Early Summer Reading

Early summer (non-fiction) reading recommendations:

Andreou, Chrisoula and Mark D. White, eds. The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination (2010). Professor White is one of my co-bloggers at The Literary Table and, in any case, I’m prone to buying any edited collection with contributions from either George Ainslie or Jon Elster.

Bartha, Paul F.A. By Parallel Reasoning: The Construction and Evaluation of Analogical Arguments (2010). Essential reading.

Bortolotti, Lisa. Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs (2010). Timely, to put it mildly.

Graham, George. The Disordered Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Mental Illness (2010). While the link is to a hardbound version, I was able to find it in paperback.

Nichols, John. The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism (2011). Should be read with Charles Nordhoff’s classic, The Communistic Societies of the United States... (New York: Schocken, 1965; originally published in 1875).

Radden, Jennifer. On Delusion (2011). Incidentally, both this and the Bortolotti book above are part of excellent publisher’s series: Oxford’s “International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry” and Routledge’s “Thinking in Action” respectively.

Silva, Padmasiri de Silva. An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology (4th ed., 2005). One need not be a Buddhist to benefit from the material in this classic work, accessible to non-specialists.

Tauber, Alfred I. Freud: The Reluctant Philosopher (2010). Tauber’s book, Patient Autonomy and the Ethics of Responsibility (2005) is one of the few indispensable books (another being Carl Schneider's 1998 volume, The Practice of Autonomy) for exploring the notion of autonomy in a clinical setting or within a generous rendering of bioethics. His latest book does not disappoint. Highly recommended!

Thornton, Tim. Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry (2007). I know, it’s a few years old, but you might have missed it.

Wright, Erik Olin. Envisioning Real Utopias (2010). See too all the other volumes in the Real Utopias series edited by Wright.