Works

#744 · 1943 (lectures); 1944 (book)

Einstein on science, religion, ethics, politics — the major collection of his philosophical and public reflections

Twentieth-century physics / philosophy of biology 1

What Is Life? (Late)

Erwin Schrödinger

Schrödinger's 1944 Dublin lectures founding the conceptual framework of molecular biology

Twentieth-century physics / philosophy of physics 1

#1052 · 1916 (Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie); English translation 1920

Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (Mid-mature)

#1056 · 1916-55 (correspondence across four decades); published in 1971 (German); English 1971 (Walker)

Einstein's own popular exposition of special and general relativity — the principal accessible source for the lay reader

Twentieth-century physics / philosophy of science 2

The Born-Einstein Letters (Mature-late)

#752 · 1964 (lectures); 1965 (book)

The Einstein-Born letters — the principal documentary record of the early-twentieth-century physics debate, especially over quantum mechanics

The Character of Physical Law (Mid)

Richard Feynman

Feynman's 1965 Messenger Lectures on the structure and character of physical laws

Twentieth-century political liberalism / philosophy of science applied to politics 1

#121 · Composed 1938–1943 in New Zealand exile; published 1945 (2 vols)

The Open Society and Its Enemies

Karl R. Popper

The closed society of tribal traditions vs the open society of critical inquiry — and the historicist enemies that produce totalitarianism

Twentieth-century political philosophy 3

#188 · 1951 (with later editions adding new prefaces and material through 1968)

The Origins of Totalitarianism (Mid (Arendt's breakthrough book))

Antisemitism, imperialism, totalitarianism — Arendt's 1951 study of how Europe arrived at the death camps and the Gulag

#189 · 1963

On Revolution (Late (after Eichmann in Jerusalem))

#919 · 1969 (New York Review of Books, Feb 27); 1970 (Harcourt expanded book edition)

The lost treasure of revolution — public freedom rediscovered, then forgotten. The American success and the French failure

On Violence (Late (Arendt's most-cited short political essay, written in response to the 1968 student movements))

Violence is not power's highest expression but its substitute when power has failed

Twentieth-century political philosophy / Arendt's post-totalitarian thought 1

#113 · 1958

The Human Condition

#179 · 1963 (New Yorker articles 1962-63, then book)

Labour, work, action — three distinct activities of the vita activa, and the modern reduction of action to making

Twentieth-century political philosophy / Jewish thought 1

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Mid-late (after The Human Condition, before The Life of the Mind))

#920 · 1968 (Harcourt Brace; essays composed 1955-67, several in New Yorker, Merkur, etc.)

The "banality of evil" — Eichmann not as a monster but as a bureaucratically thoughtless functionary, raising the most disturbing question of twentieth-century ethics

Twentieth-century political philosophy / philosophical biography 1

Men in Dark Times (Late (collected from essays spanning more than a decade))

#212 · 1954 (essay-length; often published together with the 1956 Heaven and Hell)

In dark times, the moral lucidity of particular individuals lights what general theory cannot illuminate

Twentieth-century political-cultural criticism 1

#1043 · 1958

Brave New World Revisited (Late)

Aldous Huxley

Twenty-six years later — Huxley's sober reassessment argues the dystopia is arriving faster than he had imagined

Twentieth-century post-Christian radical feminist theology 1

#860 · 1973

Beyond God the Father (Mid)

Mary Daly

Daly's 1973 founding work of radical feminist theology — beyond God the Father

Twentieth-century psychedelic-philosophical writing 1

The Doors of Perception (Late)

Aldous Huxley

"If the doors of perception were cleansed" — Huxley's 1954 essay on his first mescaline experience, the founding text of modern psychedelic-philosophical writing

Twentieth-century radical feminism 1

#998 · 1984 (Beacon Press)

Pure Lust (Late-mature)

Mary Daly

"Pure Lust" — elemental passion of women's desire for life, freedom, creative communion, against the "phallic lust" of patriarchal possession

Twentieth-century radical feminism / post-Christian feminist philosophy 1

#997 · 1978 (Beacon Press)

Gyn/Ecology (Mature)

Mary Daly

Patriarchy is a global religion of dismemberment — sati, foot-binding, genital mutilation are its rituals; gyn/ecology is the women-centred ecology that resists

Twentieth-century Reformed / dialectical theology 1

#132 · 1919 (1st ed.); 1922 (2nd ed., radically revised)

Commentary on Romans (Early)

Karl Barth

God is in heaven, and you are on the earth — the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity, recovered against liberal Protestantism

Twentieth-century Russian-Soviet poetry / Acmeism 1

#809 · 1935-61 (composed and memorized); 1963 (first published abroad); 1987 (in USSR)

Requiem (Late)

Anna Akhmatova

Akhmatova's 1935-61 cycle on Soviet terror — Requiem — the prison line and the witness

Twentieth-century scientific humanism / philosophy of religion 1

#1054 · 1930 (published New York Times Magazine, November 9, 1930)

Religion and Science (Mid-mature)

#1053 · 1934 (German: Mein Weltbild, Querido Verlag, Amsterdam; English: Covici Friede, New York)

Three stages of religion — fear, moral, cosmic — and mature science as continuous with cosmic religious feeling

Twentieth-century scientific humanism / philosophy of science 1

The World as I See It (Mid-mature)

#1055 · 1950 (Philosophical Library, New York)

Einstein's 1934 collection of essays and addresses — philosophical, political, personal — the most accessible non-technical statement of his worldview

Twentieth-century scientific humanism / philosophy of science / philosophy of religion 1

Out of My Later Years (Late)

#794 · 1934 (posthumous, Vygotsky died June 1934)

Einstein's 1950 late-career essay collection — Princeton years on science, politics, religion, and Zionism

Twentieth-century Soviet psychology / cultural-historical school 1

Thought and Language (Mid)

Lev Vygotsky

Vygotsky's 1934 posthumous founding work of socio-cultural psychology — language as mediating tool

Twentieth-century Warburg-school art history 1

#814 · 1950 (1st ed.); 1995 (16th ed.)

The Story of Art (Mid)

Ernst Gombrich

Gombrich's 1950 popular history of art — from the caves to the twentieth century

Twentieth-century Warburg-school iconology 1

#813 · 1939

Studies in Iconology (Late)

Erwin Panofsky

Panofsky's 1939 founding work of modern iconology — three levels of art interpretation

Twenty-first-century analytic ethics / moral realism 1

#922 · 2011 (Vols I & II, Oxford UP); 2017 (Vol III, Oxford UP — published months after Parfit's death)

On What Matters (Late (Parfit's final, three-decade-in-the-making work — his second after Reasons and Persons, 1984))

Derek Parfit

Kantian ethics, contractualism, and rule-consequentialism climb the same mountain from different sides — and what we ought to do is independently real

Twenty-first-century Italian literature 1

#833 · 2011 (Italian L'amica geniale); 2012 (English)

My Brilliant Friend (Late)

Elena Ferrante

Ferrante's 2011 first Neapolitan novel — childhood friendship in postwar Naples

Twenty-first-century speculative history 1

#878 · 2015 (Hebrew); 2016 (English)

Homo Deus (Late)

Yuval Noah Harari

Harari's 2016 speculative history of humanity's near future — dataism and the upgrade of Homo sapiens

Twenty-first-century tech humanism 1

#909 · 2018

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Mature (Lanier's short polemical follow-up to Who Owns the Future?, 2013, and Dawn of the New Everything, 2017))

Jaron Lanier

Social media platforms are behaviour-modification engines — leaving them is the precondition of being a free agent in the digital era

Twenty-first-century theoretical physics / philosophy of time 1

#755 · 2017 (Italian); 2018 (English)

The Order of Time (Late)

Carlo Rovelli

Rovelli's 2017 popular essay on the dissolution of time in fundamental physics

Twenty-first-century transhumanism 1

#879 · 2005

The Singularity Is Near (Late)

Ray Kurzweil

Kurzweil's 2005 popular transhumanist treatise — the coming Singularity

Urdu poetry / Islamic philosophy / South Asian Muslim political philosophy 1

#1215 · 1935

Bal-i Jibril (Gabriel's Wing) (Late)

Muhammad Iqbal

Iqbal's 1935 Urdu poetry collection — mature philosophical-political poetry

Utilitarianism / Effective altruism 1

#1302 · 2009 (1st ed.), 2019 (10th anniversary ed.)

The Life You Can Save (Late)

#1301 · 1981 (1st ed.), 2011 (2nd ed.)

Singer's 2009 popular work on global poverty and effective giving

Utilitarianism / Evolutionary ethics 1

The Expanding Circle (Mid)

Singer's 1981 work — proper-rational extension of moral concern

Utilitarianism / Preference utilitarianism 1

#1300 · 1993

How Are We to Live? (Mid)

#1299 · 1979 (1st ed.), 1993 (2nd ed.), 2011 (3rd ed.)

Singer's 1993 popular work on ethics in an age of self-interest

Utilitarianism / Preference utilitarianism / Analytic ethics 1

Practical Ethics (Mid)