Comments Elsewhere

I been tagged by Jonathan Wilbur and Andy Bass. I’m bad at these things, because once I get rolling I’m bad at cutting my list short. That’s why my list is going to be lucky 13 instead of 10. Instructions: “In your status, list 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes and do not think too hard. They do not have to be the ‘right’ books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way. Tag 10 friends including me so I can see your list.” 1. NICOMACHEAN ETHICS, Aristotle. 2. THE POLITICS OF REALITY, Marilyn Frye. 3. A WRINKLE IN TIME, Madeleine L’Engle. Got me on the whole sci-fi thing, and the whole dystopian literature thing, and in retrospect it is just astonishingly beautiful. 4. INTRODUCTION TO LOGIC, Irving M. Copi. I know the proof system is incomplete. Oh well. It’s here because it was an old, used copy of Copi, dating back to the 1960s, that I used to teach myself Logic back when I was in high school and supposed to be learning something else. 5. PRINCIPIA ETHICA, G. E. Moore. 6. Dialectics & Liberty series (AYN RAND: THE RUSSIAN RADICAL, MARX, HAYEK AND UTOPIA, and TOTAL FREEDOM) by Chris Sciabarra. Convinced me that left-wing market libertarianism is possibly a thing. 7. “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. “So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? . . . Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.” 8. THE SILMARILLION, J.R.R. Tolkien. Oh God, don’t get me started. 9. FOUNDATION, Isaac Asimov. (Or the first three FOUNDATION collections collectively, if you like. I don’t care for most of the later novels, and was affected by them mostly in gaining a distaste for forced continuity mergers.) 10. LETTERS FROM A WAR ZONE, Andrea Dworkin. 11. WITTGENSTEIN, AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS AND THE LOGIC OF ACTION, Roderick Long. (MS.). Introduced me to anti-psychologism, praxeological methods, and Roderick Long. 12. ALL ON FIRE: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON AND THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY. By Henry Mayer. 13. LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME, by James Loewen. Of course, when I read this book many years ago, it somewhat affected my views on a number of specific points about American history, and about questions on the perspective from which history is told. But it also, beyond that, it really radically shifted how I think about teaching, and about the nature of textbooks.