Recommended reading for ACTION PHILOSOPHERS #9
A Whole Lot of Dudes

Lao Tzu. Tao te Ching. Translated from the Chinese by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. 25th Anniversary Edition Vintage Books Edition, 1997.
I actually got a little choked up when, in preparation for writing AP #9, I stumbled across this edition of Lao Tzu's spiritual classic on Amazon. I bought an earlier printing years ago at the local New Age bookstore in Syracuse, my freshman year of college. This big, floppy book, with its elegant black and white nature photographs; the Chinese original on one page of a spread, the English translation on the other, with a chapter per spread, is the perfect way to experience the Tao for the first time. Lao Tzu was real revelation to me when I was 18 years old, and I was not surprised to read in the new introduction that this version has sold 500,000 copies since it was first published in 1972 (the year I was born).

Re-reading a book as old as I am, almost a decade later, and at the end of this series, reinforced my firm belief that 80% of the problems of two-plus millennia of Western philosophy can be solved by one month of studying Eastern philosophy.

Matthew Stewart. The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza and the Fate of God in the Modern World. New York: W. W. Norton 2006.
A perfectly serviceable entry in the ever-growing popular historio-philosophy genre pioneered by - well, me and Ryan - and most famously by Edmonds & Eidinow's Wittgenstein's Poker (E&E's less successful Rousseau's Dog informed the Rousseau and Hume stories in this issue), Courtier and Heretic refers to Leibniz and Spinoza, respectively, and is structured around an afternoon-long encounter between the two thinkers not long before the latter's death. It employs the psuedo-suspenseful-crosscutting-to-drag-out-what-was-a-fairly-minor-historical-episode technique that bugged the hell out of me in Wittgenstein's Poker. But about halfway through Stewart really takes off, doing a terrific job of explaining Spinoza's "God-intoxicated" philosophy and relating it to the later movements of Western thought.

He's less successful explicating Leibniz, but I don't blame Stewart for that – I blame Leibniz. You know you have a crappy philosophy when even Hegel thinks it's stupid.

Tom Morris. The Bluffer's Guide to Philosophy. South Bend, IN: Diamond Communications, Inc., 1989.
We here at ActPhilo headquarters have been lucky to have a booster from the very beginning in the form of Tom Morris, author of Philosophy for Dummies and many other popular philosophy books and the co-editor of Superheroes and Philosophy. He kindly sent us a signed copy of the latter book when AP #1 first solicited, along with this fun little tome that has been on my desk ever since. One humorous page per philosopher, it served me well as a handy guide to choosing which thinkers to profile in the series, not to mention a great quick-reference for dates, titles of major works and such. Tom was kind enough to lend us pull quotes you've seen on the back of our GIANT-SIZE THINGS, so we'll return the favor by giving him a shout-out here!