Then I wound up randomly assigned freshman year to a class that was all about women and minority writers. One is that I used to be the kind of jerk who thought education was being ruined by PC demands to represent more women and minority writers. Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: For two reasons. Guns, Germs, and Steel is arguably the better book in this genre, but I only ever read it because I’d read P&P first so I’m giving McNeil the nod. William McNeil, Plagues & Peoples: This had a kind of revelatory quality to me, the idea that everything you thought was important about history was actually kind of trivial and the real determinants of human destiny are something else entirely. Dennett I think gave me an example of the shewing. I’m drawn to Wittgeinstein’s thing about how you need to “show the fly the way out of the flybottle” rather than “solve” these timeless dilemmas, but I find Wittgeinstein almost impossible to read and didn’t understand what he was saying at all when I tried. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained: The precise content of Dennett’s ideas about human consciousness aren’t that important to me (though I agree with him), but the practical methods at work are.
But this is a really important book! The fact that Caplan “ultimately didn’t learn much of substance” from Nietszche except the value of being arrogant strikes me as telling. Friedrich Nietszche, On the Genealogy of Morals: I first picked up Nietszche because his image has a kind of appeal to smart, pretentious, angry, lonely teenage boys. Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons: This is my alternative to a theological system or religious belief, the set of preposterous-to-those-who-don’t-believe-it-yet ideas that underlies how I think about morality, who we are, and what it all means. And they’re like night and day - a great illustration, in my view, of why even though Cowen and Caplan are formally committed to similar political beliefs I find Cowen to be a much more sympathetic figure. The other day, Tyler Cowen posted a list of ten books that influenced him greatly saying “I’ll go with the ‘gut list,’ rather than the ‘I’ve thought about this for a long time list.’” Bryan Caplan did a list of his own.
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