A short reading list

On a discussion list DO wrote the following:

"The sapient brain continues to evolve, and teaching methods continue
to improve, but the underlying hypothesis of traditional liberalism
(John Locke & Voltaire), and of Marxism, that the human brain is a
blank slate or general-purpose computer waiting to be programmed or re-
programmed, is biologically preposterous."

And  I replied:

Locke and Voltaire might be liberals (traditional??) but they're not so much philosophers as popularizers. The blank slate thing is the hallmark of mechanical  materialists - empiricists like Hume and a lot of the enlightenment encyclopedians. It has NOTHING WHATEVER to do with Marx's ideas. Stalin's social-darwinism is related to it, of course, but that has NOTHING WHATEVER to do with Marx's ideas, either. D, I think you should take time off from reading folks like Lakoff and dig into the mother lode of modern ideas. For me this means the following short reading list.

Kant:                 Critique of Pure Reason

Hegel:                Phenomenology of the Spirit

                           Science of Logic

Marx:                The German Ideology - part 1, Feuerbach (including the Hegel section)

                           The Grundrisse 

Too skeletal? ;-)

Add before:   

Machiavelli:     The Prince

Hobbes:            Leviathan

Rousseau:        The Social Contract

Include:

Kant:                  Critiques of Practical Reason, and of Judgment

Marx/Engels:   The Communist Manifesto

Engels:               Anti-Dühring

Marx:                 Capital I-III and Theories of Surplus Value

Add afterwards:

Freud:             The Interpretation of Dreams

Lenin:              The State and Revolution

Trotsky:          The Permanent Revolution, and The Revolution Betrayed

Chomsky:       Cartesian Linguistics        

All of them (and the idea of  evolution which I haven't "crystallized" in a single book recommendation cos that shouldn't be necessary) are concerned with ripping away illusion, false appearances, and exposing the real elements and forces at work in our lives and our world. With the possible semi-empiricist exceptions of Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant. Kant in fact going too far the other way and declaring impossible the unveiling of the hidden depths of the Thing-in-Itself. The least empirical hard-nosed empiricist you can imagine :-)

For a light-hearted frame to all this, I'd recommend Lucretius On the Nature of Things 

"Sed tua me virtus tamen et sperata voluptas
Suavis amicitiae quemvis efferre laborem
Suadet et inducit noctes vigilare serenas
Quaerentem dictis quibus et quo carmine demum
Clara tuae possim praepandere lumina menti
Res quibus occultas penitus convisere possis.
Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
Non radii solis neque lucida tela diei
Discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque." 

rounded off by Sartre's Critique de la Raison Dialectique.

The alternative? Being consigned in perpetuity to Intellectual Hell - a dim, draughty, library with hard, splintery, rickety chairs, flickering lamps, traffic noise, machines throbbing and whining at unpredictable frequencies and volumes, musty air, moaning twitching whimpering snivelling readers radiating chill not warmth, with inaccessible and scrapy loudspeakers pouring out Stephen Hawkings reading the collected works of Jacques Lacan. For ever.

Cheers

Chops