Reading Plan

My discussion with AI on ready philosophers that agree and disagree with my philosophical feelings and intuitions. 

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🗓️ Month-by-Month Breakdown

Month 1 – The Moral Practice of Attention

• 📘 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

• ➕ Optional: Her essay “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’” (available online)

• ✍️ Prompt: “What do I see clearly, and what do I distort? What does love require of my attention?”

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Month 2 – Creating Your Own Values

• 📘 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

• ➕ Optional: Walter Kaufmann’s intro or audio lectures

• ✍️ Prompt: “What inherited values do I still follow, even if they no longer serve me?”

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Month 3 – Feeling as Knowing

• 📘 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (intro + selected chapters on love and compassion)

• ➕ Optional: Her The Therapy of Desire (skim opening if you like)

• ✍️ Prompt: “What emotions teach me the most about how to live? When have I ignored them?”

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Month 4 – On Power, Control, and Freedom

• 📘 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (read Part 1 & 3)

• ➕ Optional: YouTube series “Foucault Explained Simply”

• ✍️ Prompt: “Where am I internalizing control? Where do I mistake freedom for conformity?”

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Month 5 – Kindness as Rebellion

• 📘 Albert Camus, The Plague

• ➕ Optional: His essay The Myth of Sisyphus

• ✍️ Prompt: “What do I persist in doing, even when it seems absurd or thankless?”

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Month 6 – Moral Complexity in Practice

• 📘 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

• ➕ Optional: Short podcast “The Banality of Evil Explained” (BBC, In Our Time)

• ✍️ Prompt: “What decisions do I make thoughtlessly? What systems do I uphold?”

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Month 7 – Dignity, Flourishing, and Capability

• 📘 Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities

• ➕ Optional: Compare your own values with her 10 Central Capabilities

• ✍️ Prompt: “What do I need—not want—to truly flourish?”

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Month 8 – Sacred Simplicity

• 📘 Simone Weil, Waiting for God

• ➕ Optional: Gravity and Grace (as daily devotional fragments)

• ✍️ Prompt: “When was the last time I paid full attention without trying to fix anything?”

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Month 9 – Play, Doubt, and Identity

• 📘 Zadie Smith, Feel Free (selected essays: “On Optimism and Despair,” “Northwest London Blues,” etc.)

• ➕ Optional: Intimations (shorter, meditative)

• ✍️ Prompt: “What do I know for sure? What am I still figuring out about myself?”

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Month 10 – Political Joy and Personal Ethics

• 📘 Camus, The Rebel (skim core sections; don’t get lost in the references)

• ✍️ Prompt: “How do I resist harm—not with anger, but with dignity?”

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Month 11 – Seeing Others Without Ego

• 📘 Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics (selected essays)

• ✍️ Prompt: “What kind of life would be good enough? Who gets to decide?”

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Month 12 – Integration Month

• 📘 Revisit highlights, write a reflective essay or creative piece.

• ✍️ Prompt: “What have I kept? What have I discarded? What am I building now?”

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📓 Tools for Engagement

Tool	Description
Journal	Keep one thread for summaries, another for personal reflections. Don’t combine.
Margin Method	In physical books, mark: ! (surprise), ✱ (important), ? (confusion), ♡ (resonance).
Quarterly Check-in	Revisit your values every 3 months. What has shifted? What’s firmer?

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🔄 Variations

If time is short:

• Read the first 2 chapters and a final section of longer works.

• Use audiobooks or summaries to supplement tougher texts (esp. Foucault, Arendt).

• Substitute fiction (Murdoch’s The Bell or Camus’s The Fall) when in need of variety.

If time is plentiful:

• Add companion thinkers: bell hooks (All About Love), Emmanuel Levinas, or Rebecca Solnit.

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Would you like this turned into a printable one-pager, spreadsheet tracker, or Notion template? I can prepare that for you next.

📚 Reading Brief: Philosophers Who Will Deepen Your Thinking

I asked an AI to review my blogs and suggest a brief on philosophers who align with my beliefs.  

1. Iris Murdoch – The Moral Life as Clear Vision

🧭 Contribution:

Murdoch believes that goodness begins with attention—not as a fuzzy feeling, but as the rigorous, almost sacred act of seeing others clearly, without distortion by ego or habit.

📘 Reading List:

• The Sovereignty of Good – her central work on moral perception, love, and the unselfing power of beauty.

• Existentialists and Mystics – essays that tie art, morality, and spiritual seriousness together.

• The Nice and the Good – a novel that explores these themes through character and plot.

🌱 How She Deepens You:

• Your emphasis on attention and presence becomes not just personal, but moral.

• Your attraction to joy and beauty is reframed as serious moral training—not escapism.

• Murdoch gives you a framework for humility without self-erasure.

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.”

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2. Martha Nussbaum – Flourishing, Emotion, and Human Dignity

🧭 Contribution:

Nussbaum works at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, literature, and justice. She brings ancient ideas (especially from Aristotle and the Stoics) into modern contexts—defining what it means to live well with others.

📘 Reading List:

• The Fragility of Goodness – on how chance, emotion, and tragedy affect moral life.

• Upheavals of Thought – a deep exploration of how emotions carry ethical knowledge.

• Creating Capabilities – outlines her “capabilities approach” to human dignity, justice, and policy.

🌱 How She Deepens You:

• She shows that being a good person includes feeling deeply, not transcending emotion.

• She reframes your value of thriving not as productivity, but as capability—the real freedom to be and do.

• Nussbaum is especially clarifying on the moral role of literature and imagination.

“Compassion is not a weakness. It is a form of moral intelligence.”

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3. Simone Weil – Attention as Moral & Spiritual Act

🧭 Contribution:

Weil gives an almost mystical intensity to ideas of care, attention, and justice. She argues that true attention is the basis of both education and love—and that justice requires absolute humility.

📘 Reading List:

• Gravity and Grace – fragments and aphorisms on suffering, grace, and the soul.

• Waiting for God – letters and reflections on moral philosophy and the divine.

• The Need for Roots – more political, but useful for understanding belonging and obligation.

🌱 How She Deepens You:

• She gives spiritual weight to your attentiveness—without requiring religion.

• She shows that moral clarity requires silence, stillness, and surrender—not assertion.

• If you're drawn to care work, caregiving, or quiet moral labor, Weil affirms that work’s sacredness.

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”

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4. Albert Camus – Clarity, Joy, and Moral Rebellion in an Absurd World

🧭 Contribution:

Camus famously said the world is absurd, but his response isn’t nihilism—it’s lucid revolt and ethical decency without illusions. He affirms joy, honesty, and kindness even when the universe offers no reward.

📘 Reading List:

• The Myth of Sisyphus – Camus’s core text on absurdism and personal meaning.

• The Plague – a novel that turns public health crisis into an allegory of moral resistance.

• The Rebel – a deeper dive into political and moral rebellion.

🌱 How He Deepens You:

• You want to be happy and a good person; Camus says: do it anyway—even when the world doesn’t cooperate.

• He encourages joy, clarity, and moral limits in the face of darkness—a defiant ethical light.

• He frames resistance not as aggression but as steadfast decency.

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

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5. Zadie Smith – Literary Attention & Ethical Self-Interrogation

🧭 Contribution:

Smith is primarily a novelist and essayist, but her work is quietly philosophical—exploring identity, cultural responsibility, and the slipperiness of the self.

📘 Reading List:

• Feel Free – essays on writing, belief, identity, and being a good person in public.

• Intimations – essays written during the pandemic; reflective, compact, humane.

🌱 How She Deepens You:

• She affirms the role of self-questioning as part of moral life.

• She blends humor, doubt, and dignity in ways that make moral reflection feel livable.

• Smith is a good companion for ethical growth in a noisy, digital, pluralistic world.

“Time is how you spend your love.”

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🧱 Summary Table: Strengtheners of Your Values

Philosopher	Deepens Which Value(s)?	Method
Iris Murdoch	Moral attention, love, clarity	Moral vision as "unselfing"
Martha Nussbaum	Compassion, flourishing, dignity	Emotions as ethical knowledge
Simone Weil	Radical attentiveness, humility	Justice through silent presence
Albert Camus	Integrity, rebellion, joy	Meaning in the face of absurdity
Zadie Smith	Self-awareness, ethical doubt	Artful reflection through story

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🪞 Why These Philosophers Matter to You

You’re not looking for abstraction for its own sake—you’re trying to live well. These philosophers help by:

• Affirming your instinct to care, attend, and reflect.

• Giving moral weight to presence, emotion, and art.

• Offering resistance to despair or shallow thinking—without requiring dogma.

They don’t hand you rules; they give you tools. They are companions in the kind of life you already want to lead—just with more depth, courage, and clarity.

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Would you like this turned into a reading sequence with journaling prompts, or integrated with a broader life philosophy document? I can also help you cross-map this list with the challenging thinkers, if you're looking to build a “philosophical diet.”

📚 Reading Brief: Philosophers Who Will Challenge You

I asked an ai to read over my blogs and suggest some philosphers that will challenge me. 

1. Friedrich Nietzsche – The Radical of Value Creation

🔎 Challenge:

Nietzsche will challenge your commitment to compassion, duty, and shared morality by questioning whether those values serve your life—or suppress it. He argues that much of what we call “goodness” comes from resentment, conformity, or fear rather than strength or creativity.

📘 Reading List:

• The Gay Science – poetic, aphoristic, full of joy and provocation. Nietzsche at his most exploratory.

• Beyond Good and Evil – deeper critique of moral systems, Christian humility, and the idea of objective truth.

• Thus Spoke Zarathustra – semi-narrative, allegorical philosophy. Beautiful but intense.

💥 How You'll Be Challenged:

• You value kindness; Nietzsche asks if it’s masking timidity or self-denial.

• You cherish meaning; he asks if it’s a lie you inherited.

• You want to thrive; he says: then create new values, don’t inherit them.

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."
—Nietzsche, but also a pivot: what happens when the why dissolves?

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2. Hannah Arendt – The Politics of Thoughtlessness

🔎 Challenge:

Arendt will challenge your idea of being “a good person” as sufficient. She warns that evil isn’t only found in malice—it can arise from ordinary people failing to think, follow orders, or avoid difficult conversations.

📘 Reading List:

• The Human Condition – analysis of work, labor, action, and how public life creates moral consequences.

• Eichmann in Jerusalem – study of the “banality of evil,” where she controversially argued that Nazi official Eichmann was less a monster than a bureaucrat.

• Responsibility and Judgment (essays) – condensed reflections on how moral action emerges from thought.

💥 How You'll Be Challenged:

• You write about kindness, attention, presence; Arendt will ask if you’ve taken enough responsibility for the structures you live in.

• She will push you from the personal to the political, from the emotional to the consequential.

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

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3. Michel Foucault – Power, Selfhood, and Hidden Control

🔎 Challenge:

Foucault doesn’t believe in fixed “truths.” He believes our very ideas of normality, health, goodness, and even selfhoodare shaped by power systems: schools, prisons, hospitals, bureaucracies. You are being shaped—even when you think you're choosing.

📘 Reading List:

• Discipline and Punish – how modern society uses surveillance, norms, and institutions to control bodies.

• The History of Sexuality (Vol. 1) – on how even liberation discourses are shaped by systems of power.

• The Care of the Self – a late work where he turns toward ancient philosophy and ethical self-cultivation.

💥 How You'll Be Challenged:

• You value moral clarity and reflection. Foucault will ask:

  • Where did those values come from?

  • Who taught you to think this way?

  • Is “care” another kind of discipline?

• He wants you to suspect the very framework of your thinking—especially what looks neutral or natural.

"Where there is power, there is resistance."
He doesn't mean rebellion—he means even your joy and discipline are part of a structure. Will you see it?

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🧱 Summary Table: Challenge at a Glance

Philosopher	Primary Challenge	Core Question
Nietzsche	Challenges inherited morality and moral humility	Are your values life-affirming, or are they survival mechanisms?
Arendt	Challenges the sufficiency of private virtue	Are you thinking politically, or simply living comfortably?
Foucault	Challenges the neutrality of your self and choices	Who shaped your “freedom”? What systems do you embody?

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🎯 Why These Challenges Matter to You

You’ve expressed a desire to:

• Be a good person (Arendt asks what kind of good, and to whom).

• Take advantage of your opportunities (Nietzsche pushes you to define that ambition on your own terms).

• Be happy and thriving (Foucault questions whether your definition of “thriving” is freely chosen or culturally imposed).

Together, these thinkers don’t destroy your personal philosophy—they deepen it. They force you to face the unknowns and power dynamics beneath your certainties.

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Would you like a reading plan—light to heavy, with pacing and reflection prompts? Or a framework to journal your responses to each? Happy to build either.

Being Mortal

by Atul Gawande

Eventually we all hit the time in our lives when our bodies stop healing. Can we accept this? What resources will be available to us? How we approach medicine and treatment has to change at this point. Why undergo invasive treatments if you will never fully recover? 

Many doctors don't want to deal with the fact that there comes a time when we will never fully recover from an illness. Unintentional, they advocate for expensive treatments that ultimately won't make a difference. 

This book goes through the history of the assisted living home, the differences between geriatrics and regular medicine. and the shortage of geriatrics specialists that we face.

How to Know a Person

By David Brooks

Lately my mind has been focused on attention and attending to others—as a way to communicate and as morality.

This brings to mind the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I've seen people engage in exhausting text arguments. Note to self: accusing someone of being a "typical Liberal" or a "typical Conservative" doesn't really help anyone communicate.

I have my own struggles here. I'm more of an introvert and enjoy my downtime. But engaging with people—getting to know them—is healthy and good. It's a skill I've been trying to develop for years.

When you get to know them, actually get to know them, see them, understand them—this has to be a safe process. Your goal can't be to get to know someone in order to change them.

Now getting to Brook's wonderful book... Brooks has a deep curiosity about people and he shares the this process. No easy summary here. You have to patiently listen to people, ask open questions, and earn the privilege of deeply knowing someone.

"To be able to understand people and be present for them in their experience-- that's the most important thing in the world."

"Experience is not what happens to you, it's what you do with what happens to you."

"Nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous" Murdoch writes "grow by looking."

"During the generative life task, people try to find some way to be of service to the world. One either achieves generatively or one falls into stagnations. Vallant defines generatively as the capacity to foster and guide the next generations."

"Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly thing they are finished."

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

By David S Landes

A book that tackles the thorny questions "Why did the western world, and its practices, come to dominate the world economy." The book goes through the analysis and narrative of many economies to glean what when right and what went wrong. 

The question is not easily answered and would have different answers depending on which century you asked it in. The relevant question three hundred years ago may have been Why did Spain and Portugal..." The question in the next century may be "Why did China..."

Quotes to remember...

"Three factors cannot coexist (1) a marked disparity of power; (2) private access to the instruments of power; and (3) equality of groups or nations. Where one group is strong enough to push another around and stands to gain by it, it will do so. Even if the sate would abstain from aggression, companies and individuals will not wait for permission. Rather they will act in their own interest, dragging others along, including the state."

"but what mattered in the long run (never forget the long run) were those small low-risk gains that add up and do not disappoint."

"I am skeptical, however, of this effort to conflate personal confusion with larger causation."

"No one likes to be told (reminded) that his failures are due to his failings; or that his sources of pride are vices rather than virtues."

"Don't do as I did; do as I can afford to do now. The advice does not always sit well."

"One cannot always discern the boundaries between curiosity, exploration and outright spying. A leading student of the subject writes that "many foreigners... gathered useful intelligence without ever doing anything underhand.:

"Injustice perceived is injustice felt. Men are not moved by bread alone."

"The problem with such rationality is that today's good sense may be tomorrow's mistake. Development is long; logic, short. The economic theory is static, based on conditions of the day. The process is dynamic, building on today's absence to tomorrow's abundance."

On giving large loans to developing countries...

"Cynic may say that dependency doctrines have been Latin America's most successful exports. Meanwhile they are bad for effort and moral, By fostering a morbid propensity to find fault with everyone but oneself, they promote economic impotence. Even if they were true, it would be better to stow them.."

"violence is the quintessential, testosterone expression of mail entitlement."

"British management saw bonus systems as a way of economizing on management. Never underestimate the leisure preference of bosses, any more than of workers."