Massimo Pigliucci's Top Book Recommendations

Massimo Pigliucci

It guides you on how to live your life from a Stoic perspective. The chapter titles are topics that Epictetus debated with his students, and these topics were often very practical. There’s very little theoretical philosophy in Epictetus. [source]

Massimo Pigliucci

He explores how much Stoicism can be updated to be compatible with modern science, modern philosophy, and still be called Stoicism. [source]

Massimo Pigliucci

Even though I’m not a utilitarian, and so I tend to disagree with Singer in terms of the general framework, this book literally changed my life. I read it many years ago, in the 1990s, when I was in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was part of a book club that I helped organize and I don’t remember who suggested it but we read this book. One of the things that struck me as really reasonable and useful in it is that Singer says, ‘Don’t try to be perfect, don’t try to change everything you do all at once because most likely you will fail and give up. Try to do the little that you can, and as much as you can in the right direction.’ So, for instance, Singer is famously an advocate of animal rights and vegetarianism. He says that if you agree that the vegetarian or even the vegan position is, in fact, morally preferable, that doesn’t mean you have to give up everything on the spot, or indeed ever. It means that you want to move in that direction. What are you doing now, eating steak three times a week? Go down to one a week, or once every couple of weeks. Start moving in that direction. Any movement you make in the right direction is progress. It’s progress for you as an individual and it’s progress for whatever cause—in this case, animal rights and the environment—you’re concerned with. [source]

Massimo Pigliucci

It’s an epic poem. In fact, quite apart from the topic that we’re talking about today, how to be a better person, Pharsalia is one of the best epic poems in the Western tradition. If somebody is interested in Roman/Latin literature, it’s definitely something to read, also because of the history. It’s a historically fairly accurate poem, not like Virgil’s Aeneid, or Homer’s Odyssey…It refers to the civil war between Pompey and Julius Caesar, which happened about a century and a half before Lucan. The title, Pharsalia, refers to a place called Pharsalus which is where, in 48 BCE, the final battle between the two sides took place and Julius Caesar vanquished Pompey, thereby ending the Roman Republic and setting the stage for the onset of the Roman Empire a few years later. [source]

Massimo Pigliucci

The title, The Character Gap, refers to the notion that, typically, we’re not as good as we think we should be. There is a gap between where we would like to be and where we are in terms of our behavior. Most of us would like to be generous, fair and just and all that sort of stuff but it turns out that, in practice, we’re not quite there. A good part of the book is, firstly, about why. What kind of factors determine this character gap? Secondly, how do we overcome the gap? What kind of strategies work or do not work?…One of the interesting things about this book is that it looks at the evidence. My background is both in science and in philosophy and while I love philosophical arguments and discussions, I also have been trained to say, ‘This is nice. It sounds good. But what do we know in terms of empirical evidence?’ This is an area where it’s difficult to do research. Character is difficult to describe in an operational way, in a way that you can measure. People disagree on what it means to have a certain character trait. What is a virtue? How do you measure that? Psychologists and social scientists in general are having a pretty hard time making progress. Miller’s book is a nice overview of where the empirical evidence is. [source]