Four More Inspiring Philosophy Books for Your Christmas #160

Our big Christmas gifts guide, part 2

Looking for a really great present? Here are Daily Philosophy’s recommendations for four more of the most inspiring books for your Christmas presents list. See also the first part of these book recommendations and our list of the very best philosophy introductions!

Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

The holidays are upon us, but here in Hong Kong this just means a pile of exam papers under the Christmas tree and rampant commercial exploitation of any religious sentiment that might arise. So one better stays at home (advisable for Covid reasons anyway) to concentrate on the best things in life — great books.

(Those exams are also the reason for the delayed post this week. Bear with me. I’ll try to be more punctual in the new year).

This time I want to bring you the second part of my “inspirational books” recommendations list. With one exception, these are all Buddhism-inspired, but Buddhism today has become the lingua franca, the English of spirituality, so I feel that most of these books will also speak to those of us who don’t identify as Buddhists in the narrow sense.

Speaking of Buddhism, let me point you to a fascinating article by David E Cooper about a British soldier who turned into a Buddhism hermit in Sri Lanka: “Nanavira Thera. The hermit of Bundala.” Here is an excerpt:

The villagers knew the man, not as Captain Harold E. Musson, but by the name and title given him when ordained as a Buddhist monk in 1950 — Nanavira Thera (Elder). The son of a wealthy career army officer, Harold was born in 1920 and educated at English boarding schools before studying Italian and French at Cambridge. On leaving university, he joined up and was assigned to the Intelligence Corps, serving in Algeria and Italy, where his linguistic skills were used in interrogating prisoners of war. His knowledge of Italian also enabled him to read, at the end of the war, a remarkable book on Buddhism that he was later to translate and that decisively affected his future — Julius Evola’s The Doctrine of Awakening.

Explore the story of this unique and tragic life here on Daily Philosophy.

Last week we also saw another article on Stoicism, “The Stoic View of the Self,” which goes into one of the core principles of Stoic life advice:

For the Stoics, everything that happens to us seems to have a special significance that the same event wouldn’t have if it happened to someone else. When I miss the bus, I’m upset. When the dude in the blue suit over there misses the same bus, I’m not. This insight is at the core of the Stoic philosophy of life.

Read the full article here.

The Stoicism series will go on for a few more posts into the new year, because we still have many interesting aspects of the theory to talk about.

Early in the new year, I will also publish the book on Erich Fromm, augmented with a series of posts on the Frankfurt School and Herbert Marcuse, which fit quite nicely into the topic of how the structures of society affect our happiness.

This brings me to the last announcement of this year:

From next year on, there will be a reader-supported (paid) version of this newsletter in addition to the present, free one. The main point of this addition is to give those of you who’d like to support Daily Philosophy a way to do so. I’m sure that you understand that publishing between one and three long articles each week is quite a bit of work and that, in the long run, this needs to become financially sustainable for me. But I don’t want to dilute or make the free newsletter worse in any way, so I will just reserve particular articles for the paid version and keep most articles free. The subscription will also include free downloads of all Daily Philosophy books that will be published in the future, so you will get a huge value out of it in case you’re interested in the books. I will send more details around within the next two weeks.

And now, let’s go to the list of the next four super-inspirational books that you should seriously consider giving to your loved ones this Christmas!

1. Jill B. Taylor, My Stroke of Insight

Jill Bolte Taylor’s book would probably not even count as philosophy by most book categorisations. But I’ve always found its philosophical implications striking.

You see, when we talk about how to achieve happiness in life, there is only a limited number of ways we can go about it:

• Enjoying the world. This is the premise behind Epicureanism and Hedonism. Despite their differences in the details, both would agree that what makes us happy is the proper enjoyment of our lives and that we can live optimally happy lives by maximising this enjoyment.

• Taking part in the world as a virtuous person. This is the idea behind Aristotle’s theory and, in extension, Bertrand Russell’s and Richard Taylor’s versions of Eudaimonism. You can read all about it in the Daily Philosophy book “Live Happier with Aristotle” (which I wrote, as most of you will know). Get it here on Amazon.

• Embracing the faith. It is known that religious people are, statistically, happier than non-religious people.

• Renouncing one’s self. In different ways, but following a similar principle, this is what both Stoicism and Buddhism advocate as the way to a happier life. If what keeps us from being happy is an undue fixation on our own perceived interest, then letting go of our egotism and perceiving the connection between all living things might be a way out of life’s unhappiness.

• Changing the world to make it better. This is the approach of Marxism, of social psychology and political philosophy, of Erich Fromm and the Critical Theory school of thought. Perhaps what keeps us in misery is society; then, achieving a better, happier life is only possible if we change the way our societies work.

• Finally, changing one’s brain (by mechanical or chemical means) might be another way out of unhappiness. After all, we never perceive the world as it “really is.” The only thing we have access to are our inner mental states, the ways our brains perceive that reality. Taking drugs can alter this perception, as can, quite forcefully, brain injuries. Research on brain patients has shown that some brain injuries can bring about quite extraordinary changes in the character of patients, but also in the way they perceive the world. What if we could use this insight to alter our brains so that we become effectively happier?

This is what Jill Bolte Taylor’s book is really about. Jill Taylor is a brain researcher who, at one point in her life, had a stroke herself. Being a specialist, she was fully equipped to study the phenomenon of having a stroke from the inside, from the patient’s perspective. In addition, luckily for her and for us, her stroke did not damage any vital brain regions. Instead, it temporarily took out these parts of the brain that are responsible for logical thinking and the ego-centred perception of oneself.