The following articles and books are essential background for understanding these essays (under construction).
Barrett, Justin L. (2004). Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Altamira Press.
Barrett’s explanation of why the supernatural is so plausible to so many people was a brilliant counter-weight to The Ego Tunnel. It helped me to mediate between my beliefs and other people, particularly my mother who is a religious fanatic.
Bolte Taylor, Jill. (2008). Jill Bolte Taylor's Stroke of Insight. [TED talk] http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
Dunbar, Robin. (2014). Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Pelican.
Feldman-Barrett (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Mariner Books.
Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (1975) Truth and Method. Bloomsbury Academic.
Glucklich, Ariel. (1997). The End of Magic. New York, Oxford University Press.
Gombrich, Richard. (2009). What the Buddha Thought. London, Equinox.
Goodall, Jane. (1971). In the Shadow of Man. London: Collins.
Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. (2012) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. UK: Allen Lane.
Hamilton, Sue. (2000). Early Buddhism: A New Approach. London: Routledge.
Jayarava. (2011) Is Paṭicca-samuppāda a Theory of Everything? [Draft].
Johnson, Mark. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. University of Chicago Press.
Jones, Richard H. (2013). Analysis & the Fullness of Reality: An Introduction to Reductionism & Emergence. Jackson Square Books.
Lakoff, George. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George. (1995). Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust. http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. New Ed. [Originally published 1981]. University of Chicago Press.
Mahony. William K. (1998). The Artful Universe: An Introduction to the Vedic Religious Imagination State University of New York Press.
Margulis, Lynn. (1998). The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. Basic Books.
Margulis has rapidly faded away since her death. But she made a massive impact on me. She taught me to look at evolution in terms of symbiosis, communities, and cooperation instead of just competition and predation.
Marx, Karl & Engels, Frederich. (1888) The Communist Manifesto. Oxford University Press: 1998. Reprinted from the Updated and corrected Ed. Originally published 1848.
McMahan, David L. (2008). The Making of Buddhist Modernism. Oxford University Press.
Mercier, Hugo & Sperber, Dan. (2017) The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding. Allen Lane.
Metzinger, Thomas. (2009). The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. Basic Books.
The Ego Tunnel was very important for me. By the end of it, I no longer had any lingering doubts about the nonexistence of the supernatural. It freed me from tooth-fairy agnosticism. The mind is a emergent property of the brain. The rest is details.
Norenzayan, Ara. (2013). Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Princeton University Press.
Searle, John R. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. MIT Press.
Searle, John R. (1995). The Construction of Social reality. Penguin.
Spencer, David. (2013). "Mercantilism: Six Centuries of Vilifying the Poor." Pieria. 18 Sep 2013.
Vince, Gaia. (2019) Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time. Allen Lane.
Waal, Frans de. (2013). The bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Amongst the Primates. W.W. Norton & Co.
De Waal reinforced the lessons from Margulis, emphasising the social nature of human beings. But he also proposes a way of thinking about morality that is universal. Morality can be seen as emerging from two qualities or capacities shared by all social mammals and some social birds. (1) Empathy the ability to model, and thus gain insight into, the disposition of other people (and animals). And (2) reciprocity or keeping track of social obligations.
Webster, David. (2012). Dispirited: How Contemporary Spirituality is Destroying Our Ability to Think, Depoliticising Society, and making Us Miserable. Zero Books.
Witzel, E. J. Michael. (2012) The Origins of the World's Mythologies. Oxford University Press.
