Readings
Things that changed how I think
Not a complete list. Not a ranked list. A list of things I keep returning to — books, papers, and essays that left a mark.
Philosophy of mind & consciousness
Douglas Hofstadter·1979
The book that made me take consciousness seriously as a philosophical problem. Dense, playful, and genuinely strange. I have never looked at a recursive structure the same way since.
David Chalmers·1996
Where the hard problem of consciousness gets its clearest articulation. Chalmers is careful in a way that forces you to be careful too.
Thomas Nagel·1974
Four pages that have generated decades of argument. The question it asks is simple. The implications are not.
Derek Parfit·1984
On personal identity, rationality, and what we owe to future people. Parfit writes philosophy the way a novelist writes — with genuine stakes.
Ethics & moral philosophy
Judith Jarvis Thomson·1971
The violinist argument. A masterclass in how to use a thought experiment — not to win a debate, but to isolate exactly what is at stake.
Adrienne Asch·1999
Changed how I think about the relationship between disability, identity, and the ethics of selection. Asch is precise where the debate usually is not.
Peter Singer·1979
I disagree with Singer on several things. That is exactly why this book is useful. It forces you to be clear about why you disagree.
Jonathan Haidt·2012
On why good people disagree about morality. The moral foundations framework is imperfect but the underlying insight — that moral reasoning is often post-hoc rationalisation — is important.
Technology, AI & society
Brian Christian·2020
The clearest account I have read of what AI alignment actually means in practice — not as an abstract technical problem but as a question about human values and their complexity.
Cathy O'Neil·2016
On how algorithms encode and amplify existing inequalities. Essential reading for anyone building systems that affect people's lives.
Alan Turing·1950
The paper that introduced the Turing Test. More interesting for the questions it raises than the test itself — Turing was thinking about imitation, identity, and what it means to think.
Jaron Lanier·2010
A dissent from within the tech world. Lanier's critique of how digital systems flatten human expression is more relevant now than when it was written.
On thinking, writing & the examined life
Rainer Maria Rilke·1929
The source of the line I keep returning to: live the questions now. Short enough to read in an afternoon. Long enough to think about for years.
Strunk & White·1959
I read this every year. Not because it is perfect — it is not — but because the discipline of omitting needless words is a discipline that extends beyond writing.
Daniel Kahneman·2011
On the two systems of thought and how they fail us. Changed how I think about my own reasoning — and how suspicious I am of my own intuitions.
Robert Nozick·1989
Philosophy written for living, not for academic journals. Nozick takes the big questions — love, death, meaning — and treats them with the seriousness they deserve.
History, culture & the world
Yuval Noah Harari·2011
Overreaches in places. Still one of the most useful frameworks I have for thinking about how human societies work and why they believe what they believe.
Amartya Sen·2005
On the tradition of public reasoning in Indian intellectual history. A corrective to narratives about India that flatten its complexity — and a reminder that argument is a form of respect.
Salman Rushdie·1981
Not philosophy, not non-fiction — but the book that most shaped how I think about identity, history, and the relationship between the personal and the political.
Jane Jacobs·1961
About cities, ostensibly. Actually about how complex systems work, why top-down planning fails, and what it means for a place to be alive.
This list grows. Last updated October 2026.