists, which he calls, not entirely seriously, the “greatest books of all time” (GBOATs). 

It has more than 10,000 books, ranked by how often they appear on the constituent lists. You can search the top 500 below and sort them by decade or century of publication, year of publication, language and length.”

5 Podcasts That Revisit the Past Through Oral Histories

The New York Times – no paywall: “These compelling shows dig into momentous political and cultural moments through the voices of the people who were there. ‘Division Street Revisited’; ‘Fiasco: Iran-Contra’; ‘Making Gay History’; ‘Witness History’; ‘Cold War Conversations’.

“The ROL100® is a unique ranking that captures the ReturnOnLeadership® of the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500. ReturnOnLeadership® (ROL®) is a solution that gathers and measures thousands of data points that together reflect leadership value creation. Built to diminish risk and increase success, ROL® assesses and quantifies four fundamentals of leadership execution. The ROL100® Ranking has been released annually in conjunction with the publication of the Fortune 500 since 2021. [Amazon ranks 39th, Microsoft is 

The New Dark Age – The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself

The Atlantic no paywall: “The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions.

Revised:

1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel by Paul Redding.
2. Distributive Justice and Empirical Moral Psychology by Christian B. Miller.
3. Francisco Sanches by Rolando Pérez.
4. Intensional Transitive Verbs by Graeme Forbes.
5. Adam Smith’s Moral and Political Philosophy by Samuel Fleischacker.
6. Turing Machines by Liesbeth De Mol.
7. Dependence Logic by Pietro Galliani.
8. Theological Voluntarism by Mark Murphy.
9. Clarence Irving Lewis by Bruce Hunter.
10. The Traditional Square of Opposition by Terence Parsons and Graziana Ciola.

IEP

1. Intuitionism in Mathematics by Bruno Bentzen.

1000-Word Philosophy

1. Rudolf Otto on “Numinous” Religious Experience by Matthew Sanderson.

BJPS Short Reads

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Book Reviews*

1. An Instrumentalist Theory of Political Legitimacy by Matthias Brinkmann is reviewed by Fabian Wendt at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
2. A Realistic Blacktopia: Why We Must Unite to Fight by Derrick Darby is reviewed by Vanessa Wills at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
3. Democracy and Beauty: The Political Aesthetics of W. E. B. Du Bois by Robert Gooding-Williams is reviewed by Becca Rothfeld at The Washington Post.
4. A Philosophy of Shame: A Revolutionary Emotion by Frédéric Gros is reviewed at Kirkus Reviews. 
5. Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction (2nd ed.) by Dale Jamieson is reviewed by Nicolas Delon at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
6. Kant on Freedom and Rational Agencyby Markus Kohl is reviewed by Frederick Rauscher at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
7. Thinking of Necessity: A Kantian Account of Modal Thought and Modal Metaphysics by Jessica Leech is reviewed by Uygar Abaci at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
8. Karl Marx in America by Andrew Hardman is reviewed by Devin Thomas O’Shea at Los Angeles Review of Books, by Michael Kazin at The New Republic, and at Kirkus Reviews.
9. Essays on Relativism: 2001-2021 by Crispin Wright is reviewed by Derek Ball at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Philosophy Podcasts – Recent Episodes(via Jason Chen)

Compiled by Michael Glawson

* The Book Reviews section contains links to reviews of books by philosophers in non-academic media as well as in open-access reviews published in academic journals.

BONUS: When a request for evidence is evidence. Also: theories of consciousness.