The reading
bibliotheca · ‘the collection of books’
The catalogue of texts that have shaped Res — and the people who wrote them. A working bibliography rather than a syllabus: what the system stands on, and what it keeps returning to.
Orientation
The library is a catalogue, not a reading list. It records the texts that have made the system what it is — works to which its arguments owe something, references that recur in its writing, sources held close enough to be worth listing by name.
It is not Knowledge — the atomic understandings extracted from reading. It is not a reading queue — the personal record of what has been read or is waiting to be. It is the bibliographic substrate that those other things attach to: the canonical record of works and authors, independent of any particular use being made of them.
The shape borrows pragmatically from library science: each entry is a Work(the abstract intellectual creation — Plato’s Republic) which may have one or more Editions (a particular translator, publisher, year). Authors and other contributors are first-class — one person writes many works, one work involves many people.
By form
c. 375 BC
Plato's central dialogue. A long argument about justice that becomes a long argument about everything: the soul, the city, education, art, and the form of the Good. The cave allegory sits in the middle of it.
justice · political philosophy · epistemology · ethics · 2 editions
c. 370 BC
Plato's dialogue on rhetoric, love, and writing. Contains the famous critique of the written word — that writing weakens memory and gives the appearance of wisdom without the substance.
rhetoric · writing · memory · love · 1 edition
c. 340 BC
Aristotle's long treatment of how to live well. Introduces the five intellectual virtues (epistēmē, technē, phronēsis, sophia, nous) and grounds the rest of practical philosophy in them.
ethics · virtue · practical wisdom · phronēsis · 1 edition
1748
Hume's mature restatement of his earlier Treatise. Section IV poses the problem of induction in its sharpest form: we have no non-circular ground for expecting the future to resemble the past.
epistemology · induction · causation · scepticism · 1 edition
1843
Mill's two-volume work on logic and method. Argues that all real inference is from particulars to particulars, and that the syllogism merely registers a generalisation already inductively achieved.
logic · induction · scientific method · philosophy of mind · 1 edition
c. 65 AD
One hundred and twenty-four letters of philosophical counsel from Seneca to his younger friend Lucilius. The most accessible entry into Stoic ethics in any language.
stoicism · ethics · friendship · death · 1 edition
1903–1908
Ten letters from Rilke to a young military cadet who had asked for an opinion on his poems. Rilke barely answers the question and instead writes about solitude, doubt, and what it is to take one's own work seriously.
poetics · solitude · vocation · doubt · 1 edition
c. 170–180 AD
Marcus Aurelius's private notebooks — twelve short books written to himself while on military campaign. Never intended for publication, which is why the same arguments recur and the same reminders get re-issued.
stoicism · ethics · self-discipline · mortality · 2 editions
c. 4th c. BC (traditional 6th c. BC)
Eighty-one short chapters, traditionally attributed to Laozi. The foundational text of philosophical Daoism — paradox, restraint, action through non-action.
daoism · wisdom literature · metaphysics · ethics · 1 edition
1912–1922
Ten elegies begun at Duino Castle in 1912 and finished a decade later at Muzot. Rilke's late masterwork — a sustained meditation on beauty, terror, the angelic, and the human.
poetry · metaphysics · death · beauty · 1 edition
c. 1600
Shakespeare's longest play. A prince, a ghost, a revenge that won't quite happen — and the most articulate procrastinator in the language.
tragedy · indecision · revenge · mortality · 1 edition
Dostoevsky's last novel. A patricide framing a debate about faith, freedom, and moral responsibility, conducted between three brothers who are also three positions on the question of how to live.
moral philosophy · faith · freedom · guilt · 1 edition
1912
Russell's short introduction to the central questions of philosophy. The chapter on induction makes the principle of uniformity explicit as the premise without which no inductive inference can run.
epistemology · induction · philosophy of mind · knowledge · 1 edition
1958
Polanyi's case for the indispensability of tacit knowledge in science and everyday skill. We know more than we can tell; the explicit account always rides on a larger implicit one.
philosophy of science · tacit knowledge · epistemology · skill · 1 edition
The seminal Tversky and Kahneman paper introducing the representativeness, availability, and anchoring heuristics. Founded the heuristics-and-biases programme.
cognitive psychology · judgement · heuristics · decision-making · 1 edition
1968
First volume of Knuth's projected seven-volume reference. Covers basic data structures and algorithms with mathematical depth and a long footnote tradition.
computer science · algorithms · data structures · engineering reference · 1 edition