My Reading List

The most valuable books I've come across. In descending order of impact on my life...

Things Hidden Since the Foundations of the World

by Rene Girard

The Uses and Abuses of History for Life

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Democracy in America

by Alexis de Tocqueville

Rousseau’s Theodicy

by Frederick Neuhouser

Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory

by Frederick Neuhouser

三国演义

The Vimalakirti Sutra 

The Philosophy of Right

by Georg Hegel

Recognition

by Axel Honneth

Desire, Deceit, and the Novel

by Rene Girard

The Genealogy of Morals

by Friedrich Nietzsche

西游记

Lack and Transcendence

by David Loy 

The Phenomenology of Spirit

by Georg Hegel

Debt

by David Graeber

The Republic

by Plato

The Denial of Death

by Ernest Becker

The Struggle for Recognition

by Axel Honneth

The Prince

by Niccolo Machiavelli

The Theban Trilogy

by Sophocles

Fear and Trembling

by Soren Kierkegaard

Battling to the End

by Rene Girard

Confessions

by St. Augustine

The Actuality of Philosophy

by Theodore Adorno

Nichomachean Ethics

by Aristotle

The City of God

by St. Augustine

Either/Or

by Soren Kierkegaard

On the Jewish Question

by Karl Marx

In Love with the World

by Mingyur Rinpoche

The Inferno

by Dante Alighieri

Destined for War

by Graham Allison

The Straussian Moment

by Peter Thiel

Lost in Thought

by Zena Hitz

The Concept of the Political

by Carl Schmitt

The Nine Cloud Dream

by Kim ManJung

The Symposium

by Plato

The Critique of Pure Reason

by Immanuel Kant

水浒传

Paradise Lost

by John Milton

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

by Max Weber

The Gay Science

by Friedrich Nietzsche

When these Things Begin

by Rene Girard

The Elephant in the Brain

by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson

The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

Persecution and the Art of Writing

by Leo Strauss

Violence and the Sacred

by Rene Girard

Leisure, the Basis of Culture

by Joseph Pieper

Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

The Truth of Tripartition

by Myles Burnyeat

The Rise and Fall of American Growth

by Robert Gordon

The Euthyphro

by Plato

The Critique of Judgement

by Immanuel Kant

Socialism

by Axel Honneth

The Meno

by Plato

The Apology

by Plato

The Dialectic of Enlightenment

by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer

Twilight of the Idols

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Macbeth

by William Shakespeare

The Aenid

by Vergil

The Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life

by Shantideva

The Oresteia Trilogy

by Aeschylus

Man’s Search for Meaning

by Victor Frankl

The Odyssey

by Homer

Elementary Particles

by Michel Houellebecq

Das Kapital

by Karl Marx

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

by Rene Girard

Philosophical Fragments

by Soren Kierkegaard

论语

Politics

by Aristotle

The Emptiness that is Form

by Thomas Freeman Yarnall

Simulacra and Simulation

by Jean Baudrillard

Don Quixote

 by Miguel de Cervantes

Sappho

The Origins of Totalitarianism

by Hannah Arendt

When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

On Liberty

by John Stuart Mill

Engaging Buddhism

by Jay Garfield

The Iliad

by Homer

The Essays

by Montaigne

Sacrifice

by Rene Girard

The Wealth of Nations

by Adam Smith

The Great Awakening

by David Loy

The Sickness Unto Death

by Soren Kierkegaard

Discipline and Punish

by Michel Foucault

Evolution and Conversion

by Rene Girard

Science as Vocation

by Max Weber

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

by Friedeich Nietzsche

墨子

道德经

Theory of Moral Sentiments

by Adam Smith

The Ascent of Money

by Niall Ferguson

Politics as Vocation

by Max Weber

Estranged Labor

by Karl Marx

Utilitarianism

by John Stuart Mill

The Leviathan

by Thomas Hobbes

18th Brumaire

by Karl Marx

On the Origin of Species

by Charles Darwin

Reflections on the Revolution in France

by Edmund Burke

The Second Discourse on Inequality

by Jean Jacques Rousseau

The Foundations of Buddhism

by Rupert Gethin

庄子

The Histories

by Herodotus

Second Treatise of Government

by John Locke

The Uncanny

by Sigmund Freud

The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

by Immanuel Kant

Inner Revolution

by Robert Thurman

Capital in the 21st Century

by Thomas Picketty

The Nature of Buddhist Ethics

by Damien Keown

韩非子

The Metamorphoses

by Ovid

The Scapegoat

by Rene Girard

The Religion of Technology

by David Noble

The Political Possibilities in the Long Romantic Period

by Akeel Bilgrami

The One by Whom Scandal Comes

by Rene Girard

The Ecstasy of Communication

by Jean Baudrillard

荀子

Summa Theologica

by St. Thomas Aquinas

Innovation and Repetition

by Rene Girard

The Shipwrecked Mind

by Mark Lilla

Superintelligence

by Nick Bostrom

The Mind Illuminated

by Jeremy Graves

Killing Commendatore

by Haruki Murakami

This Life

by Martin Hagglund

The Heart Sutra

Understanding Media

by Marshall Mcluhan

Theatre of Envy

by Rene Girard

On Self Rule

by Ghandhi

Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions

by Max Weber

Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

by Mary Wollstonecraft

The Game

by Neil Strauss

Genesis of Desire

by Jean-Michel Oughourlian

Meditations

by Marcus Aurelius

The Souls of Black Folk

by W.E.B. du Bois

The Social Psychology of the World Religions

by Max Weber

The Wretched of the Earth

by Frantz Fanon

Meditations on First Philosophy

by Rene Descartes

Zero to One

by Peter Thiel

Anorexia and Mimetic Desire

by Rene Girard

The Task for Social Philosophy and the Institute for Social Research

by Max Horkheimer

Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim

by Immanuel Kant

The Sacred and the Profane

by Mircea Eliade

The German Ideology

by Karl Marx

The Lean Startup

by Eric Ries

How the Economic Machine Works

by Ray Dalio

When Genius Failed

by Roger Lowenstein

Myth of Mirror Neurons

by Gregory Hickok

Counterfeit Gods

by Timothy Keller

Resurrection from the Underground

by Rene Girard

Psychopolitics

by Jean-Michel Oughourlian

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

Essential Mind Training

by Thupten Jinpa

The Monk and the Philosopher

by Jean-François Revel and Matthieu Ricard

Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory

by Wolfgang Palaver

The Black Swan

by Nassim Taleb

The Social Contract

by Jean Jacques Rousseau

Oedipus Unbound

by Rene Girard

Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory

by Frederick Neuhouser

To Double Business Bound

by Rene Girard 

On Becoming a Person

by Carl Rogers

What is Good and Why?

by Richard Kraut

AI Superpowers

by Lee Kai-Fu

Rene Girard and Creative Mimesis

by Pablo Bandera and Thomas Ryba

The Rescuer from Error

by Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali

The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

Elon Musk

by Ashlee Vance

Will to Meaning

by Victor Frankl

Data Science as Machinic Neoplatonism

by Dan McQuillan

The Once and Future Liberal

by Mark Lilla

Why we Sleep

by Matthew Walker

Driven by Compression

by Jürgen Schmidhuber

The Lessons of History

by Will Durant

The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill

by John Stuart Mill

The Lotus Sutra

Literature and Christianity

by Rene Girard

On China

by Henry Kissinger

Never Split the Difference

by Christopher Voss and Tahl Raz 

Job, the Victim of his People

by Rene Girard

On Anger

by Seneca

Benjamin Franklin

by Walter Isaacson

Age of Ambition

by Evan Osnos

Hegel’s Ethical Thought

by Allen W. Wood 

Einstein

by Walter Isaacson

Skin in the Game

by Nassim Taleb

Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality

by Peter Railton

The Metaphysics of Morals

by Immanuel Kant

Sex at Dawn

by Cacilda Jetha and Christopher Ryan

Economy and the Future

by Jean-Pierre Dupuy

When the Machine Stops

by E. M. Forster

A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will

by Robert Kane

Karma

by Traleg Kyabgon

The Wolfman

by Sigmund Freud

What Technology Wants

by Kevin Kelly

10% Happier

by Dan Harris

Siddhartha

by Hermann Hesse

Hayy Ibn Yaqzan

by Ibn Tufail

The Tale of Genji

by Murasaki Shikibu

Inside the House of Money

by Steven Drobny

Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

by Nathaniel Branden

Cutting through Spiritual Materialism

by Chögyam Trungpa

The Nature of Technology

by Brian Arthur

The Mass Ornament

by Siegfried Kracauer

I am a Strange Loop

by Douglas Hofstadter

How to Win Friends and Influence People

by Dale Carnegie