Recommended reading for ACTION PHILOSOPHERS #8
Kant, John Stuart Mill, Hegel, Schopenhauer

Immanuel Kant. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated from the German by Lewis White Beck. Upper Saddle Hall, NJ: Library of the Liberal Arts, 1993.
Next to Plato, whom Ayn Rand said was the worst thing that ever happened to philosophy, Kant was top of her Hit List: His whole project, she contended, was to carve out with sophistry a protected space where the mystical could co-exist with the scientific. If Kant is really an apologist for theology, then this book is his Apologia, in which he argues that belief in God is, as the title implies, practically necessary for moral living. It's much shorter (171pp) than its mammoth predecessor, Critique of Pure Reason, which is kind of like reading VCR instructions for your brain.

And I don't mean that in a bad way...

John Stuart Mill. Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969.
I found this slim (185pp) tome weirdly fascinating, almost like - if you'll forgive the analogy - a 19th century MySpace page, in which Mill relates his life from the point of view of all the influences (writings, people, music, poetry) that informed his life and philosophy, from being home-schooled by his control-freak father - he learned to read Greek by age three, but was an emotional basket case - up until his falling in love with a married woman, whom he married when her husband died, and influenced his lobbying for women's suffrage. You cheap bastards can also read it for free at this on-line clearinghouse for Utilitarian resources.

Ozamu Tezuka. Buddha Vol. 6: Ananda. Translated from the Japanese by Yuji Oniki. New York: Vertical, 2005.
Hey, since Schopenhauer himself said that the only three people worth knowing were Kant, Buddha, and his dog, let's take him at his word, shall we? And besides, we need more comics in this column! (Kant is covered above, and Schopenhauer's dog's masterpiece, World as Fetch and Food Dish, will be covered in a later issue.)

Tezuka's brilliant, eight-volume explication of the life of Siddhartha is a comics masterpiece, a historical epic of love, war, and spiritual fulfillment; in this volume the Enlightened One delivers a sermon about how quenching the fire within leads to inner peace, which is more or less what ol' Artie Schopenhauer was talking about in terms of butting Will out of the driver's seat and taking control of your own life. Most of the Buddha volumes by Tezuka, who basically invented manga as we know it, are self-contained, so any book is a good jumping-on point, and this book, which focuses the title character, an unstoppable bandit sent by a demon to destroy Buddha, is no exception.