The following books and articles I find interesting and/or important. They have mostly to do with understanding why we are what we are, and why we do what we do.
"Upheavals of though - The intelligence of emotions" by Martha C. Nussbaum
This is a book that seeks to explain the role and function of emotions in our lives.
Are emotions simply animal energies or impulses with no connections to our thoughts? Or are they rather suffused with intelligence and discernment, and thus a source of deep understanding and awareness?
In this book, Martha Nussbaum argues that emotions are not alien forces but highly discriminating responses to what is of value and importance to us. The emotion is our body's way of telling us the significance and affect of a particular situation, and in this way helps us to come up with the apropriate response. This way of thinking neatly dovetails with that of Antonio Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness; Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain).
To be continued....
"The man who knew too much", Alan Turing and the invention of the computer, by David Leavitt.
A well-researched account of the life and accomplishments, and, alas, the pain and sorrow of one of the greatest practical thinkers of recent history.
It can be argued that Alan Turing was an aberration. Where others are reasonably balanced to cope with both the social and practical requirements of life, Alan Turing had little to no social abilities but on the other hand was a prodigious thinker cranking out solutions for problems. He is known as the man who cracked the German secret codes during WWII, a contribution to an early and victorious end of the war that can hardly be overestimated. He laid the foundation for modern computer theory - and practice, building vacuum-tube-based monsters that had the absolute novelty of a stored program, that could be altered for the task at hand. But he almost never saw his projects through; once the initial problems were solved, and the building well on the way, he was already losing interest and engaging in the next project.
He was a lonely man, who's work was brutally cut short when, as an openly gay man in a time when homosexuality was officially illegal in Britain, he was arrested and sentenced to a 'treatment' amounting to chemical castration, which ultimately drove him to suicide...
