Philosophy & Great Books
Stoicism, ethics, classic books, political philosophy, consciousness and AI, and the art of living.
About this list
This reading list brings together items from the sources selected for Philosophy & Great Books. Open each item at its original source for the complete article, episode or video. This is a selection of current coverage, not a complete archive.
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John Ioannidis: AI is generating "false, fraudulent and fake" medical research
The US spends nearly 20% of its GDP on health and publishes 3 million biomedical papers a year. So why is life expectancy stalling, or perhaps even falling? Stanford professor of medicine John Ioannidis argues that vested interests and basic research mistakes are destroying biomedicine, and that two decades after his bombshell paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” the situation has only worsened. AI is generating a new deluge of fraudulent research, and medicine is drifting ever further from quality evidence.
Chu Prayad
Power, precision and acrobatic high kicks – the Southeast Asian sport of sepak takraw offers Prayad relief from the road - Directed by Habib Yazdi and Joseph Marra Watch on Psyche
How to handle jealous feelings
Jealousy can be a useful, insightful emotion – if you manage it well. Get curious about your jealousy to get a grip on it - by Carla Marie Manly Read on Psyche
PIKSI’s in Peril but You Can Help (guest post)
The Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institutes (PIKSI) in Boston aim to “broaden inclusion within professional philosophy.” In part because such efforts are currently
Naturalness: a useful principle, but not an absolute rule
There are two classes of problems that physicists often talk about that might leave you thinking, “geez, a physicist can never be satisfied, can they?”
NostradamusGPT: The Psychology of Prophecy and How to Break Free from the Prison of Predictive Technologies
This is our paradox: We know that uncertainty is the substrate of the universe, is the crucible of creativity, is the path to truth, and yet we spend our lives searching for certainty. The word auspicious derives from the Latin auspex — one who examines the flight of birds for omens and divinations of the future. Today, our birds are made of bits — wind-up larks of our own making we call algorithms — but they serve the same function: to let us believe that we can divine the future in order to respond to it; to sedate our anxieties… read article
Bringing Stoicism to Australia and New Zealand
📖 Order the latest book from Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic 10th Anniversary Edition: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10 ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 🤝 Join the largest community of Stoics ever in history and get exclusive bonuses at https://dailystoiclife.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic X: https://x.com/dailystoic Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic #Stoicism #DailyStoic #RyanHoliday
Probability Theory Pioneer Mark Kac on the Unpredictability of Creativity and the Two Types of Geniuses
"Creative people live in two worlds. One is the ordinary world which they share with others and in which they are not in any special way set apart from their fellow men. The other is private and it is in this world that the creative acts take place."
Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing on Breaking Free from the Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
This is the history of the world: revolutionaries turning into tyrants, leaders who claim to stand with the masses turning the individuals within them on each other, stirring certainties and self-righteousness to distract from the uncomfortable unknowns, from the great open question of what makes us and keeps us human, and human together. This is also the history of the world: artists — those lighthouses of the spirit — speaking truth to power, placing imagination ahead of ideology, the soul above the self, unselfing us into seeing each other,
The Problems We Have Today Aren’t New With Rich Cohen
📖 Order the latest book from Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic 10th Anniversary Edition: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10 ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 🤝 Join the largest community of Stoics ever in history and get exclusive bonuses at https://dailystoiclife.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic X: https://x.com/dailystoic Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic #Stoicism #DailyStoic #RyanHoliday
Musonius Rufus, Lectures - Innate Inclination Towards Virtue - Sadler’s Lectures
This lecture discusses key ideas from the ancient Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus' Lecture 2, in which he argues that human beings have an innate inclination towards virtue and even the "seeds of virtue" within them. He uses several lines of argument. The fact that certain lines of conduct are required or prohibited shows an assumption that people are responsible for developing and displaying virtue. As opposed to other types of skill or knowledge, where we don't hold people accountable for not knowing them, that of living well is one we do.
Untimely Reflections #48: Neema Parvini (Academic Agent) - Disenchanting Politics
Neema Parvini is well known on Youtube for his channel, Academic Agent, and for his para-academic work at the Academic Agency. He discusses a broad range of topics in political philosophy, and does not shy away from any topic, from elite theory to Marxism, from Julius Evola to Guy Debord. We discuss how he moved from literary theory to political philosophy; what politics really demands and why it is not the same as theorizing, the “take economy”, or expressions of individualism; we discuss the difference between Evola & Nietzsche;
You Never Graduate From Philosophy
📖 Order the latest book from Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic 10th Anniversary Edition: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10 ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 🤝 Join the largest community of Stoics ever in history and get exclusive bonuses at https://dailystoiclife.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic X: https://x.com/dailystoic Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic #Stoicism #DailyStoic #RyanHoliday
Musonius Rufus, Lectures - Demonstrations For One Matter - Sadler’s Lectures
This lecture discusses key ideas from the ancient Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus' Lecture 1, in which Musonius advances the claim that it is a sign that a teacher better understands their subject when they can present it with fewer rather than more arguments, proofs, or demonstrations. Likewise, on the part of the student, it is a sign that they have better intellectual capacities when they do not require as many demonstrations to understand the matter in question.
There Is Almost No Situation Where Hatred Helps
📖 Order the latest book from Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic 10th Anniversary Edition: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10 ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 🤝 Join the largest community of Stoics ever in history and get exclusive bonuses at https://dailystoiclife.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic X: https://x.com/dailystoic Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic #Stoicism #DailyStoic #RyanHoliday
Ep. 402: Plato Talks Homer: Hippias Minor and Ion (Part One)
On two short Platonic dialogues, written perhaps around a decade after Socrates' death in 399 BCE. Hippias Minor, where Hippias is (like many of Socrates' interlocutors) a Sophist. In this case, this means that Hippias presents himself as an expert in all sorts of practices (techne) including not only literary marvels but even making his own clothes. Do these things add up to virtue? Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion.
Why Saying No Is a Superpower
📖 Order the latest book from Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic 10th Anniversary Edition: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10 ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 🤝 Join the largest community of Stoics ever in history and get exclusive bonuses at https://dailystoiclife.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic X: https://x.com/dailystoic Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic #Stoicism #DailyStoic #RyanHoliday
10 Stoic Lessons It Took Me 10 Years to Understand
📖 Order the latest book from Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic 10th Anniversary Edition: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/the-daily-stoic-10 ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 🤝 Join the largest community of Stoics ever in history and get exclusive bonuses at https://dailystoiclife.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic X: https://x.com/dailystoic Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic #Stoicism #DailyStoic #RyanHoliday
Future of an Illusion
On this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss Freud's Future of an Illusion, a text that would become overshadowed by his subsequent publication, Civilization and Its Discontents. The hosts discuss the relationship between the two texts--paying close attention to how the drive becomes figured and then reconfigured in the latter text--but are careful to stamp out where Illusion departs in focus and in substance from one Freud's most well-known works.
PEL Presents Closereads: Gilbert Ryle on Self-Knowledge (Part One)
On The Concept of Mind (1949), Ch. 6, "Self-Knowledge." Ryle is arguing against a Cartesian take on mind that he sees as over-intellectualizing. In this case, it is not the case that every conscious act is itself an object of an act of consciousness: Not all consciousness is self-conscious, and introspection itself must involve a layer of mentality (the act of self-consciousness) that is not itself the object of an act of consciousness.
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