The Sooty Empiric

Let me tell you upfront that I don't intend this to be endorsed. The point of the exercise is to see if it sounds to you as plausible as similar narratives you have heard in other cases. So it's a kind of satire, I guess, but the goal isn't at all to mock or to be funny. (It's also me trying my hand at something kinda like the ideological Turing test - but not quite, since after all I don't think people actually do run this particular argument.) If I have done my job correctly, this will seem to you about as plausible as other elements of the popular Everything Changed When The SJs Attacked genre. In this genre one talks about how a once proud tradition of Western achievement in the arts or humanities has been ruined by the advent of social justice scholarship or activism. I don't like linking to negative exemplars where I don't have to - so if you are unfamiliar with the genre or think it doesn't exist, just consider the plausibility of this on its own ...

This is a list of all the books I finished this year, along with summary and reflections. I often start books without finishing them (and where I just picked up where I left off from some previous year's reading I have left a * before the book to indicate this). I am hoping to break this habit, as well as keep a bit better a record of what I am done. I am hoping that the appeal to my vanity of knowing that I can publish this list for all the world to wonder at - I have one skill, that of quick reading! - will make me actually properly read, and the exercise of having to publicise a summary and review open to academics will keep me honest. The list is in order of my finishing them, most summaries wrote immediately upon completing the book. Some overall reflections: My 2018 new year's resolution was to try and let philosophy shape my personal behaviour more. As such, my reading was somewhat skewed towards the ethical and aesthetic, as I tried to develop a decent sensibility. I...