4.01 avg rating — 4,064 ratings

"The only neuroscience book I've read so far that actually deals with consciousness as consciousness, ie, attempting an explanation of consciousness as it is lived. It's the real "Consciousness Explained" that Dennett wished he could've written but was too busy explaining away to fit his methodological and ontological presuppositions. It's a user-friendly tour of consciousness. It is unusual for a third-person perspective to have this effect, but it does quicken your sense of awareness into greater realization, which I think speaks volumes to its degree of fitness to lived experience. It's the kind of book that provides a turning point in self-awareness; I'd wager that it's one of those works that is essential to the whole project of self-knowledge. If this is the only neuroscience book on the topic that you ever read, you will have the basic insight that a neural perspective can offer you in constructing a personal biographical narrative that is actually in line with how the brain works. That is no small feat. "

4.34 avg rating — 984 ratings

"There is nothing quite like this synoptic, interdisciplinary probe into the human condition that Becker provides here. Meaning is the key. Meaning is as protective of human mental life as atmosphere is of physical life in general. Becker's work, in general, attempts to lift the scrim ever so slightly and take the last step into knowledge unadorned by anthropomorphic ifs and buts. Sort of like a modern-day Nietzsche, really, but he brings in a wealth of evidence from the various human sciences of his day into a synthesis in order to inform his philosophical exploration.

(Incidentally, this shows a way to powerfully use a synoptic philosophical perspective as the catalyst for forming new interdisciplinary connections)."

4.22 avg rating — 1,699 ratings

"A good argument for placing our personal life narratives into the much larger context of historical development of inherited meanings, as well as an analysis of the ontologies that those meanings open up - and conceal."

4.20 avg rating — 1,320 ratings

"One powerful attempt to pop the bubble of mind and retrace its roots back into the common soil of life-process. This aspect of self-awareness that deals with the continuity of life is sorely needed today, as the larger context to compass all myopic humanisms, subjectivisms, or relativisms. There is no way to really realize you've always been out there than by going through the tour Maturana guides you on, by showing you the way cognition, far from separating us from the larger unfolding of life, is in fact an integral offshoot thereof. "

4.20 avg rating — 605 ratings

"Since our whole life is lived in a cage (or garden, whichever be your choice) of symbols, it would behoove us to start asking the question of self-knowledge by looking at this screen that - for better or for worse - filters all our access to reality. "

4.02 avg rating — 455 ratings

"The title says it all. The aim of self-knowledge, is, after all, to go beyond that momentary, surface flicker of awareness, and peer into the supporting background... which is precisely what this book is about."

4.08 avg rating — 1,287 ratings

"Here's the most focused tool for conceptual analysis I've ever found. It's not the final systemic formulation it presents itself as, but it does offer a powerful new cognitive-science-informed methodology for the analysis of concepts, worldviews, and for narrating the history of ideas according to cognitive universals (ie, not the individual historian's whim). And since conceptual analysis is really the most generalizable metacognitive skill/tool... what more important tool could you put in your self-knowledge toolkit?"

4.26 avg rating — 1,476 ratings

"A book that offers a powerful alternative to both the traditional humanist and theological contexts for the telling of our personal life-narratives with an ecological one. "

4.27 avg rating — 807 ratings

"One of those fundamental works of paradigm-redescription. Ie, that tries to reformulate the fundamental concepts by which we gain background perspective on ANY issue. I find works that target this order of understanding really exciting. They literally shift the grounds on which we stand whenever we formulate any thought, any interpretation of experience, and any methodology."

4.34 avg rating — 14,006 ratings

"Probably the best narrative guide to the making of your own coherent life narrative you could find. Difficult reading? Of course, but this is because a reading that tries to make you see that through which you see all things will inevitably be difficult. It models for you how to make a whole out of the fragments and contingencies of experience, an immanent, emergent whole - in the absence of any external ontological frameworks."

3.73 avg rating — 22,999 ratings

"The ultimate critique of biographical form through fiction. The fine irony that cracks through this narrative monster shows the far remove from experience we are always at in every formulation, every bit of perspective-taking, every interpretation. Experience slips past us relentlessly. Sterne's like an inverse Proust, I suppose."

4.13 avg rating — 61,012 ratings

"Castorp (esp in the Snow passage) is probably THE modern emblem of the initiate into knowledge, such as is available to a historical epoch that has lost all connection to cosmic orders and cohering ontologies. "

4.09 avg rating — 3,100 ratings

4.27 avg rating — 4,897 ratings

"A powerful exploration of historical consciousness (much needed in as historically illiterate an age as ours is), as well as a drama of the "mind forg'd manacles" that Blake spoke of. If you want to see once and for all that symbols are not some airy, harmless philosophical exercise, but ghastly real things, and most terrible when materialized on a world scale, then read this. It is really a window into the darker side of our symbolic existence. "

4.10 avg rating — 42,228 ratings

3.96 avg rating — 42,096 ratings

"The book that traced the formal outlines along which modern consciousness still situates itself, perspectivally, in the world. If you want to know who you are, know how you got here, by walking down the trails set down by those who came before. "

4.09 avg rating — 9,667 ratings

"A completion of the CPR - bringing theoretical consciousness down to the earth of apprehension (esp aesthetic). Kant's picture of reason sketched out in the first critique gains some flesh here. "

4.18 avg rating — 6,410 ratings

"You know how everyday experience is just a diffuse bunch of slop that sloshes through your fingers? Well, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger are the guys to help give everyday experience a more solid, orderly outline. As phenomenologists, they look for the general outlines by which we can make maximal sense and coherency out of everyday experience. If you use their works as a sort of meditation manual, with time, you will acquire that kind of ordered perspective that more fully integrates experience as it comes, IMO. "

4.05 avg rating — 27,680 ratings

4.26 avg rating — 15,745 ratings

4.19 avg rating — 304 ratings

4.05 avg rating — 15,797 ratings

4.24 avg rating — 2,072 ratings

3.97 avg rating — 605 ratings

"This little work of Cassirer's offers nothing less than an argument against most of our current most posh approaches to self-knowledge, and helps illuminate the far larger, historical AND formal contexts of understanding needed to make sense of who we are. Best argument against our culture's subjectivist, experientialist approach to self-knowledge. Who are you? You are this formally circumscribed world in consciousness. To know the formal parameters within which your consciousness patterns itself is to know yourself. He approaches the topic critically, transcendentally (like Kant), but also historically. A different inquiry from, say, Lakoff's inquiry into cognitive fundamentals, because it deals with formal fundamentals.

Cassirer's entire work is great because it offers a model of reason that far transcends the scope of the one we inherited from the post-Russell, logicist, formalist, Anglo-American tradition. Cassirer tries to show that rationality comes in many different modalities, hence his analysis of language, art, myth, etc, topics which are usually shunned from the purview of rationality in the Anglo-American formalist tradition. Cassirer's work seeks a model of reason that does indeed do justice to ALL its modalities."

4.15 avg rating — 126 ratings

4.09 avg rating — 89,155 ratings

"Plato's theory of the fundamental human drive to know - how eros morphs into logos - is as timely now as it ever was. In fact, it will always be timely."

4.12 avg rating — 7,400 ratings

"See all substantiality fall through the cracks in this radical foreground of our reality-constructive filters. Foucault's genius is to foreground the filter of this filthy window we look out through to such an extent that it is hard to believe we could ever see the garden outside. See if you can see a filter behind the filter, or anything left peeking through. "

3.60 avg rating — 5,833 ratings

4.19 avg rating — 78,425 ratings

"The Underground Man is the ultimate outsider consciousness - as Barrett argued, the human remainder that can't fit into any of the grand schemes and systems of modernity. He's Everyman, in short. To the extent that we haven't identified with our given slot in the symbolic-institutional order of the day, he is a placeholder for us, as embodied, alienated, existents."

4.28 avg rating — 340,380 ratings

3.94 avg rating — 14,352 ratings

4.18 avg rating — 7,897 ratings

"Fragments gleaming might just reflect the whole better than an airtight closure, a system."

4.28 avg rating — 1,158 ratings

4.18 avg rating — 47,059 ratings

"The whole issue of sexuality and identity. Here it is."

3.64 avg rating — 206 ratings

4.14 avg rating — 53,150 ratings

3.99 avg rating — 73,582 ratings

"Brilliant prototypical biographical narrative because it shows how (Christian) ontology seeps into and inwardly informs, coheres, a biographical trajectory. "

4.07 avg rating — 11,847 ratings

4.23 avg rating — 21,974 ratings

3.98 avg rating — 278 ratings

4.40 avg rating — 1,879 ratings

4.47 avg rating — 981 ratings

4.43 avg rating — 794 ratings

3.95 avg rating — 14,207 ratings