Steve Reads

• The Complete Works of Michel de Montaigne
• Anything by Jules Michelet
• Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourses.
• In general, the books that established the foundations for classical liberal democracies in the 1700’s. (Though Bernard Bailyn’s book Ideological Origins of the American Revolution makes it pretty clear that American pamphleteers had much more to do with the spread of revolutionary ideas than did the classical British philosophers.)

Also, a very nice email conversation with the author of Ethics for Adversaries suggests that not only should John Rawls’ A Theory Of Justice be my next read, but that I should move from there to Rawls’ Collected Essays, Political Liberalism, and Law of Peoples.

Cosma Shalizi is always good for recommendations; in response to my question about the status of the word “species”, he suggested that I read

• Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusion
• Kitcher, Science, Truth and Democracy
• Ronald Giere, Explaining Science
• Larry Laudan, Beyond Positivism and Relativism
• Christopher Norris generally
• David Hull, Science as Process
• Stephen Toulmin, Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts

I think it’s time to learn to speed-read.

Also I want to learn Latin and Ancient Greek, but I suspect that’s a longer-term project.