Sunday, December 20, 2009

More winter reading

For Intro students eager to get a jump-start on the readings, here are our main texts for Winter-Spring 2010:

*Solomon & Higgins, A Passion for Wisdom: A Very Brief History of Philosophy

*Richardson, William James: in the Maelstrom of American Modernism

*de Botton, Consolations of Philosophy

*Critchley, Book of Dead Philosophers

Everyone will also be encouraged to find a volume of popular philosophy that speaks peculiarly to an interest of their own, and either write or do a class presentation about it. (Jimmy Buffett and Philosophy, anyone?)

If the Critchley title sounds too morbid, I promise you it is not. Mortality was never so much fun, in fact. Here is the author, surveying a very brief history of how Big Questioners have shuffled off our humble coil. (Best exit line, seasonally appropriate just now, was from Wittgenstein: "Tell them it was a wonderful life.")

No comments:

KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News