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View quake reading
Ryan Holiday blogs my email to him:
My reading was much different when I was younger. I would more likely intensively engage with some important book totally full of new ideas. Hayek. Parfit. Plato. And so on. There just aren't books like that left for me anymore. So I read many more, to learn bits, but haven't in years experienced a "view quake." That is sad, to me at least, but I don't know how to avoid how that has turned out. So enjoy your best reading years while you can!
Quine should be on that list as well. Nietzsche was a view quake in high school, though I find him oddly uninteresting upon rereading. Here is Ryan's post on Marcus Aurelius.; the Stoics collectively were a view quake for me, in economics there was Anthony Downs and Thomas Schelling and Albert Hirschmann. David Hume. Maybe Rene Girard was the last "view quake" author I read. On the upside, greater context means that many more books are interesting than was the case before.
Many of you are asking me about Amazon Kindle, the new ebook (sort of); Jason Kottke offers a round-up of opinion.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 20, 2007 at 06:08 AM in Books | Permalink
Comments
This seems sadly jaded. Surely there are many more quake-worthy books out there, and surely a rereading Plato, for example, 20 years later will produce a new quake. The other kind of reading, to pick up a few bits, hardly seems worthwhile by comparison.
Posted by: Kent Guida at Nov 20, 2007 8:08:49 AM
My view quake is certainly Frank Herbert. Certainly an author I'd love to have a conversation with if he was alive.
Posted by: Akshay Kapur at Nov 20, 2007 8:50:08 AM
Is it that there are only a limited number of books capable of creating a view quake ... or is it that view quakes are much easier to generate when you are younger?
The last one I remember was Hernstein's "Godel, Escher and Bach" -- that's from the mid-70's. I should get Hernstein's newest book and see if there are still new gems.
Posted by: ZBicyclist at Nov 20, 2007 9:44:17 AM
Definitely Gödel, Escher, Bach (though the author's name is "Hofstadter", not "Hernstein").
David Hume has been known to wake people from their dogmatic slumbers.
Posted by: The Other Brock at Nov 20, 2007 9:57:59 AM
Wow, I managed to read Prof. Cowen's post without seeing that Hume was on his list.
Continuing in the philosophical vein, with a bias toward the contemporary, my personal list includes Kripke's Naming and Necessity and David Lewis's On the Plurality of Worlds.
Of more interest to the general reader, but still philosophical in nature, is Dennett's Consciousness Explained.
Posted by: The Other Brock at Nov 20, 2007 10:04:28 AM
I think it probably *is* the youth thing.
Other Brook, if you could explain what about Naming and Necessity quaked your views, I for one would be very grateful indeed. Kripke may be the most important philosopher whose achievement I find the most baffling to appreciate.
Posted by: Anderson at Nov 20, 2007 10:29:17 AM
Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, obviously.
At 38, I was recently overwhelmed by "Seeing Like a State" (Scott), which has a good thesis (how the state homogenizes for control). Some books only make sense when you are older (and vice-versa). When is the best time to read King Lear? Romeo and Juliet?
Posted by: David Zetland at Nov 20, 2007 11:19:09 AM
Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, obviously.
At 38, I was recently overwhelmed by "Seeing Like a State" (Scott), which has a good thesis (how the state homogenizes for control). Some books only make sense when you are older (and vice-versa). When is the best time to read King Lear? Romeo and Juliet?
Posted by: David Zetland at Nov 20, 2007 11:19:58 AM
Anderson,
The two big things about Naming and Necessity that affected my philosophical outlook were semantic externalism (which Putnam expressed pithily as "meanings ain't in the head"), and putting modality at the forefront of metaphysics. (Or back at the forefront, where it hadn't hadn't been since Leibniz.)
When you read a work, like N&N, where the footnotes are as good as the main body of the text, that's a sign that you may have a "view quake" book in your hands.
Posted by: The Other Brock at Nov 20, 2007 11:35:17 AM
Other Brock,
Yes, Consciousness Explained was my most recent view quake, as well. Sadly he spent most of the book refuting silly claims from other philosophers (e.g. egiphenomena).
Does anyone know of more recent books that covers this topic of consciousness emerging from unconscious neurons?
Posted by: Gan at Nov 20, 2007 12:23:34 PM
Recently published:
Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity
Overall I think its more rigorous than Dennet's version (although I haven't quite finished it yet).
Posted by: Leif at Nov 20, 2007 1:28:52 PM
It's not the most scientifically respected book but I found "Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" to be utterly fascinating. And if it is true it is a quake of epic proportions
Posted by: Ryan Holiday at Nov 20, 2007 2:04:00 PM
If you want to maximize view quakes, you should spend your youth reading Nietzsche and Marx, and then later read Hayek and C.S. Lewis. Perhaps this is the real value of an American university education: lots of view quakes in your 30's, 40's, and 50's.
Posted by: 8 at Nov 20, 2007 3:17:28 PM
Thanks, O.B. The point about meaning is good, tho I seem to have picked that up lsewhere. Not sure (from Wikiscanning) why modal logic is exciting, but I guess I should read the boo and find out.
Ryan, I enjoyed the Jaynes book thoroughly while finding myself utterly unable to take it seriously. But I dunno if it's been rebutted in any detail. I do think that the book upon which he leans heavily, Bruno Snell's The Discovery of the Mind, has been discrdited.
Posted by: Anderson at Nov 20, 2007 7:06:14 PM
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