Source graph

Further Reading

Treat this as a graph, not a canon. Some items are bedrock. Some are bridge-builders. Some are deliberately wild but useful. The point is breadth with spine.

A first shelf

If you needed to compress the whole map into a starting point.

  1. 01 Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics c. 350 BCE
  2. 02 Spinoza Ethics 1677
  3. 03 Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation 1818
  4. 04 Nietzsche The Gay Science 1882
  5. 05 William James The Varieties of Religious Experience 1902
  6. 06 Heidegger Being and Time 1927
  7. 07 Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception 1945
  8. 08 Frankfurt The Importance of What We Care About 1988
  9. 09 Bateson Steps to an Ecology of Mind 1972
  10. 10 von Uexküll A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans 1934
  11. 11 Shannon A Mathematical Theory of Communication 1948
  12. 12 Floridi The Philosophy of Information 2011
  13. 13 Deacon Incomplete Nature 2011
  14. 14 Maturana & Varela Autopoiesis and Cognition 1980
  15. 15 Varela, Thompson & Rosch The Embodied Mind 1991
  16. 16 Clark Surfing Uncertainty 2015
  17. 17 Friston, Parr & Pezzulo Active Inference 2022
  18. 18 Melanie Mitchell Complexity 2009
  19. 19 Berger & Luckmann The Social Construction of Reality 1966
  20. 20 James C. Scott Seeing Like a State 1998
  21. 21 Nagarjuna Mūlamadhyamakakārikā c. 150 CE
  22. 22 Zhuangzi Zhuangzi c. 300 BCE
  23. 23 Bhagavad Gītā Bhagavad Gītā c. 200 BCE
  24. 24 Meister Eckhart Selected Sermons c. 1310
  25. 25 de Beauvoir The Ethics of Ambiguity 1947

Reference infrastructure

Keep these open in parallel while reading.

  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — especially: desire, agency, phenomenology, embodied cognition, value theory, boundary, categories, models in science, information, measurement in science, process philosophy, pragmatism, mysticism
  • Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Cambridge Companions to major philosophers and traditions
  • Oxford Handbooks in philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, cognitive science, ethics, philosophy of science, religion
  • Routledge Handbooks on phenomenology, embodiment, process thought, complexity, systems
  • Norton / Hackett anthologies for primary texts

Act I — Volo Ergo Sum

Want, lean, motivation, care, direction, love, growth, meaning, subjectivity, and the possibility of moving from private orientation to shared reality.

Core philosophers

  • Aristotle — De Anima, Nicomachean Ethics
  • Hume — A Treatise of Human Nature
  • Spinoza — Ethics
  • Kant — Groundwork
  • Schopenhauer — The World as Will and Representation
  • Nietzsche — The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality
  • Kierkegaard — Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death, Works of Love
  • William James — The Principles of Psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism
  • Henri Bergson — Creative Evolution, Matter and Memory
  • Heidegger — Being and Time
  • Sartre — Being and Nothingness
  • de Beauvoir — The Ethics of Ambiguity
  • Merleau-Ponty — Phenomenology of Perception
  • Iris Murdoch — The Sovereignty of Good
  • Martin Buber — I and Thou
  • Korsgaard — The Sources of Normativity
  • Frankfurt — The Importance of What We Care About
  • Bratman — Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason
  • Davidson — Actions, Reasons, and Causes

Desire, motivation, and action theory

  • Bernard Williams — Internal and External Reasons
  • Michael Smith — The Moral Problem
  • T. M. Scanlon — What We Owe to Each Other
  • Jonathan Lear — Love and Its Place in Nature

Phenomenology of subjectivity

  • Husserl — Ideas I, Cartesian Meditations
  • Dan Zahavi — Self and Other, Phenomenology
  • Shaun Gallagher — How the Body Shapes the Mind
  • Max Scheler — Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values
  • Emmanuel Levinas — Totality and Infinity
  • Michel Henry — The Essence of Manifestation

Biology, affect, and the floor of wanting

  • Jaak Panksepp — Affective Neuroscience
  • Kent Berridge — papers on wanting vs liking
  • Antonio Damasio — The Feeling of What Happens, Self Comes to Mind, Feeling & Knowing, The Strange Order of Things
  • Joseph LeDoux — The Emotional Brain
  • Lisa Feldman Barrett — How Emotions Are Made
  • Anil Seth — Being You
  • Friston / Parr / Pezzulo — Active Inference
  • Kevin Mitchell — Free Agents
  • Michael Tomasello — A Natural History of Human Morality
  • Robert Sapolsky — Behave

Love, growth, meaning

  • Viktor Frankl — Man's Search for Meaning
  • Erich Fromm — The Art of Loving
  • Martha Nussbaum — Upheavals of Thought
  • Susan Wolf — Meaning in Life and Why It Matters
  • Charles Taylor — Sources of the Self
  • bell hooks — All About Love
  • René Girard — Deceit, Desire and the Novel; Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Act II — init.d

Carving, edges, maps, categories, good/bad, dualities, thingification, and the information/physical seam.

Distinction, categories, and boundaries

  • Aristotle — Categories, Metaphysics
  • Kant — Critique of Pure Reason
  • Cassirer — The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms
  • Nelson Goodman — Ways of Worldmaking
  • E. J. Lowe — The Four-Category Ontology
  • Achille Varzi — Parts and Places (with Casati); work on boundaries
  • Eleanor Rosch — prototype theory papers
  • George Lakoff — Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
  • Lakoff & Johnson — Metaphors We Live By
  • Ian Hacking — The Social Construction of What?
  • Gilbert Ryle — The Concept of Mind

Map and territory / model and world

  • Alfred Korzybski — Science and Sanity
  • C. S. Peirce — selections on signs, inquiry, fallibilism
  • Ferdinand de Saussure — Course in General Linguistics
  • Jakob von Uexküll — A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans
  • Gregory Bateson — Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Mind and Nature
  • Bas van Fraassen — The Scientific Image
  • Thomas Kuhn — The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  • Karl Popper — Conjectures and Refutations
  • Imre Lakatos — The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes
  • Nancy Cartwright — How the Laws of Physics Lie
  • Judea Pearl — Causality, The Book of Why
  • Frigg & Hartmann; Frigg & Nguyen — models in science

Good, bad, value, and valence

  • Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics
  • Nietzsche — Genealogy, Beyond Good and Evil
  • Max Scheler — value phenomenology
  • John Dewey — Theory of Valuation
  • Philippa Foot — Natural Goodness
  • Alasdair MacIntyre — After Virtue
  • Christine Korsgaard — Sources of Normativity
  • Martha Nussbaum — The Fragility of Goodness
  • Jonathan Haidt — The Righteous Mind
  • Susan Neiman — Evil in Modern Thought

Thingification, reification, classification, institutions

  • Lukács — Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat
  • Berger & Luckmann — The Social Construction of Reality
  • John Searle — The Construction of Social Reality
  • Ian Hacking — Making Up People
  • Bowker & Star — Sorting Things Out
  • James C. Scott — Seeing Like a State
  • Michel Foucault — The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish
  • David Graeber — Debt; The Utopia of Rules
  • Bruno Latour — Science in Action, Reassembling the Social
  • Mary Douglas — Purity and Danger

Information / physical duality

  • Claude Shannon — A Mathematical Theory of Communication
  • Luciano Floridi — The Philosophy of Information, The Logic of Information
  • Gregory Bateson — difference that makes a difference
  • Terrence Deacon — Incomplete Nature
  • Howard Pattee — writings on the epistemic cut
  • Pattee & Rączaszek-Leonardi — Laws, Language and Life
  • John Wheeler — It from Bit
  • David Chalmers — for information-based metaphysical speculation
  • Jesper Hoffmeyer — Biosemiotics
  • Marcello Barbieri — The Organic Codes
  • Robert Rosen — Life Itself, Anticipatory Systems

Act III — MMM

Measurement theory, scientific modeling, cybernetics, predictive processing, active inference, autopoiesis, enactivism, complexity, and learning theory.

Measure

  • SEP: Measurement in Science
  • Campbell, Stevens, Fechner — classical measurement / psychophysics
  • Green & Swets — Signal Detection Theory and Psychophysics
  • Donald Campbell — metric distortion / Campbell's Law
  • Marilyn Strathern — When a measure becomes a target…
  • Gigerenzer — heuristics, bounded rationality, ecological rationality
  • Nate Silver — The Signal and the Noise
  • Tetlock & Gardner — Superforecasting
  • Kahneman — Thinking, Fast and Slow

Model

  • George Box — All models are wrong…
  • Herbert Simon — The Sciences of the Artificial
  • David Marr — Vision
  • Andy Clark — Whatever Next?; Surfing Uncertainty
  • Jakob Hohwy — The Predictive Mind
  • Karl Friston — free-energy principle papers
  • Parr, Pezzulo, Friston — Active Inference
  • Judea Pearl — causal models
  • Frigg & Nguyen — Modeling Nature

Manifest

  • John Dewey — Experience and Nature; Human Nature and Conduct; Art as Experience
  • Donald Schön — The Reflective Practitioner
  • Edwin Hutchins — Cognition in the Wild
  • Don Norman — The Design of Everyday Things
  • Tim Ingold — Making
  • Pierre Bourdieu — Outline of a Theory of Practice
  • Bruno Latour — artifacts, networks, inscriptions
  • Richard Sennett — The Craftsman
  • Lucy Suchman — Plans and Situated Actions

MMM across life, evolution, and civilization

  • Darwin — On the Origin of Species
  • Maynard Smith & Szathmáry — The Major Transitions in Evolution
  • Stuart Kauffman — At Home in the Universe; Investigations
  • John Holland — Hidden Order
  • Melanie Mitchell — Complexity
  • Maturana & Varela — Autopoiesis and Cognition
  • Varela, Thompson, Rosch — The Embodied Mind
  • Evan Thompson — Mind in Life
  • Di Paolo, Buhrmann, Barandiaran — Sensorimotor Life
  • Odling-Smee, Laland, Feldman — Niche Construction
  • Richard Lewontin — The Triple Helix
  • Terrence Deacon — Incomplete Nature
  • Whitehead — Process and Reality
  • Gregory Bateson — recursive learning and ecology of mind

What the mystics were tracking

Treated comparatively — not as all saying the same thing, but as repeatedly converging on attention, ontology, and changed life-practice. Metaphysical disagreements kept intact.

Buddhism

  • Pali Canon selections — Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, Bāhiya Sutta, The Simile of the Raft, The Two Arrows, The Parable of Kisa Gotami and the Mustard Seed
  • Nagarjuna — Mūlamadhyamakakārikā
  • Śāntideva — Bodhicaryāvatāra
  • Dōgen — Shōbōgenzō
  • Secondary: Jay Garfield, Mark Siderits, Evan Thompson, Brook Ziporyn

Daoism / Chinese thought

  • Dao De Jing
  • Zhuangzi — Butterfly Dream, Butcher Ding, The Useless Tree, fasting of the mind
  • Liezi
  • Secondary: Roger Ames, Brook Ziporyn, Chad Hansen, Edward Slingerland on wu-wei

Vedanta / Hindu / Yoga / Kashmir Shaivism

  • Upaniṣads
  • Bhagavad Gītā
  • Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali
  • Abhinavagupta / Kashmir Shaivism selections
  • Aṣṭāvakra Gītā
  • Secondary: Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Eliot Deutsch, Arindam Chakrabarti, Jonardon Ganeri

Sufi / Islamic philosophy

  • Al-Ghazali — Deliverance from Error
  • Ibn ʿArabī
  • Rumi
  • Attar — Conference of the Birds
  • Mulla Sadra
  • Secondary: William Chittick, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Toshihiko Izutsu

Christian contemplative / negative theology

  • Augustine — Confessions
  • Pseudo-Dionysius
  • Meister Eckhart — selected sermons
  • The Cloud of Unknowing
  • Julian of Norwich
  • Teresa of Ávila
  • John of the Cross
  • Secondary: Denys Turner, Bernard McGinn, Sarah Coakley

Jewish / Kabbalistic / dialogical

  • Job, Ecclesiastes, Pirkei Avot
  • Zohar selections
  • Martin Buber — I and Thou
  • Abraham Joshua Heschel
  • Secondary: Gershom Scholem, Moshe Idel

Sikh

  • Japji Sahib
  • Guru Granth Sahib selections
  • Secondary: Pashaura Singh, Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair

African, relational, and personhood traditions

  • John Mbiti — African Religions and Philosophy
  • Kwame Gyekye
  • Kwasi Wiredu
  • Mogobe Ramose on Ubuntu
  • Akan conceptions of personhood
  • Yoruba / Ifá selections

Indigenous and ecological relationality

  • Robin Wall Kimmerer — Braiding Sweetgrass
  • Gregory Cajete — Native Science
  • Vine Deloria Jr.
  • Tyson Yunkaporta — Sand Talk
  • Eduardo Kohn — How Forests Think

Living better, ethics, flourishing, and finite objectivity

Ancient and practical

  • Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics
  • Epictetus — Discourses, Enchiridion
  • Seneca — letters and essays
  • Marcus Aurelius — Meditations
  • Cicero — On Duties

Modern ethical formation

  • Philippa Foot — Natural Goodness
  • Alasdair MacIntyre — After Virtue
  • Martha Nussbaum — The Fragility of Goodness; capability writings
  • Amartya Sen — Development as Freedom
  • Susan Wolf — meaning
  • de Beauvoir — ambiguity, freedom
  • Iris Murdoch — attention as moral practice
  • Charles Taylor — moral sources of the self

Revisability, truth, inquiry, and being less wrong

  • C. S. Peirce — The Fixation of Belief
  • William James — Pragmatism
  • John Dewey — inquiry as lived intelligence
  • Karl Popper — falsification and conjecture
  • Helen Longino — social dimensions of scientific knowledge
  • Daston & Galison — Objectivity
  • Thomas Kuhn — paradigm shifts
  • Tetlock — forecast humility
  • Julia Galef — The Scout Mindset

Wild cards

Not always the first books people mention, but unusually relevant to the architecture of this book.

  • Howard Pattee — symbol/matter interface, epistemic cut
  • Robert Rosen — anticipatory systems
  • Jakob von Uexküll — Umwelt
  • Gregory Bateson — recursive mind/ecology
  • Evan Thompson — life/mind continuity
  • Mark Johnson — embodied meaning
  • Susan Oyama — developmental systems
  • Richard Lewontin — organism/environment reciprocity
  • John Vervaeke — relevance realization
  • Bernard Stiegler — technics, exteriorization
  • Gilbert Simondon — individuation
  • Karen Barad — agential realism
  • Bruno Latour — actor-network and institutional reality
  • Achille Varzi — boundary
  • Brook Ziporyn — Chinese Buddhist / Daoist metaphysics
  • Edward Slingerland — wu-wei as practical intelligence
  • Patricia Churchland — neurophilosophy
  • J. J. Gibson — ecological perception and affordances
  • Eleanor Rosch — categorization
  • Mary Douglas — purity, category, order
  • James C. Scott — legibility, state simplification