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Tim Crane's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Tim Crane recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Tim Crane's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
In this book, which revises and greatly expands his classic work Sameness and Substance (Blackwell, 1980), David Wiggins examines the logic of identity, the ideas of substance and change, essence, predication and mortal predication, personhood, and personal memory. This important book will appeal to a wide range of readers in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and analytic philosophy. less
Recommended by Tim Crane, and 1 others.

Tim CraneWiggins was someone who was very influenced by Aristotle, and by Leibniz too, and I’m very interested in this book. I find it a fascinating book. (Source)

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2

Discourse on metaphysics, correspondence with Arnauld and monadology

Recommended by Tim Crane, and 1 others.

Tim CraneHe wrote many short things, and so Leibniz’s work is often collected into collections. They’re actually surprisingly readable given the abstract nature of the ideas. (Source)

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3

Real Time II

Real Time II extends and evolves DH Mellor's classic exploration of the philosophy of time, Real Time. This new book answers such basic metaphysical questions about time as: how do past, present and future differ, how are time and space related, what is change, is time travel possible? His Real Time dominated the philosophy of time for fifteen years. Real TIme II will do the same for the next twenty. less
Recommended by Tim Crane, and 1 others.

Tim CraneIt’s a treatise on the nature of time which made an enormous impression on me when I first read it. (Source)

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4

A Survey of Metaphysics

A systematic overview of modern metaphysics, A Survey of Metaphysics covers all of the most important topics in the field. It adopts the fairly traditional conception of metaphysics as a subject that deals with the deepest questions that can be raised concerning the fundamental structure of reality as a whole. The book is divided into six main sections that address the following themes: identity and change, necessity and essence, causation, agency and events, space and time, and universals and particulars. It focuses on contemporary views and issues throughout, rather than on the... more
Recommended by Tim Crane, and 1 others.

Tim CraneIt’s not immensely difficult but it’s not talking down to people, it’s not metaphysics made simple either. (Source)

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5
Here is a brilliant new translation of Descartes's Meditations, one of the most influential books in the history of Western philosophy, including the full texts of the Third and Fourth Objections and Replies, and a selection from the other exchanges. Discovering his own existence as a thinking entity in the very exercise of doubt--in the famous formulation cogito, ergo sum--Descartes goes on to develop new conceptions of body and mind, capable of serving as foundations for a new science of nature. Subsequent philosophy has grappled with Descartes's ideas, but his arguments... more

Tim CraneDescartes was educated by Jesuits, and it’s important that they were called meditations because they were meant to be things that people would think through themselves. (Source)

Dallas DeneryDescartes wants a God that doesn’t speak, because speaking is tantamount to interfering with the orderly and law-like operations of the world. (Source)

Luciano FloridiToday Descartes speaks more directly to us if you understand him as the equivalent of an engineer testing a product. (Source)

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