Sydney Penner

"Nam et legentibus euenit et mihi saepissime ut perlecta pagina uel epistula nesciam quid legerim et repetam." - Augustinus, De Trinitate XI.15

Here's a list of what I am reading or have read recently enough for the material in question to be responsible for an item or two of information still lingering in my mind. The page is divided into three sections: philosophy books, non-philosophy books (the boundary is vague, of course), and papers. The book lists are more or less exhaustive. The list of papers is not; I read far too many to want to bother listing all of them. But when I have some reason or other so to do, I will add them. Reasons can range from having found the paper especially interesting to having read it during a solar syzygy.

Looking through these lists may give you some idea of my interests. It will not, however, tell you much about my views or even about what books I think are insightfully wrong. Bigotry is sustained not only by condemning books expressing certain views to lists of forbidden books; it is also sustained by judging books written by certain kinds of people to be contemptible books beneath the notice of intelligent people. Hence, I try to make a point of occasionally reading books that I expect to be of little merit. Not to mention that the historian in me sometimes wants to read books merely because they have shaped or are shaping the views of significant numbers of people. At any rate, don't go making unlicensed inferences about my views, sympathies, and so on merely because I happen to have Hitler's Mein Kampf and LaHaye's Are We Living in the End Times? sitting on my shelf (to take extreme examples of nefariousness and dubiousness respectively).

Sometimes I have added some comments after entries. Failure to do so in no way indicates that I have nothing to say about the work in question.

Most recent entries at the top.

(If, like me, you like browsing other people's libraries, you can do so online here. And, no, I did not compile a list of the books just for your benefit. In addition to the above warning about inferring too much about my views, note that this list includes both books acquired by me and books acquired by Erin. Generally speaking, if the book has a call number starting with 'P', it was probably acquired by Erin; if not, probably by me.)

Philosophy Books

Henninger, Mark G. Relations: Medieval Theories, 1250-1325 (Oxford University Press, 1989).

Aristotle. De anima.

Anselm. Three Philosophical Dialogues: On Truth, On Freedom of Choice, On the Fall of the Devil, transl. by Thomas Williams (Hackett, 2002).

Five Texts on the Mediaeval Problem of Universals: Porphyry, Boethius, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Ockham, transl. by Paul Vincent Spade (Hackett, 1994).

Suárez. On goodness = De bonitate.

Suárez. On Real Relation = De relatione reali in communi.

Suárez. On Beings of Reason = De entibus rationis.

Augustine. On Free Choice.

Adams, Robert Merrihew. A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Frances, Bryan. Scepticism Comes Alive (Oxford University Press, 2005). A fascinating spin on scepticism.

Suárez, Francisco. Selections from Three Works, edited by Gwladys L. Williams, et al. (reprint: William S. Hein, 1995).

Fichter, Joseph H. Man of Spain: A Biography of Francis Suarez (Macmillan, 1940). Not always entirely credible, but interesting biography of Suárez.

Williamson, Timothy. Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford University Press, 2000). Williamson makes lots of arguments for bizarre views. Moreover, he tends to be wrong. But working through the book is a good way of figuring out exactly why more customary positions are right. As for style, the reviewer who praised the elegance of the writing got it wrong, but the reviewer who admired its 'wintry exactitude' got it precisely right.

Augustine. De Trinitate.

Hahn, Martin, and Bjorn Ramberg, eds. Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge (MIT Press, 2003). There are some nice papers in this volume. Burge's in-depth responses to the papers is a great bonus.

Segal, Gabriel M. A. A Slim Book about Narrow Content (MIT Press, 2000).

Fodor, Jerry A. Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (Oxford University Press, 1998).

Peacocke, Christopher. A Study of Concepts (MIT Press, 1992).

Miller, Alexander. Philosophy of Language (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997).

Marenbon, John. Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 2006). Good overview of medieval philosophy. Notable for including Muslim and Jewish philosophers in addition to the customary Christian ones. It could have used a good editing job, though; errors, awkward sentence constructions, and so forth abound.

Non-philosophy books

Stackhouse, John G., Jr. Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender (Baker Academic, 2005). Somewhat disappointing; I've seen better from Stackhouse. Not that there aren't good bits in the book. It's just that he tries to have it both ways and, well, sometimes the reason most people don't take both ways is because the two ways are just simply inconsistent with each other.

Eco, Umberto. The Island of the Day Before (Harcourt Brace, 1995). Typical Eco, though not as good as The Name of the Rose. If you like strange, layered tales laced with obscure terms and bits of Latin, you might like Eco.

Lewis, C. S. An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 1961). A wonderful, stimulating little book. Argues that instead of judging a man's taste by whether he reads good or bad books, we should judge books by the kind of reading they get.

Berry, Wendell. The Memory of Old Jack (Counterpoint, 1999). A moving telling of the memory of a dying farmer. I think this is the best of Berry's fictional works that I have read so far.

Articles

Stone, M. W. F. 'The Scope and Limits of Moral Deliberation: Recta Ratio, Natural Law, and Conscience in Francisco Suárez'. In Imagination in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, ed. by Lodi Nauta and Detlev Patzold (Louvain: Peeters, 2004): 37-59. An interesting article, plus lots of useful citations, i.e., precisely what one needs when starting research. Even better, it contains a rousing defense of the importance of Suárez's moral philosophy.

Brachtendorf, Johannes. 'Die Finalität der Handlung nach F. Suarez : eine späatscholastische Kritik an Thomas von Aquins Lehre vom Letztziel des Menschen'. Theologie und Philosophie 76 (2001): 530--50. One of the more interesting pieces of secondary literature on Suárez that I've encountered so far.

Burge, Tyler. 'The Individual and the Mental'. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1979): 73-121. I'm not quite a convinced content externalist yet, but this classic paper is still as good a defense as is to be found. It serves as a good example of how philosophy ought to be done.

Frege, Gottlob. 'Sense and Reference'. The Philosophical Review 57 (1948): 209-30. I read this a long time ago as an undergraduate, but realized that I didn't actually remember any of it.

Kelly, Thomas. ‘The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement’ in John Hawthorne and Tamar Gendler (eds.) Oxford Studies in Epistemology, 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 167-196. Argues that one does not need to suspend judgement when faced with the disagreement of prima facie epistemic peers. I agree with the conclusion, but I think there are some problems with Kelly's argument for it.

Christensen, David. 'Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News'. The Philosophical Review 116 (2007): 187-218. Provides one of the best defenses of the view that disagreement between two epistemic peers should lead both of them to withhold belief (ignoring Christensen's qualifications for the sake of brevity). I still think this view is wrong, but there is admittedly something to be said for it.