A Long-Form Study of Attention and Judgment

Over the past few years, I’ve been quietly assembling a small library on purpose. Not a “great books” program, not a checklist, and not an aesthetic exercise. Not a fixed list, but a thorough and deeply considered foundation to the rest of my reading life.

A private canon.

Its aim is specific: to treat perception as ethically real.

My work as a mastering engineer depends on listening decisions that can’t be reduced to rules. There’s no formula that tells you when a vocal is emotionally forward enough, when a transient carries intention rather than aggression, or when a record crosses the line between intensity and coercion. Those judgments come from somewhere. They’re trained, shaped, stabilized — and sometimes distorted. Over time, it became hard to avoid a simple conclusion: listening isn’t neutral reception

Over time, it became hard to avoid a simple conclusion: listening isn’t neutral reception. It’s participation. Attention is action.

This library exists to take that realization seriously.

I didn’t set out to “balance East and West,” or ancient and modern. The organizing principle was simpler: find writers who understood that experience is structured, that judgment is real even when it can’t be proven like math, and that the self is formed rather than simply given.

Different traditions name this in different ways — discipline of assent, right intention, lived experience, conditions of possibility, process — but the pressure point is the same: the way we attend and perceive is not ethically neutral. That matters because modern life increasingly separates perception from responsibility. The real battleground is salience: what gets to feel action-relevant in the first place. Attention is captured, redirected, automated. Judgment is outsourced to metrics.

Taste becomes reactive instead of trained. It becomes possible to live inside a perceptual world that feels vivid while remaining structurally unexamined.

These books are a counterweight. They don’t hand me answers so much as steady the ground beneath perception itself. Because if perception is shaped by systems, responsibility eventually has to touch design and governance.

Taken together, these works form a single investigation: how a human being becomes responsible for perception.

This isn’t about acquiring beliefs. It’s about training the instrument of attention itself.

The list, as it currently stands…

• David Z. Albert — Quantum Mechanics and Experience

• Hannah Arendt — The Human Condition

• Aristotle — De Anima (trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred; Penguin Classics)

• Marcus Aurelius — Meditations (trans. Gregory Hays; Modern Library)

• Matsuo Bashō — The Narrow Road to the Deep North (trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa; Penguin Classics)

• Harris M. Berger, Friedlind Riedel, David VanderHamm — The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures (Oxford University Press)

• Henri Bergson — Matter and Memory (trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer)

• Albert Borgmann — Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry

• Martin Buber — I and Thou (trans. Walter Kaufmann; Scribner)

• John Cage — Silence: Lectures and Writings

• Georges Canguilhem — The Normal and the Pathological (trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett; Zone Books)

• Sean Carroll — Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime

• Andy Clark — Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind

• Confucius — Analects: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries (trans. Edward Slingerland; Hackett Publishing)

• Matthew B. Crawford — The World Beyond Your Head

• Stephen Darwall — The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability

• René Descartes — Meditations on First Philosophy (trans. Donald A. Cress; Hackett)

• John Dewey — Art as Experience

• John Dewey — Experience and Nature

• Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher — Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language

• Dōgen — Shōbōgenzō (ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi; Shambhala)

• Meister Eckhart — Selected Writings (trans. Oliver Davies; Penguin Classics)

• The Epic of Gilgamesh (trans. Andrew George; Penguin Classics)

• Michael Epperson — Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead

• Michel Foucault — The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (Vintage Books)

• Michel Foucault — Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (trans. Alan Sheridan; Vintage Books)

• Miranda Fricker — Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing

• Hans-Georg Gadamer — Truth and Method (trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall)

• James J. Gibson — The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

• Jean Gebser — The Ever-Present Origin (trans. Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas; Ohio University Press)

• Philip Goff — Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness

• David Ray Griffin — Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem

• Jürgen Habermas — The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (trans. Thomas McCarthy; Beacon Press)

• G. W. F. Hegel — Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (trans. Bernard Bosanquet; Penguin Classics)

• G. W. F. Hegel — Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Miller; Oxford University Press)

• G. W. F. Hegel — The Science of Logic (trans. George di Giovanni; Cambridge University Press)

• Heraclitus — The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (trans. and ed. Charles H. Kahn; Cambridge University Press)

• Axel Honneth — The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (trans. Joel Anderson; MIT Press)

• Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno — Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (trans. Edmund Jephcott; ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr; Stanford University Press)

• Edmund Husserl — Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom; Hackett, 2014)

• Aldous Huxley — The Perennial Philosophy

• Ibn ‘Arabī  —  Fusus al-Hikam: An Annotated Translation of “The Bezels of Wisdom” (trans. Binyamin Abrahamov; Routledge)

• Don Ihde — Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound

• William James — Essays in Radical Empiricism

• William James — Writings 1902-1910: The Varieties of Religious Experience / Pragmatism / A Pluralistic Universe / The Meaning of Truth / Some Problems of Philosophy / Essays (Library of America)

• Hans Jonas — The Imperative of Responsibility

• C. G. Jung — Aion

• C. G. Jung — Memories, Dreams, Reflections

• C. G. Jung — The Red Book

• Immanuel Kant — Critique of Judgement (trans. James Creed Meredith; rev. and ed. Nicholas Walker; Oxford World’s Classics)

• Immanuel Kant — Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood; Cambridge University Press)

• Kenkō and Kamo no Chōmei — Essays in Idleness and Hōjōki (trans. Meredith McKinney; Penguin Classics)

• Eva Feder Kittay — Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency

• Susanne K. Langer — Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art

• Laozi — Tao Te Ching (trans. James Legge)

• Emmanuel Levinas — Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (trans. Alphonso Lingis; Philosophical Series)

• Alasdair MacIntyre — After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (3rd ed.; University of Notre Dame Press)

• Alasdair MacIntyre — Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues

• Man’yōshū (trans. Ian Hideo Levy)

• John McDowell — Mind and World

• Iain McGilchrist — The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World

• Marshall McLuhan — Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — Phenomenology of Perception (trans. Donald A. Landes; Routledge)

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — The Visible and the Invisible (trans. Alphonso Lingis; Northwestern University Press)

• Iris Murdoch — The Sovereignty of Good

• Nāgārjuna — Nagarjuna’s Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (trans. Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura)

• Thomas Nagel —  Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False

• Kitarō Nishida — An Inquiry into the Good (trans. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives)

• Keiji Nishitani — Religion and Nothingness (trans. Jan Van Bragt; University of California Press)

• Alva Noë — Action in Perception

• Onora O'Neill — A Question of Trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002 (Cambridge University Press)

• Philip Pettit — Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government

• Plato — The Republic (trans. C.D.C. Reeve; Hackett Publishing)

• Plotinus — The Enneads (trans. Stephen MacKenna; abridged ed., Penguin Classics)

• Neil Postman — Amusing Ourselves to Death

• Paul Ricoeur — Oneself as Another (trans. Kathleen Blamey)

• Carlo Rovelli — Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution (trans. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell; Riverhead Books)

• Carlo Rovelli — On the Equality of All Things: Physics and Philosophy

• Śāntideva — The Bodhicaryāvatāra (trans. Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton; Oxford World’s Classics)

• James C. Scott — Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

• Shankara — Vivekacūḍāmaṇi (trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood; Vedanta Press)

• Lee Smolin — Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum

• Baruch Spinoza — Ethics: Proved in Geometrical Order (trans. Michael Silverthorne; Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)

• Henry P. Stapp — Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (2nd ed.; The Frontiers Collection, Springer)

• Jun’ichirō Tanizaki — In Praise of Shadows and Other Essays (trans. Michael P. Cronin; Tuttle)

• Charles Taylor — Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

• Charles Taylor — Sources of the Self

• Evan Thompson — Mind in Life

• Evan Thompson — Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

• Joan C. Tronto — Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care

• Upaniṣads (trans. Patrick Olivelle; Oxford World's Classics)

• Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch — The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (rev. ed.; MIT Press)

• Simone Weil — Gravity and Grace (Routledge Classics)

• Simone Weil — The Need for Roots (Penguin Classics)

• Alfred North Whitehead — Adventures of Ideas

• Alfred North Whitehead — Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (Corrected Edition; eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne; Free Press)

• Alfred North Whitehead — Science and the Modern World

• Ludwig Wittgenstein — Philosophical Investigations (trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte; Wiley-Blackwell, revised 4th edition)

• Wayne Wu — Movements of the Mind

• Zhuangzi — The Complete Writings (trans. Chris Fraser; Oxford World’s Classics)

16 years ago I made a list of 100 canonical literary classics, mainly novels — Tolstoy, Joyce, Proust, Goethe. With that first list long since finished, I’ve collected a new stack of 100 heavy tomes to carry my mind through the decades to come. I expect to live with these books; not to “finish” them, but to return to them for the rest of my life. They’re a stable reference point against which experience can be tested, clarified, and corrected.

The goal is simple, and not easy: to perceive clearly, to judge responsibly, and to act without distorting the world through inattention or ego.

In the end, this isn’t philosophy as a credential. It’s philosophy as a practice of perceptual honesty.

More simply: it’s about living a life that is good.