BOOKSHELF TOUR | A Tour of a Philosophy Student's Books

hey guys it's cosmic skeptic and today i wanted to do something a little bit different a lot of you have asked me about the books that constantly appear in my videos behind me and i've done a few videos in the past giving you book recommendations that's not quite the same thing as just showing you what's on my bookshelf and i know that that's something that some people are interested in for some reason so i thought i'd take a moment to just show you around and show you the kind of stuff that's on my shelves so uh yeah let's go take a look this shelf here is probably the most special shelf in the entire collection because most of the books up here are signed or kind of otherwise special kinds of books except for this one on the end i've just stuck hitchens in there just to kind of block off the entire shelf but we start over here with some copies of god is not great for instance this one here which i believe is the first edition and is signed by the man himself someone's written lighthouses are more helpful than churches that ben franklin quote which hitchens then signed so i'd love to know the story behind that but i couldn't find any information so if this was you reach out and let me know we've next got a few books by jordan peterson 12 rules for life and beyond order both of which are signed i actually went to see uh i got this book signed when i went to see jordan peterson at the o2 arena in london uh when he was in conversation with sam harris and douglas murray and got it signed afterwards so those are quite special too as well as this book by douglas murray the madness of crowds and this is the first book on this shelf which is special not just because it's signed but because it was signed when douglas murray came on the podcast anytime i have a guest in person and they have a book i like to get them to sign a copy of the book as a kind of keepsake of the podcast so he wrote for alex uh and some message that i can't even read with his handwriting and then signed it and put the date that we did a podcast so that's quite a nice one too then we've got a few more books by douglas murray followed by a bunch of richard dawkins books and one of the first books i ever got signed was the selfish gene by richard dawkins that was the first time i ever saw richard dawkins and it was an event in oxford and i'm pretty sure that there's a live stream that exists somewhere on some facebook page where you can see a kind of nervous 17 year old alex asking richard dawkins a question with his squeaky voice and it's the most embarrassing thing on the internet so i hope that no one ever finds it i've also got these two copies of the god delusion one of which is a first print american edition one of which is a first print british edition both of which is signed as well as this really special thing that i came across in the united states because this is a first edition of the selfish gene with the original artwork and i found it in some kind of second-hand bookshop in the united states and i really love this artwork and one of the coolest things is that this fairly famous piece of art on the front of the book i actually got to see the original piece of artwork in richard dawkins house when we went to interview him he had to my surprise this artwork the original thing itself up on the wall and that was a really special moment so i love this book as well this is quite a fun one as well you might remember you might have seen on my channel that i did a debate with frank churek on justin briley's show a few years ago i think it's got over a million views now which is great and uh after we had that conversation frank turek gave me a copy of his book stealing from god uh which he wrote quite a kind message inside he said dear alex i hope you find this encouraging whatever that means uh you have well he he said some nice words and then said blessings frank churek and put his emails so that we could keep up correspondence which i thought was a really nice touch i had a great time debating frank shurick he was a really nice guy and i think that conversation was a great one next up we've got some by sam harris here so his book on free will which many of you will know was an incredibly important part of me coming to believe that human beings don't have free will so this is a great book and i was i was happy to get a signed copy as well as well as letter to a christian nation that's another book that i got tom harris to sign at that event when i saw him i've also got a copy of the satanic verses by salman rushdie which is also signed at an event that salman did in oxford uh lawrence krauss here a universe from nothing this again was signed when i interviewed lawrence krauss and launched krause was one of the earliest people earliest kind of famous people that i ever had as a guest on my channel i remember i drove all the way up to wales in order to interview him it was like a five-hour round trip for a 10-minute conversation but at the time it was a really big deal for the channel so this is quite a special book to me as well secularism by andrew copson again signed but again because he came on the podcast also justin brielle's book unbelievable why after 10 years of talking with atheists i'm still a christian this was given to me by justin briley i think after frank turek gave me a copy of his book justin was like wait let me give you one of mine too and then finally perhaps the most prized possession of all of my book collection is animal liberation by peter singer which of course i had a peter singer on the podcast as well and he signed the book and said to alex thanks for a challenging interview peter singer and then put the date and i think thanks for a challenging interview it's just about the most complimentary thing he could have put given the nature of what we were doing and because animal liberation has had such an impact on my overall ethical philosophy uh the book itself means a lot to me it's one of those few things that i would kind of try to save if the building was burning down or something like that but the one thing that i would definitely save if the building was burning down probably my most prized possession of the entire bookshelf is this thing here this is a 10 000 subscriber uh custom wooden plaque that my friends matty and gabriel made for me when i hit 10 000 subscribers a lot of people seem to think that i made this for myself when i hit 10 000 subscribers and then i kind of egotistically made myself an award that's not what happened obviously one of the one of the biggest milestones that any aspiring youtuber is aiming for is to get one of these bad boys the hundred thousand subscriber plaque but when i hit 10 000 subscribers because you know having a subscriber plaque is one of the things that aspiring youtubers dream of my friends very kindly made this for me and it's just so special to me i i treasured this more than i treasure the hundred thousand subscriber plaque by a long way and that's that plaque is sitting on top here of a book life on earth by david attenborough which is similarly signed on the next shelf down we start with this this is quite an interesting book because this is this is of course richard dawkins second latest book outgrowing god but i was sent this by penguin before the book came out so it was quite a special thing for me but i actually forgot to get richard dawkins to sign it but it's still quite a special book uh next to that i've got armin navarby's book and armin the barbie was the very first guest on the cosmic skeptic podcast armin of course signed the book for me but not only with his kind of normal english signature as he said but also this special persian signature a book about kind of grammar and english which is quite funny a cookbook this book uh by david nutt i saw david nut uh speak at a festival that i went to not long ago david nutt is an expert in drugs and alcohol and he used to be an advisor to the uk government but he then published some research or some finding and essentially said publicly that riding a horse is more dangerous than doing mdma and the government promptly fired him the rest of the shelf is basically fiction i've got quite a few books by george orwell stuck together as well as dostoevsky books some of my favorite novels as well as my favorite poet who is philip larkin and this lovely collection of poems so the bottom shelf here is maybe where the really interesting stuff is uh in the middle we've got a six volume biography of george washington and the reason that i have this i'm not actually that interested in having a massive six volume biography of george washington but when i had a look in the shop here it says six volumes for 20 pounds turns out that was actually a mislabeling it was supposed to be 20 pounds per volume but i took it to the counter and because i looked up the books and they're worth a lot more than that so i took it to the counter and said listen are you sure that that's not supposed to be 20 pounds per book and he basically said to me yeah i'm pretty sure that's what it's supposed to mean but because it says six volumes for 20 pounds i have to sell you them for 20 pounds so now i have a six five six volume biography of george washington that collection of george washington biographies is stood on top of this lovely leather-bound copy of the rights of man by thomas payne next to some more uh eastern press leather-bound copies first of 1984 and also this copy of the federalist papers which was actually a birthday present from one of my patrons james if you're watching love the book it's got this lovely drawing of uh hamilton john j and james madison in the front and it's just kind of beautifully that the typography is beautiful everything about it's lovely the only downside of course is that these books are leather bound which means that now that i'm a vegan i can't buy them anymore so i won't be buying any more of these in my collection but i certainly won't be selling them either and then finally on the on the right hand side here we have this amazing find that i got in in a secondhand bookshop in the united states again this is a first edition of the catcher in the rye so it's a it's a hardback and if you look on the inside you can see that it's dated to 1951 because this book this actual physical copy of the book was published in 1951 when the book first came out and finally the last book that i have on the shelf here is this history of the united states so the thing that makes it interesting is that this book is just so old this book was written or this book was published this physical book was published within living memory of the american civil war so it's a history of the united states that talks about the civil war as if it just happened which i find just fascinating and it only cost me seven dollars it looks like this particular edition was published in 1871 but okay we'll move on to the next shelf but we'll go via uh this lovely painting which i haven't found a place to put up yet um by michael williams who is a guy that paint paints stuff on instagram tagged me in this painting and i was just like that's incredible that's that's an amazing painting so i bought it off him so michael if you're watching thanks again for the painting i need to find a way to put it up and then i've just got i've actually just got a few books here these are some books that i've just taken off the shelves because of my current university studies this book here the blackwell companion to natural theology the absolute go-to guide for arguments for the existence of god i absolutely love this book it's been an incredible resource in the philosophy of religion if you're trying to teach yourself philosophy of religion or if you're a student of the subject you need to have access to this book it's of course edited by william lane craig another guest on the podcast but it contains essays by a whole host of various uh philosophical experts including craig but also people like jpmorland lydia mcgrew alexander prus has a fantastic essay in here on the cosmological argument so yeah definitely pick it up if you can and then on top of that i've just got some random books here an introductory book to meta ethics i've also got a few books on islam because as some of you may know i'm currently studying a paper islam in the classical period for my final exams at uni this one in particular comes recommended by the faculty and then finally just stephen j gould's trash book rocks of ages which i'm being forced to read from my science and religion paper okay so moving on to this shelf we start at the top with essentially a shelf of philosophy starting with perhaps the most important philosophical books in all of history the quran and the bible followed by some works of political philosophies so we've got the social contract we've got machiavelli the prince we've got thomas payne's rights of man and common sense um and john stuart mills on liberty followed by some albert camus and then some bertrand russell probably the most important analytic philosopher of the 20th century i've got his autobiography here and the history of western philosophy and if you read the autobiography you will learn that a great deal apparently of the history of western philosophy was written whilst bertrand russell was naked so enjoy that image next up we have some little small books you can come and have a look we've got david hume's little treaties on suicide we've got john stuart mills on liberty and seneca on the shortness of life followed by some more david hume treaties of human nature an inquiry concerning human understanding the inquiry is essentially a revision of the treaties uh and there's mixed opinion on exactly why david hume did that hume himself said that it was just an updated version but many people think that he rewrote it to make it more palatable and sell more copies so uh in at least the oxford syllabus they still make us read the original treaties on human nature it's a good place to start with david hume next up is this uh controversial little volume which is uh essays and aphorisms by arthur schoppenhauer schopenhauer is the most elegant pessimist to have ever put a pen to paper if you want to understand the pessimist philosophy the idea that suffering is the thing that makes itself present in life and essentially is the defining quality of the human experience it's expressed nowhere better than by arthur schopenhauer but this collection also contains an essay that arthur shoppenhauer wrote on women which is shall we say infamous you know i was about to read an extract but it's so misogynistic that it might actually demonetize this video i actually have another collection of essays by arthur shoppenhauer including the essay on women and in the editor's preface he actually says by the way the essay on women isn't a joke he wasn't being ironic he was actually being serious it's so bad that to the modern reader it can almost seem like he's doing some kind of parody or or trying to make a joke or something he's not he was just a massive misogynist i mean it's possible that part of the reason why arthur schabenhauer was such a pessimist and was so attuned to the suffering of the human experience was because he was a massive misogynist who just couldn't get laid next to arthur shopping howard here i have a bunch of stuff on descartes so we have of course the set text meditations on first philosophy which is kind of again one of the go-to descartes texts it's where you find the uh kagito or at least one version of it you don't actually find i think therefore i am in in that phrase the quagito ergo sum in this book um but it's one of the places where it's most famously expressed you'll also find two proofs for the existence of god uh an argument for the separation of mind and body an argument for the existence of the external world is kind of as i say a go to descartes but it can be quite difficult to just jump into reading descartes especially people who are writing so long ago some of the language they're using is different you need to understand the context they were writing in and so it's always a good idea to refer to secondary literature and when it comes to descartes one of the best places you can go is to john cottingham this particular book here is one that's constantly recommended by tutors to students who are studying descartes so if you want to understand descartes this book by john cottingham is a great place to start following that i have jon stewart mills utilitarianism or as mohammed hijab would say utilitarianism utilitarianism with that famous fourth chapter which is not called the proof of utilitarianism everyone in the audience can google it yes it's actually the title is proof of utilitarian chapter four what i said oh is he right it's not proof okay i'll concede that point if you don't know what i'm talking about click this link and uh actually you know what don't click that link it's not worth the headache but of course another classic work of liberal philosophy and another thing i have to study for my ethics exam then i've got a book uh by michael sandell another podcast guest this one is justice if you just want a general introduction to normative ethics just a discussion of consequentialism of cantianism and kind of a good place to start with all of that kind of stuff justice by michael sandel is probably the best recommendation i could give you then i've got this rather special book uh conversations on ethics which just contains a bunch of essays and and arguments and conversations on ethics but the reason this is special to me is that one of my old teachers gave it to me they just had the book they weren't reading it and she thought that i might like it and it's just a nice memento of that time when i was uh studying my a levels and doing philosophy finally on the top shelf we've got this book by ac grayling another more recent history of philosophy and again this is signed when i saw ac grailing talk in oxford okay so on the next shelf down you'll probably have already spotted him it's hitch yeah i do have a bust of christopher hitchens it's partly ironic just because i know that christopher hitchens would hate the fact that anyone would be such a sycophant of him to get a bust of him but i saw it on like etsy or something and i thought if there's anyone who's gonna have a buster christopher hitchens it's gonna be me um although when i first got it my brother pointed out that it looks quite a lot like david ike so now i can't unsee that so thanks bro and next to that bust of hitchens we have hitch 22 and again this is a signed edition uh made out to someone called bernie i just wonder who that bernie is um if you're out there bernie let me know and then on the other side of hitch i've got hans kung's book islam past present and future hans kung is a christian theologian but he wrote this absolutely massive fact book about islam it's a great kind of accessible read to people who are more familiar with christian theology he makes a lot of cross-comparisons okay let's try and get through the rest of this fairly quickly uh we have the oxford handbook of animal ethics which of course someone like me should probably own the case for animal rights by tom reagan animals a history which is about the history of the position of animals within philosophy stemming back all the way back to like aristotle i think is where the book starts um gary francione's book animal rights the abolitionist approach next to that is yet another copy of animal liberation and then jonathan safran foes book eating animals should we stop now i've always recommended peter singer's book as the first port of cool for animal ethics but this is even more accessible uh jonathan safran foe's book is a fantastic book if you're vegan or not if you haven't read it it's definitely worth picking it up next up is just a bunch of hitchens the missionary position letters to young contrarian his biography of thomas jefferson his biography of thomas paine god is not great hitch 22 and mortality which is my favorite book maybe probably my favorite book that hitchens wrote actually i love letters to a young contrarian but this was the first book of christopher hitchens that i ever read it's the last one he wrote but the first one i read it's essentially as he was dying of cancer he was writing these essays for vanity fair with the intention of them being collated into a book which eventually happened but the size of the book will give you an indication of what happened at the end he hadn't finished writing the book but what he had done is uh made notes of the things he was going to include in future essays because he thought he had more time and the editors of the book decided to include the scrambled jottings of this dying man as the final chapter of the book and it is just heartbreaking to read especially if you're a fan of christopher hitchens like i am the final chapter here just a bunch of scrambled notes uh this one here for instance just says misery of seeing oneself on old videos or youtubes and it kind of gives me the thought of christopher hitchens kind of laying in his bed unable to properly move and speak being too fragile and weak but watching himself on youtube it's just is a tragic thought to think about but the fact that he was still writing and still wanted his voice to be heard until the last opportunity i think is a testament to the guy that christopher hitchens was okay so just a quick fire we've got darkness visible by william siren the kind of first go-to book on depression the looming tower by lawrence wright which is an overview of the events leading up to and including the 911 terrorist attacks defending my enemy this is by an ex-president of the american civil liberties union he wrote this about the skokie case where a bunch of nazis were trying to march in a predominantly jewish town called skokie and the town said no you're not allowed to march and the american civil liberties union came out and defended their right to march despite this guy being a jew himself and it's a great work on freedom of expression for those that you dislike or detest man's search for meaning followed by martin luther king why we can't wait uh and then this book plain honest men by richard beeman one of the absolute greatest works of literature on american history this book is uh is boring it's very very boring it goes kind of step by step through the constitutional convention talking about how the constitution was formed all the different characters involved and all that kind of stuff so it's a very dry read but having read through it it gave me so much information about the founding of the united states a people's history of the united states followed by the constitution of the states and then a few books by c.s lewis last up we've got this book here why i'm not a muslim and this book by edward fazer which is five proofs for the existence of god you might have heard me recommend this before in certain debates that i've been doing uh this tells you about aristotle and aquinas and leibniz and some philosophers whose approaches to the question you might not have come across before i found this book incredibly useful incredibly instructive and again i'd recommend reading this if you're interested in the philosophy of religion now on the bottom shelf here i've got this really helpful book about the hadith literature from jonathan brown if you want to learn about the hadith and the sunnah of the prophet that's a great book to start with as well as a biography of the prophet by karen armstrong followed by this massive history of christianity uh and then apparently two copies of free economics i'm not sure quite sure how that happened and a bunch of these kind of penguin orange back books that i've just put together because they look nice and of course as is usually the case when you find books by people like richard dawkins or sam harris on my shelf you can pick up any one of them and the likelihood is that it's signed and then we've just got sapiens and homo deus by yuval noah harari that's it those are all the books that you're seeing in the background of my videos and some of the books that i think is most important to have on my shelf now i do own more books than the books that i've shown you today but these are the books that are in the background of my video the ones that you keep asking about so there you go i hope you enjoyed that little tour it's worth noting though that i haven't read all of these books i've read a lot of them but i haven't read all of them i actually think that having a library full of books that you haven't read is more valuable than having a library of books that you have read but a lot of the reading that i'm doing at the moment is actually just online in fact my entire life at the moment my job my university career and at the moment of course a lot of my social life exists online and that's why i want to make sure that when i am online i'm browsing safely that's right i want to take a moment to thank today's sponsor of this video expressvpn expressvpn is a virtual private network that protects your internet security when browsing online as i say i'm someone whose entire job and currently my entire university life lives online and so i spend a lot of time in the past worrying about my online security i want to make it as hard as i can for my data to be compromised by people that i don't want to have it that's why i've been using expressvpn even if you're just a casual internet user you'll still have passwords emails bank details and a host of other things that you want to protect from hackers especially when you're connected to unencrypted wi-fi networks but it's not just hackers you have to look out for you guys might have seen the social dilemma on netflix which recently exposed many of the ways in which big tech companies mine your data and track your online activity in order to use or sell it for profit expressvpn masks my ip address by rerouting my network data through a separate secure server making it much more difficult for websites and big tech companies to personally identify me even when you use incognito mode you might think that nobody can see what you're doing online but your internet service provider can still see all the sites you visit and in the uk internet service providers are required by law to keep logs of my activities online for up to a year with expressvpn your online activity stays your own business but since as i say my entire life is basically online at the moment i want to make sure that i can still browse the internet quickly and efficiently many vpns will slow down your internet but expressvpn has always been incredibly fast and convenient let me show you so to connect to expressvpn all i have to do is i can either use this little tab at the top here which allows me to connect directly or i can just open the software click on this button and within seconds i'll be connected in this case to a server in the united states and you'll see that my internet is just as quick as it ever has been and the best part is that if you use the link in the description expressvpn.com forward slash cosmic skeptic you can get three months of expressvpn completely for free it's a no-brainer just click the link in the description to try it out i'm sure you'll like it just as much as i do but anyway thank you all for watching this video sorry i haven't been uploading in a while i finished my exams on june 17th and after that i'm going to be a full-time youtuber for the first time ever so thanks for just checking in checking out the book collection i hope you enjoyed it found it interesting and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: CosmicSkeptic

Views: 118,225

Rating: 4.8614621 out of 5

Keywords: Alex O'Connor, cosmic, skeptic, cosmicskeptic, atheism, vegan, veganism

Id: 7i62gnTgs1o

Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Tue May 18 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Redditor110202312]

Watching this is just a great reminded why nobody should take this kid seriously