Book Review: Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre — This book deals with 10 thinkers that are associated with existentialism: Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kafka, Ortega, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. The collection was organized by Kaufmann, an American philosopher. The book is an anthology, which took me by surprise since it’s not mentioned anywhere. I think anthologies are…

A Book Review of Francis Fukuyama: The Origins of Political Order — This book was fantastic. I wasn’t sure what I was getting into. The closest thing I have gotten into was an introduction to political philosophy, but this is a different angle. It tells the story of how humanity went from a tribal society to different forms of political organization throughout…

I’ve been familiar with Kierkegaard for years, and I’ve always liked his ideas about anxiety and freedom, but never took the time to read him. Finally decided to give it a shot and start with this book. If you decide to read it, there are two crucial points you need…

A Book Review of The Origin of Consciousness by Julian Jaynes — I’ve seen this book mentioned countless times, and I was really excited to get into it. It was written in 1976 and remains quite popular today. Bicameralism, which the title alludes to, is the view that the human mind once had two separate parts. One that spoke, and one that…

A Book Review of “Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism” — I’ve encountered Jordan Peterson back in 2016, with the whole C-16 polemic. I started getting into his material, and I found him tremendously insightful. Ended up watching all lectures available at the time and reading Maps of Meaning. My JBP streak ended a year later or so. In part because…

A Book Review of Conscious, by By Annaka Harris — The book starts by sketching out what consciousness even is, which from the philosophical point she is coming from, she defines as “what it is like to experience something”. Consciousness is a hard concept to fully grasp when one is new to the field. Most people will simply think that…

A book review of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan — The book tells the story of Susannah Cahalan, who suddenly seems to have a personality change. She later starts to have paranoia, hallucinations, and eventually seizures. The beginning of the book starts with the quest of her and her family to try to figure out what is wrong with her…

This is the expanded edition of my 2018 book list post. It is my collection of books that I’ve gathered over the years. It initially started as a “to-read list”, but it quickly became apparent that I could never have time to read everything. But I kept collecting interesting books…

Please ignore any hyperlinks, I’m still editing this. - These lectures notes were copied from YouTube comments, they were all made by the user Matteo. He likely did them for his own study, but thankfully made it public by posting it in the comments for others. The notes are excellent…