Julian Baggini's Top Book Recommendations

Julian Baggini

Serious Sartreans get quite annoyed with this book because it’s a very accessible, easy-to-read, non-technical, public lecture. [source]

David Heinemeier Hansson

As a newcomer to existentialism, it can be hard to wrap your brain around the core concepts when reading novels like The Stranger or Nausea, or writers like Kierkegaard. You get a great feel for the existentialist ambience, but what are the core tenets? This (short) book delivers it about as directly as you can get it, as it’s basically just two parts: 1) An account of a lecture/defense that Sartre gave of existentialism, complete with a debate with someone in the audience, and 2) Sartre’s review of Camus’ The Stranger. The key concept that Sartre explains is the notion of Existence Precedes Essence. It’s one of those concepts that sounds intimidatingly highbrow, but really just means that we are not born with a purpose before we are “thrown into this world”. That then sets the stage for reaffirming human choice. That we always have a choice. That destiny or divine purpose is just an excuse we use not to make (hard) choices. This description of existentialism really resonated with me and provides a wonderful alternative vision to the stoic philosophy. There’s much agreement between the two views of the world, but also enough disagreement to provide interesting tension. Especially between the Aurelius version of stoicism, which endlessly belabors the point of doing “what the universe asks you to do”. [source]

Julian Baggini

If people want to read a New Atheist book, they should read this one. [source]

Jerry Coyne

He calls it Breaking the Spell for a reason. He thinks there is this sanctity about religion which prevents people from asking, “Where did it come from in the first place?” It’s a human construct, after all, it wasn’t given to humanity by God. It couldn’t have been, because we have thousands of different religions. So even religious people recognize the human contribution to religion. At the beginning of the book he says it could be real. We could be worshipping a real divine being. But we still want to know where this system of beliefs and practices and ceremonies came from — and it’s not off limits. That’s the importance to me of that book. [source]

Julian Baggini

Hume is the main man. [source]

Anthony Gottlieb

His friends urged him not only to give up the idea of having it published in his lifetime, but even of having it published after his death, because they thought that it would condemn all this other works to the dustbin of history. [source]

Mary Warnock

Hume thought it didn’t actually make much difference whether you believed that God did design the universe or whether you didn’t, because if you could say nothing about this God then it wasn’t a very interesting belief to hold. [source]

Julian Baggini

It’s about this idea, which is often attributed to David Hume, that there is an is/ought gap or fact/value distinction. In its strong form, this says that you can’t derive any conclusions about the way things ought to be by merely observing how they are. A statement of the fact that x is the case or something is the case, doesn’t ever generate the idea that something ought to be the case. But often we assume there’s a very strong and obvious link. [source]

Edward Skidelsky

Philippa Foot is also an Aristotelian, but of a rather different kind. MacIntyre thinks that the notion of virtue has to be detached from Aristotle’s original ‘metaphysical biology’ as he calls it, whereas Philippa Foot thinks that maybe it doesn’t. In Natural Goodness – which is beautifully written, by the way, and one of my favourite works of moral philosophy – she has this interesting discussion of the sentence “human beings have 32 teeth”. This is a perfectly ordinary sentence in English; readily intelligible, the kind we use all the time. But when you think about it, what does it actually mean? Clearly it doesn’t mean, “all humans have 32 teeth”. That would be false. It doesn’t mean, “the average human has 32 teeth”: that would also be false. What it seems to mean is something like: “human beings are meant to have 32 teeth”, or, “if everything goes well for them they should have 32 teeth”. In other words, it is a normative statement, as well as being an ordinary descriptive statement about the species homo sapiens. [source]

Julian Baggini

What she argues is that those formal mechanisms undermine trust. So to give an example, if you’re in a long term relationship with someone, most people would say trust is very important. The way to increase trust is not to develop systems whereby you can closely monitor what your partner is doing on a day-to-day basis, so that you have empirical, factual backup that those statements are true. In fact, that would undermine trust. It’s the idea that trust always includes elements of risk. It’s inherent to trust and you have to accept that. It’s a very rich book. It’s very brief. If you don’t know anything about philosophy, the arguments are very clear. They’re easy to follow. [source]

Anthony Seldon

O’Neill is an atheist, I think, and she is very Kantian, and she’s a hero because she raised the whole question of trust in a very public way in the Reith lectures in 2002, the year after 9/11. And she posed questions of such fundamental central importance that haven’t been answered seven years later, and it’s because they haven’t been answered that we have then had the credit crunch, we’ve had the decline of trust in politicians, and the year after the lectures we had the Iraq war which is the biggest single cause of loss of trust in government. [source]