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
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 — The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music Cultures (eds. Harris M. Berger, Friedlind Riedel, David VanderHamm; Oxford University Press)
John Cage — Silence: Lectures and Writings
Matthew B. Crawford — The World Beyond Your Head
John Dewey — Art as Experience
John Dewey — Experience and Nature
Dōgen — Shōbōgenzō (ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi; Shambhala)
Michael Epperson — Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead
Hans-Georg Gadamer — Truth and Method (trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall)
James J. Gibson — The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
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)
Aldous Huxley — The Perennial Philosophy
Don Ihde — Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound
William James — Essays in Radical Empiricism
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)
Laozi — Tao Te Ching (trans. James Legge)
Emmanuel Levinas — Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (trans. Alphonso Lingis; Philosophical Series)
Lucretius — The Nature of Things (trans. A. E. Stallings; Penguin Classics)
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
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
Plato — The Symposium (trans. Christopher Gill; 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 — Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (trans. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell; Riverhead Books)
Śāntideva — The Bodhicaryāvatāra (trans. Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton; Oxford World’s Classics)
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
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
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 list long since finished, I’ve collected these 60+ heavy tomes to carry my mind through 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.