by Greg Goode
Baggini, Julian (2012). The Ego Trick. London. Granta Books.
Barnes, Jonathan (1990). The Toils of Scepticism. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. A very helpful if somewhat technical presentation of the logical, philosophical Agrippan Modes of Pyrrhonist investigation.
Beck, Judith (2011). Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Second Edition: Basics and Beyond. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Bernstein, Richard (1983). Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press. Bernstein sets forth a major dispute in philosophy between “objectivism” and “relativism.” Bernstein says that these philosophical positions help understand many conflicts in contemporary culture. He defines objectivism as the claim that there is a permanent, unshakable framework of understanding that we can appeal to when we try to determine the nature of rationality, truth, knowledge and goodness. He defines relativism as the view which denies objectivism, and which goes on to say that these concepts (rationality, truth, knowledge and goodness) can only be understood relative to a specific conceptual scheme. The objectivist answers the relativist by claiming that relativism is self-refuting. That is, relativism seems to offer itself as the very over-arching conceptual scheme which it denies. Bernstein proposes that we end this dispute by no longer seeing it as either/or situation. He suggests a more pragmatic attitude towards rationality. This book is also notable for its elucidation of Cartesian anxiety, which we can feel when we believe in permanent foundations to knowledge while failing to find them.
Blanshard, Brand (1939). The Nature of Thought. London: Allen & Unwin, Library of Philosophy Series. 2 volumes.
Block, Ned (1998). “Holism, Mental and Semantic.” In: Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge. Also posted here: www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/MentalSemanticHolism.html. This is a somewhat technical introduction to holism, which refutes “atomism.” Atomism is the theory that thoughts, words and sentences derive their meanings independently of their relations to any other thoughts, words or sentences. The typical candidate for atomistic meaning is a mental state or a particular state of affairs in the world unrelated to thought or language. Atomism is an important target of refutation in the emptiness meditations.
Braver, Lee (2007). A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Topics in Historical Philosophy). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Braver traces the progression of anti-realist thought through the line of the most important “continental” philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida. This is an informative read for you as an emptiness student because it explores different features of anti-realism in a nuanced way.
Brock, Stuart and Mares, Edwin D. (2007). Realism and Anti-Realism. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press. The book introduces contemporary realist and anti-realist arguments in five areas: science, ethics, mathematics, modality and fictional objects. The definition of realism here is that real entities (or facts) are those which exist objectively and independently of mind. Realism of this type is an important target of refutation in emptiness meditations.
Burns, David (1999). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers.
Burr, Vivien (2003). Social Constructionism. New York, NY: Routledge. Helpful companion reading to Gergen’s An Invitation to Social Construction.
* Consigny, Scott (2001). Gorgias, Sophist and Artist. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. An inspiring and well-written guide not only to the great orator Gorgias of Leontini, a powerful and influential non-essentialist, but also to non-essentialism in general.
Crary, Alice and Read, Rupert (2000). The New Wittgenstein. New York, NY: Routledge. This book contains excellent articles on the so-called “resolute reading” of Wittgenstein, which emphasizes the therapeutic aspects of his work. This approach makes sense to read after one has done a lot of emptiness meditation, as it can answer some of the questions that will arise at that stage.
Davidson, Donald (2001). “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge.” In: Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Philosophical Essays of Donald Davidson). New York, NY: Oxford University Press Inc.
Dennett, Daniel (1984). Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Dennett, Daniel (1992) “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity.” In: Kessel, F., Cole, P. and Johnson, D. Eds. Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Dennett, Daniel (2004). Freedom Evolves. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
Derrida, Jacques (1973). Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. The most helpful chapters for the emptiness student are the Introduction, “Sign and Signs,” “Meaning and Representation,” “Signs and the Blink of an Eye” and “Différance.”
Derrida, Jacques (1978). “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”, In: Derrida, Jaques, Writing in Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
DeVries, Willem, and Triplett, Timm (2000). Knowledge, Mind and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellars’ Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. Chapter 8 covers sections 32-38 of Sellars’ book. See also page xxxi for their explanation of Sellars’ “key argument” against the Given (the shorter argument), as well as pages xxx, 76 and 104 for their discussion of his “master argument” (the longer and more general argument).
Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1990). Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Ellis, Albert (2001). Overcoming Destructive Beliefs, Feelings, and Behaviors: New Directions for Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. The book gives a practical overview of Ellis’ approach to cognitive therapy. One of his major contributions is to help people free themselves from absolutist rules that involve “musts” and “shoulds” (he calls this habit “musturbation”). For you as an emptiness meditator, this is helpful to dismantle the sense that any rules exist inherently, i.e., as if they were given by God or an objective law of nature. A consequence of seeing rules as empty is that we no longer feel bossed around by them which results in greater psychological freedom and flexibility.
Foucault, Michel (2001). Power (The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 3). New York, NY: The New Press. Foucault was a student of Nietzsche and dedicated most of his life to a discursive and political analysis of great Western ideals such as truth, history and the distinction between madness and sanity. In this volume, see especially the chapter entitled “Truth and Power.”
Ferrer, Jorge N. (2001). Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Nominally written as a critique of the cultural narrowness and essentialism of transpersonal psychology, it can also be interpreted as a general critique of the larger New Age approach to spirituality. Ferrer calls for a more open, participatory, diversified and relational approachÑŽ
* Gergen, Kenneth (2009). An Invitation to Social Construction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. This book looks at a variety of phenomena and shows how they are socially constructed. Examples include the self, emotions, scientific truths, and even reality. You can feel Gergen’s passion for the subject. Among all the books on the Western list, this is probably the easiest one to begin with.
Gibson, Roger F. Jr., Ed. (2004). The Cambridge Companion to Quine. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Quine’s holism is groundbreaking, but unlike Richard Rorty, Quine wrote for professional philosophers only. So Quine is quite technical. It is easiest, at least initially, to approach him through commentators. See especially Chapter 3 in this volume, “Quine’s Meaning Holisms.”
Goodman, Nelson (1978). Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. Co. Inc.
Greene, Joshua D. (2002). The Terrible, Horrible, No Go
od, Very Bad Truth about Morality and What to Do About it. Doctoral Dissertation in the Department of Philosophy, Princeton University. Available online at: www.wjh.harvard.edu/jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-Dissertation.pdf
Hacking, Ian (2000). The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Accessible and fun discussion of social construction in science.
Harman, Gilbert and Thompson, Judith (1996). Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Heidegger, Martin (1982). The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks. The title essay was first presented as a lecture in 1949.
Heidegger, Martin (2001). Poetry, Language, Thought (Perennial Classics). New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
* Hood, Bruce (2012). The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA. Using research from neuroscience and other fields, psychologist Bruce Hood argues that the self is an illusion.
Humphries, Jefferson (1999). Reading Emptiness: Buddhism and Literature (SUNY Series, Margins of Literature). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Joyce, Richard (2007). The Myth of Morality. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. First published in 2001. Gives plenty of excellent arguments and examples why moral properties do not exist inherently. At the same time, Joyce advances a form of “fictionalism,” i.e., why it still makes sense for human beings to talk as if moral properties existed. Fictionalism is of interest to you as an emptiness meditator in its own right as it is a Western flavored variant of the notion of “conventional truth” from the “two truths doctrine” in the emptiness teachings.
Joyce, Richard (2007a). Moral Anti-Realism. Online article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: (http://plato.stanford. edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/). Gives a concise overview of several positions which refute the moral “realist” notion that moral properties exist in a mind-independent way.
Kauppinen, Antti. Error Theory and Fictionalism. Online PowerPoint presentation at www.docstoc.com/docs/38839281/6-Error-Theory-and-Fictionalism. Summarizes Mackie’s key arguments that objective moral discourse is in error. Presents ideas by Richard Joyce, such as that that if objective moral properties do not exist, it is nevertheless beneficial for human beings to engage in moral discourse while being simultaneously aware of its fictional nature.
Kuhn, Thomas (2012). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. This is the classic work that looks at the process of science historically, arguing that the progress of science is not independent of scientific culture and the historical circumstances.
* Kuzminski, Adrian (2010). Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. This is a fascinating presentation of the ancient Greek approach called “Pyrrhonism,” the most radical form of not-knowing. Kuzminski traces parallels to Buddhist Emptiness teachings, and theorizes that Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus may have been influenced by Nagarjuna’s teachings.
Lanham, Richard (2007). Style: An Anti-Textbook. Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books. A delightfully written book that debunks the metaphysics of “clarity,” while linking playfulness in language to the playfulness of spirit. Ostensibly about writing, this book is a wonderful lesson in the emptiness of language.
Lawlor, Leonard (2002). Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Along with Wheeler’s book (see below), this is one of the best introductions to Derrida’s approach. In this book, see especially Part Three, “The End of Phenomenology and Ontology.”
Leahy, Robert (2003). Cognitive Therapy Techniques: A Practitioner’s Guide. New York, NY: Guilford Press. This book describes a wealth of techniques and examples for how to challenge “cognitive distortions” or “maldaptive thoughts” that cause suffering.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Mackie, John (1991). Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. New York, NY: Penguin.
Magliola, Robert (1984). Derrida on the Mend. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Magliola may be the first to deeply reflect on commonalities between Nagarjuna and Derrida.
Mansfield, Vic (2008). Tibetan Buddhism and Modern Physics: Toward a Union of Love and Knowledge. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press. From this accessible book you, as an emptiness meditator, can learn (among other things) how quantum physics and relativity theory can be utilized in an investigation into the emptiness of matter and time.
Martin, Emily (1996). “The Egg and the Sperm: Knowledge as Ideology,” Chapter 7 in Keller, Evelyn Fox and Longino, Helen E., Eds. Feminism and Science. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
* Mates, Benson (1996). The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. An excellent, helpful translation and commentary on Sextus Empiricus’ most famous work in Pyrrhonism. Not all translators and commentators are sympathetic to Pyrrhonism, but Mates is.
McGinn, Marie (2013). Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations. New York, NY: Routledge. First published in 1997. This excellent book pulls together the main concepts in Wittgenstein’s non-essentialist masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations (PI), in an orderly, intuitive way. This book can be read either before PI or alongside it.
Metzinger, Thomas (2003). Being No One. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. In this landmark book, philosopher Thomas Metzinger outlines his approach to consciousness and subjective experience. “Its main thesis is that no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self.” There is no self in the way we normally think of it, as a substantial, single, enduring entity. In this book, he gives a systematic account of how subjective experience arises from “subpersonal processes” in the brain. His work is based on neuroscience research and many insights drawn from the studies of neurological diseases. He also raises provocative questions about the potential impact these radical insights could have for how individuals understand themselves and for the society as a whole. Although the book is written for specialists, many of its chapters are accessible to a lay reader and can be sampled on their own.
* Metzinger, Thomas (2009). The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York, NY: Basic Books. This book, written for a wide audience, outlines Metzinger’s main ideas about the self and consciousness. Most prominently, he argues that the self does not exist. His phenomenal self model integrates many insights from neuroscience research. Along the way, he provides fascinating accounts of how the experience of a unified, centered world arises in our minds, and outlines the future development of a newly arising field of neuroethics. This work provides a powerful, contemporary route to understanding the emptiness of the self.
Mulhall, Stephen (2008). Wittgenstein’s Private Language: Grammar, Nonsense, and Imagination in Philosophical Investigations (§§243-315). New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA. This book describes in detail Wittgenstein’s famous private language argument. It dismantles essentialism about “self-identifying” inner states independent of a (public) language. The book is also brilliant in that it presents in parallel two distinct and important readings of Wittgenstein’s argument, the classical and the “resolute” reading, which emphasizes the therapeutic or transformational aspects of Wittgenstein’s work. The resolute reading can be very helpful for people who have some experience working with Western sources.
* Nagel, Thomas (1987). What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. This is one of the easiest introductions we have ever seen to the philosophical way of thinking. Clearly and simply written, this book discusses some of the classical Western philosophical problems, such as the mind/body problem, our knowledge of the external world, free will, right and w
rong, and the meaning of life. Although Nagel often comes down on the essentialist side of these issues, he generously leaves the questions open and encourages you to approach them for yourself. This is a very empowering book.
Nehamas, Alexander (1987). Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. This excellent non-essentialist’s guide to Nietzsche illustrates his project of creating a literary self and helps soften the rigid distinction between self-discovery and self-creation.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1976). “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”, in: Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Portable Nietzsche. Translated by Walter Kaufman. New York, NY: Viking Press.
Noë, Alva (2010). Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. The philosopher of mind Alva Noë argues that consciousness is not something that happens within our heads, rather it comes about through our interaction with the world. A good counterpoint to the idea that we are trapped inside our heads.
Parfit, Derek (1986). Reasons and Persons. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA. Influential book about rationality and personal identity. Parfit explores the relations of identity not only between different people at the same time, but between the “same” person at different times. He argues that the latter situation brings up many of the same identity issues as the former situation.
* Polt, Richard F. H. (2000). Heidegger: an Introduction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. A very readable introduction to this explosive thinker. Heidegger has a lot to offer as he reverses in a highly original way the same entrenched world views targeted by the Buddhist emptiness teachings. In addition, the poetic, flowing, imaginative style of his later work can do more than just that. It can be an excellent resource if you’d like to add more poetry (or even mysticism) to the analytical-logical pragmatic side of your emptiness studies.