BOOKS 2 THINK
I would like to share some of the books I have on my digital collection with you.
Mostly are free download or public domain and you can download from the web in PDF or EPUB
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its influences on morals and Happiness
Author: William Godwin
Intro:
Godwin’s best known work of political theory.
Written in the early years of the French Revolution before the Terror had begun, Godwin provides a devastating critique of unjust government institutions and optimistically proposes that individuals not the state can best provide for their needs.
He believed that political change could best be brought about gradually and as a result of free discussion in small communities. This work has inspired many generations of radical thinkers.
VOL 1 & 2Written in the early years of the French Revolution before the Terror had begun, Godwin provides a devastating critique of unjust government institutions and optimistically proposes that individuals not the state can best provide for their needs.
He believed that political change could best be brought about gradually and as a result of free discussion in small communities. This work has inspired many generations of radical thinkers.
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An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Author: John Lock
Intro:
An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a work by John Locke concerning
the foundation of human knowledge and understanding. It first appeared in 1689 (although dated 1690) with the printed title An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding.
He describes the mind at birth as a blank slate (tabula rasa, although he did not use those actual words) filled later through experience.
The essay was one of the principal sources of empiricism in modern philosophy, and influenced many enlightenment philosophers, such as David Hume and George Berkeley.
Vol 1 to 4
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Treatise of Human Nature
Author: David Hume
Intro:
A Treatise of Human Nature is a book by Scottish philosopher David Hume, first published (in parts) from the end of 1738 to 1740.
The full title of the Treatise is A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. It contains the following sections:
Book 1: "Of the Understanding" – An investigation into human cognition. Important statements of Skepticism.
Book 2: "Of the Passions" – A treatment of emotions and free will.
Book 3: "Of Morals" – A treatment of moral ideas, justice, obligations, benevolence.
Vol 1 to 3
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Brave New World
Author: Aldous Huxley
Intro:
Huxley wrote Brave New World in his house in Sanary-sur-Mer, France in the four months from May to August 1931.
By this time, Huxley had already established himself as a writer and social satirist.
He was a contributor to Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines, and had published a collection of his poetry (The Burning Wheel, 1916) and four successful satirical novels:
Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928). Brave New World was Huxley's fifth novel and first dystopian work.
Huxley said that Brave New World was inspired by the utopian novels of H. G. Wells, including A Modern Utopia (1905) and Men Like Gods (1923).
Wells' hopeful vision of the future's possibilities gave Huxley the idea to begin writing a parody of the novel, which became Brave New World. He wrote in a letter to Mrs. Arthur Goldsmith, an American acquaintance, that he had "been having a little fun pulling the leg of H. G. Wells," but then he "got caught up in the excitement of [his] own ideas."
Unlike the most popular optimist utopian novels of the time, Huxley sought to provide a frightening vision of the future.
Huxley referred to Brave New World as a "negative utopia", somewhat influenced by Wells' own The Sleeper Awakes (dealing with subjects like corporate tyranny and behavioural conditioning) and the works of D. H. Lawrence.
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Cultural Criticism (Britain)
Author: Aldous Huxley
Intro:
Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, into a family that included some of the most distinguished members of that part of the English ruling class made up of the intellectual elite. Aldous' father was the son of Thomas Henry Huxley, a great biologist who helped develop the theory of evolution.
His mother was the sister of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the novelist; the niece of Matthew Arnold, the poet; and the granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, a famous educator and the real-life headmaster of Rugby School who became a character in the novel Tom Brown's Schooldays.
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Heaven and Hell
Author: Aldous Huxley
Intro:
Heaven and Hell is a philosophical essay by Aldous Huxley published in 1956. Huxley derived the title from William Blake's book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The essay discusses the relationship between bright, colorful objects, geometric designs, psychoactives, art, and profound experience.
Heaven and Hell metaphorically refer to what Huxley conceives to be two contrary mystical experiences that potentially await when one opens the "doors of perception"—not only in a mystical experience, but in prosaic life.
Huxley uses the term antipodes to describe the "regions of the mind" that one can reach via meditation, vitamin deficiencies, self-flagellation, fasting, or (most effectively, he says) with the aid of certain chemical substances like LSD or mescaline. Essentially, Huxley defines these "antipodes" of the mind as mental states that one may reach when one's brain is disabled (from a biological point of view) and can then be conscious of certain "regions of the mind" that one would otherwise never be able to pay attention to, due to the lack of biological/utilitarian usefulness.
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How to live 24 Hours a Day
Author: Arnold Bennett
Intro:
In the book, Bennett addressed the large and growing number of white-collar workers that had accumulated since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. In his view, these workers put in eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, at jobs they did not enjoy, and at worst hated.
They worked to make a living, but their daily existence consisted of waking up, getting ready for work, working as little as possible during the work day, going home, unwinding, going to sleep, and repeating the process the next day. In short, he didn't believe they were really living.
Bennett addressed this problem by urging these "salarymen" to seize their extra time, and make the most of it to improve themselves.
Extra time could be found at the beginning of the day, by waking up early, and on the ride to work, on the way home from work, in the evening hours, and especially during the weekends. During this time, he prescribed improvement measures such as reading great literature, taking an interest in the arts, reflecting on life, and learning self-discipline.
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Mental Efficiency
Author: Arnold Bennett
Intro:
There are times when the whole free and enlightened Press of the United Kingdom seems to become strangely interested in the subject of "success," of getting on in life.
We are passing through such a period now. It would be difficult to name the prominent journalists who have not lately written, in some form or another, about success.
Most singular phenomenon of all, Dr. Emil Reich has left Plato, duchesses, and Claridge's Hotel, in order to instruct the million readers of a morning paper in the principles of success! What the million readers thought of the Doctor's stirring and strenuous sentences I will not imagine; but I know what I thought, as a plain man.
After taking due cognizance of his airy play with the "constants" and "variables" of success, after watching him treat "energetics" (his wonderful new name for the "science" of success) as though because he had made it end in "ics" it resembled mathematics, I thought that the sublime and venerable art of mystification could no further go.
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Philosophy of Freedom
Author: Rudolf Steiner
Intro:
The Philosophy of Freedom is the fundamental philosophical work of the philosopher and esotericist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925).
It addresses the questions whether and in what sense human beings can be said to be free.
Part One of The Philosophy of Freedom examines the basis for freedom in human thinking, gives an account of the relationship between knowledge and perception, and explores the reliability of thinking as a means to knowledge.
In Part Two Steiner analyzes the conditions necessary for human beings to be free, and develops a moral philosophy that he describes as "ethical individualism".
The book's subtitle, Some results of introspective observation following the methods of natural science, indicates the philosophical method Steiner intends to follow.
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The Corpus Hermetica
Author: Hermes Trismestigustos
Intro:
The Hermetic tradition represents a non-Christian lineage of Hellenistic Gnosticism.
The tradition and its writings date to at least the first century B.C.E., and the texts we possess were all written prior to the second century C.E. The surviving writings of the tradition, known as the Corpus Hermeticum (the "Hermetic body of writings") were lost to the Latin West after classical times, but survived in eastern Byzantine libraries.
Their rediscovery and translation into Latin during the late-fifteenth century by the Italian Renaissance court of Cosimo de Medici, provided a seminal force in the development of Renaissance thought and culture.
These eighteen tracts of the Corpus Hermeticum, along with the Perfect Sermon (also called the Asclepius), are the foundational documents of the Hermetic tradition.
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The Doors of Reception
Author: Aldous Huxley
Intro:
The Doors of Perception is a philosophical essay, released as a book, by Aldous Huxley. First published in 1954, it details his experiences when taking mescaline.
The book takes the form of Huxley's recollection of a mescaline trip that took place over the course of an afternoon in May 1953.
The book takes its title from a phrase in William Blake's 1793 poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, which range from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision". He also incorporates later reflections on the experience and its meaning for art and religion.
Mescaline is the principal agent of the psychedelic cactus peyote and San Pedro cactus, which has been used in Native American religious ceremonies for thousands of years. A German pharmacologist, Arthur Heffter, isolated the alkaloids in the peyote cactus in 1891. These included mescaline, which he showed through a combination of animal and self-experiments was the compound responsible for the psychoactive properties of the plant. In 1919, Ernst Späth, another German chemist, synthesised the drug.
Although personal accounts of taking the cactus had been written by psychologists such as Weir Mitchell in the US and Havelock Ellis in the UK during the 1890s, the German-American Heinrich Kluver was the first to systematically study its psychological effects in a small book called Mescal and Mechanisms of Hallucinations published in 1928. The book stated that the drug could be used to research the unconscious mind.
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The Ego and his own
Author: Max Stirner
Intro:
The first part of the text begins by setting out a tripartite dialectical structure based on an individual's stages of life (Childhood, Youth and Adulthood).
In the first realistic stage, children are restricted by external material forces.
Upon reaching the stage of youth, they begin to learn how to overcome these restrictions by what Stirner calls the "self-discovery of mind". However, in the idealistic stage, a youth now becomes enslaved by internal forces such as conscience, reason and other 'spooks' or 'fixed ideas' of the mind (including religion, nationalism and other ideologies).
The final stage, 'egoism' sees the now adult individual freed from all internal and external constraints, attaining individual autonomy.
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Threefold Social Order & Commonwealth
Author: Rudolf Steiner
Intro:
Social threefolding is a sociological theory suggesting the progressive independence of society's economic, political and cultural institutions.
It aims to foster human rights and equality in political life, freedom in cultural life (art, science, religion, education, the media), and associative cooperation in economic life.
The idea was first proposed by Rudolf Steiner in the great cultural ferment immediately following the end of the First World War.
The process of achieving the cooperative independence of these three societal realms is meant to be achieved through a gradual transformation of existing societal structures.
Steiner believed that the three social spheres had very gradually, over thousands of years, been growing independent of each other, and would naturally tend to continue to do so, and that consciously furthering aspects of this independence thus works in accordance with society's natural evolution.
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All text in this page are take from Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org
