my mind on books

In honor of Priscilla Palmer’s list of personal development bloggers, which continues to grow, here is a link to Amazon’s most popular books on personal transformation. If this works like I think it will, it should change to show the top books at the time the link is clicked. Right now the most popular book is Choices and Illusions: How Did I Get Where I Am, and How Do I Get Where I Want to Be? by Eldon Taylor.

Following is the full list of personal development bloggers as of now:

(more…)

• David Chalmers surveys “recent collections on consciousness”
• detailed review of Sebastian Rödl’s Self Consciousness by Béatrice Longuenesse at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
  

  Self-consciousness, as Rödl defines it, is the power to think of oneself as oneself. This power is fundamentally related to the capacity to use the word “I.” A theory of self-consciousness is thus inseparable from a theory of self-reference: investigating self-consciousness is investigating the way(s) in which “I” refers.

• Priscilla Palmer is compiling a massive list of personal development blogs
  

[Update 9/14 – The personal development list just grew and grew and became a wiki, created by Isabella Mori of change therapy]

Lifetwo reviews Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar.

Vaughan at Mind Hacks is reading Muses, Madmen and Prophets, (on auditory hallucination) which he calls “poetic, wide-ranging and difficult to put down.”

Mind Hacks also pointed to a New York Times review of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language by Christine Kenneally.

Issues in the Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science discusses ‘What is the self?’ focusing on Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Bradford Books)

Powered by ScribeFire.

“The big happy: six lies we tell ourselves about happiness” starts with “happiness can’t be taught,” citing the growing number of positive psychology courses in US universities. Books discussed include Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier by UC Davis professor Robert Emmons.

Jean Kazez comments on Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, raising an issue about happiness in an unjust society. Haidt used the example of a Brahmin who is happy because of the coherence of his senses, thoughts, and society, despite the injustice of the caste system, an image of happiness which Kazez objects to. It comes down to an issue of moral relativism, whether morality is socially determined or independent of social mores. If morality is independent of society then a sensitive person would not be happy in an unjust society. Otherwise I suppose a sense of injustice could arise when a society fails to live up to its own ideals or there are conflicting ethical ideals within a society.

A similar conflict (or at least an ambiguity) between relative and absolute morality occurs within Hindu mythology – see The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, ch. 5 “The Paradox of the Good Demon: The Clash Between Relative and Absolute Ethics.” Or, for a scifi treatment of the issue, Sideshow by Sheri S. Tepper (which, as I recall, takes an anti-relativist position).

Kazez is the author of Weight of Things: Philosophy and the Good Life.