This month, I have read, watched, and liked these:

Films, documentaries, TV series:

• Ingmar Bergman (1966) Persona
• Sergio Leone (1966) The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
• James Cameron (1984) The Terminator
• Ching Siu-Tung (1987) A Chinese Ghost Story [倩女幽魂]
• Line of duty, Season 4 (2017)​

Essays (academic): 

Population ethics/applied ethics/political philosophy

• Josh Parsons (2002) Axiological actualism
• Nils Holtug (2016) A fair distribution of refugees in the European Union

Personal identity/what matters

• Bernard Williams (1970) The self and the future
• Sydney Shoemaker (1970) Persons and their pasts
• Susan Wolf (1986) Self-interest and interest in selves
• Bart Schultz (1986) Persons, selves, and utilitarianism
• Douglas Ehring (1987) Survival and trivial facts
• Derek Parfit (1993) The indeterminacy of identity
• Derek Parfit (1995) The unimportance of identity
• David O. Brink (1997) Rational egoism and the separateness of persons
• Mark Johnston (1997) Human concerns without superlative selves
• Jennifer Whiting (1999) Back to 'self and the future'
• Sydney Shoemaker (2004) Brown-Brownson revisited
• Derek Parfit (2007) Is personal identity what matters?
• Derek Parfit (2012) We are not human beings
• Kieran Setiya (2015) Selfish reasons
• Johan Gustafsson (2018) The unimportance of being any future person

Metaphysics

• Yuri Balashov (2011) Persistence

​
Short stories and poems:

• Thomas Mann (1903) Tonio Kröger
• Thomas Mann (1912) Death in Venice
• Vladimir Nabokov (1925) Christmas
• Neil R. Jones (1931) The Jameson Satellite (not exactly 'high art', but interesting)

​
Books (academic):

• Marina Warner (2001) Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds (not the most philosophically sophisticated discussion of change and identity, but full of interesting exaples)

​​
Books (non-academic):

• Ian McEwan (2005) Saturday
• China Mieville (2009) The City & The City

This month, I have read, watched, and liked these:

Films, documentaries, TV series:

• Robert Rossen (1961) The Hustler
• Stuart Rosenberg (1967) Cool Hand Luke
• George Roy Hill (1973) The Sting
• Law & Order: UK, TV series, Season 1 (2009) 

Essays (academic): 

Ethics/Meta-ethics/Moral psychology/Applied Ethics/History of Ethics

• Thomas Nagel (1972) War and massacre
• John Harsanyi (1977) Morality and the theory of rational behaviour
• Jonathan Dancy (1997) Parfit on indirectly self-defeating theories
• David Gauthier (1997) Rationality and the rational aim
• Anthony Skelton (2010) Henry Sidgwick's moral epistemology
• Anthony Skelton (2011) Utilitarian practical ethics
• Roger Crisp (2011) Sidgwick's hedonism
• Roger Crisp (2014) Sidgwick and utilitarianism in the late nineteenth century
• Ben Eggleston (2017) Decision theory

Philosophy of Art

• Peter Lamarque (2002) Work and object
• Lee Walters (2013) Repeatable artworks as created types

Metaphysics/Personal Identity

• William Carter (1989) How to change your mind

Books (academic):

• Henry Sidgwick (1874/1907) The Methods of Ethics

​​
Books (non-academic):

• Apuleius (160s) Metamorphoses (or The Golden Ass)

This month, I have read, watched, and liked these:

Films, documentaries, TV series:​ 

• William Dieterle (1950) Dark City
• T. Gilliam & T. Jones (1975) Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Stanley Kubrick (1987) Full Metal Jacket
• Alexander Payne (2013) Nebraska 
• Robert Gordon & Morgan Neville (2015) Best of Enemies
• Trapped, TV series (2015)
• Alberto Rodriguez (2016) Smoke & Mirrors
• Electric Dreams, TV series (2017) 
• Peter Nicks (2017) The Force
• Erik Nelson (2017) A Grey State
• Tiller Russell (2018) Operation Odessa
• Drug Lords, TV series (2018)

Essays (academic): 

Ethics/Meta-ethics/Moral psychology/Applied Ethics

• Peter Singer (1972) Famine, affluence, and morality
• John M. Doris (2009) Skepticism about persons
• Theron Pummer (2016) Whether and where to give

Metaphysics/Personal Identity/Philosophy of Biology

• Derek Parfit (1975) Later selves and moral principles
• Peter Unger (1979) I do not exist
• David Shoemaker (1999) Selves and moral units
• Achille Varzi (2005) Change, temporal parts, and the argument from vagueness
• Eugene Mills (2008) The egg and I
• Karen Bennett (2009) Composition, colocation, and metaontology
• Jason Morris (2012) Substance ontology cannot determine the moral status of embryos
• Judith K. Crane (2012) Biological-mereological coincidence
• Jonathan Tallant (2014) Against mereological nihilism
• Daniel Korman (2015) Fundamental quantification and the language of the ontology room
• Bradley Rettler (2018) Mereological nihilism and puzzles about material constitution

Philosophy of Art/Fiction

• Gregory Currie (2014) Standing on the last ditch

Essays/articles (non-academic):

• Martin Wold (2007) The New Capitalism, How Unfettered finance is fast reshaping the global economy
• Scott F. Gilbert (2016) DNA as our soul: don't believe the advertising

Books (academic):

• R. M. Hare (1963) Freedom and Reason

Books (non-academic):

• Ovid (8) Metamorphoses
• W. Shakespeare (1595/6) A Midsummer Night's Dream

This month, I have read, watched, and liked these:

Films, documentaries, TV series:​ 

• Stanley Kubrick (1968) 2001: A space odyssey
• ​Jacques Audiard (2012) Rust and bone
• David Bickerstaff (2016) The curious world of Hieronymus Bosch
• Martin McDonagh (2017) Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Bryan Fogel (2017) Icarus
• SJ Clarkson (2018) Collateral, miniseries

Essays (academic): 

Ethics/Meta-ethics/Comparative philosophy

• David Gauthier (1967) Morality and advantage
• Bradford Cokelet (2016) Confucianism, Buddhism, and virtue ethics

Metaphysics/Philosophy of Biology/Personal Identity

• David Wiggins (1987) The person as object of science, as subject of experience, and as locus of value
• Eric Olson (1998) There is no problem of the self
• Cian Dorr & Gideon Rosen (2002) Composition as a fiction
• Barry Smith & Berit Brogaard (2003) Sixteen days
• Rowland Stout (2003) The life of a process
• L.A. Paul (2007) Constitutive overdetermination
• L.A. Paul (2010) The puzzles of material constitution
• Helen Steward (2013) Processes, continuants, and individuals
• Kristie Miller (2013) 'Personal identity' minus the person
• Ted Sider (2013) Against parthood
• John Dupre (2014) Animalism and the persistence of human organisms
• Eric Olson (2015) What does it mean to say that we are animals?
• L.A. Paul (2016) The subjectively enduring self

Short stories (non-academic):

• Richard Matheson (1950) Born of man and woman
• Richard Matheson (1950) Third from the sun
• Thomas Ligotti (1985) The frolic
• Thomas Ligotti (1985) Les fleurs

This month, I have read, watched, and liked these:

Films, documentaries, TV series:​ 

• Julien Duvivier (1937) Pepe le Moko
• Danny Boyle (1996) Trainspotting
• Jia Zhangke (2002) Unknown Pleasures
• Vikings, Season 1 (2013)
• Vikings, Season 2 (2014)
• Fargo, Season 3 (2017)
• Greg Kohs (2017) Alphago
• Black Mirror, Season 4 (2017)

Essays (academic): 

Philosophy of mind/Cognitive science/Perception​

• M. G. F. Martin (2002) Out of the past
• Peter Langland-Hassan (2012) Pretense, imagination, and belief
• S. Stich & J. Tarzia (2015) The pretense debate
• Deena Skolnick Weisberg (2015) Pretend play

Ethics/meta-ethics

• Isaiah Berlin (1959) On the pursuit of the ideal
• R. M. Hare (1976) Ethical theory and utilitarianism
• Roger Crisp (2006) Hedonism reconsidered
• Ben Eggleston (2012) Utilitarianism
• Miranda Fricker (2013) Styles of moral relativism
• Ben Eggleston (2017) Mill's moral standard

Books (non-academic):

• W. Somerset Maugham (1937) Theatre
• Ken Liu, editor (2016) Invisible planets (only some stories)

This month, I have read, watched, and liked these:

Films, documentaries, TV series:​ 

• Rashomon (1950) Akira Kurosawa.
• Mean Streets (1973) Martin Scorsese.
• The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974) Werner Herzog.
• The Chaser (2008) Na Hong-ji.
• Among the believers (2015) Hemal Trivedi and Mohammed Naqvi.
• Game of thrones, season 6 (2016)

​

​








Essays (academic): 

Personal identity/action/mind

• Terence Penelhum (1967) Personal identity. 
• Harry Frankfurt (1971) Freedom of the will and the concept of a person.
• D. Parfit (1971) Personal identity.
• Harry Frankfurt (1977) Identification and externality.
• Sydney Shoemaker (1979) Identity, properties, and causality. 
• Sydney Shoemaker (1981) Some varieties of functionalism. 
• Sydney Shoemaker (1984) Personal identity: a materialist account.  
• Harry Frankfurt (1987) Identification and wholeheartedness.
• Sydney Shoemaker (1994/6) The first-person perspective.
• Richard Moran (2002) Frankfurt on identification.

Epistemology/mind

• N. Shah & J. D. Velleman (2005) Doxastic deliberation.
• Conor McHugh (2011) What do we aim at when we believe?

History of Philosophy/Ethics/Comparative Philosophy

• Edward Slingerland (2015) The situationist critique and early Confucian virtue ethics.

Book (academic):

• ​Don Locke (1971) Memory.

Book (non-academic):

• Antonio Manetti (1400) La novella del grasso legnaiuolo.
• P. K. Dick (1962) The Man in the High Castle.

​This month, I have read, watched, and liked these:

Films (fiction), documentaries, TV series:​ 

• On the Waterfront (1954). Elia Kazan.
• The King of Comedy (1982). Martin Scorsese.
• The Intouchables (2011). Olivier Nakache & Eric Toledano.
• Chasing Ice (2012). Jeff Orlowski.

Essays (academic): 

Metaphysics

• Donald Baxter (1988). Identity in the loose and popular sense. Mind.
• Josh Parsons (2015). A phenomenological argument for stage theory. Analysis.

Philosophy of Mind/Imagination

• Elisabeth Camp (2009). Two varieties of literary imagination. Midwest Studies in Philosophy.
• Janet Levine (2011). Imaginability, possibility, and the puzzle of imaginative resistance. Canadian Journal of Philosophy. 

History of Philosophy/Comparative

• Jonathan Barnes (2006). Belief is up to us. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
• Lisa Raphals (2009). Thirteen ways of looking at the self in early China. History of Philosophy Quarterly.
• Jessica Gordon-Roth (2015). Locke's place-time-kind principle. Philosophy Compass. 

This month, I have read, watched, and liked these:

Films (fiction), documentaries, TV series:​

• Jaws (1975). Steven Spielberg. 
• 7 Years in Tibet (1997). Jean-Jacques Annaud.
• Blood Diamonds (2006). Edward Zwick.
• Fargo, Season 1 (2014).
• Last Days in Vietnam (2014). Rory Kennedy.
• The Hateful Eight (2015). Quentin Tarantino. ("When 'The Hangman' catches you... you hang!")
• City 40 (2016). Samira Goetschel. 
• The Nice Guys (2016). Shane Black.
• Better Call Saul, Season 2 (2016).
• Beasts of No Nation (2016). Lary Joji Fukunaga.

Essays (academic): 

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

• Jerrold Levinson (1980). What a musical work is. Journal of Philosophy.
• Richard Wollheim (1980) Seeing-as, seeing-in, and pictorial representation.
• Allen Carlson (1994). Existence, location, and function.

​
​Epistemology

• Matthias Steup (2000). Doxastic voluntarism and epistemic deontology. Acta Analytica.
• Matthias Steup (2011). Empiricism, metaphysics, and voluntarism. Synthese.

Metaphysics

• Chris Daly (2008) Fictionalism and the attitudes. Philosophical Studies.

Book (non-fiction):

•  Margaret MacMillan (2007). Nixon and Mao.

This month, I have read, watched, and liked these:

Films (fiction), documentaries, TV series:

• Pygmalion (1938). Anthony Asquith & Leslie Howard.
• The Rules of the Game (1939). Jean Renoir.
• Ghost in the Shell (1995). Mamoru Oshii.
• Mad Men, Season 6 (2013).

Essays (academic): 

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

• Paisley Livingston (2015). Authorial intention and the varieties of intentionalism. In Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost (eds.) A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature (Wiley-Blackwell).
• Berys Gaut (1998). The ethical criticism of art. In Jerrold Levinson (ed.) Aesthetics and Ethics (Cambridge University Press).
• R. A. Sharpe (2000). The empiricist theory of artistic value. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
• Matthew Kieran (2003). Forbidden Knowledge. In S. Gardner and J. Bermudez (eds.). Art and Morality (London: Routledge)

​
​History of Philosophy

• Anthony Long (1991). Representation and the self in Stoicism. In S. Everson (ed.). Companions to Ancient Thought (Cambridge University Press).
• Tad Brennan (2003). Stoic moral psychology. In B. Inwood (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics (Cambridge University Press).

Book (fiction):

• Han Kang (2007). The Vegetarian. 

This month, I have read, watched, and liked these:

Films (fiction), documentaries, TV series:

• The Fallen Idol (1948). Carol Reed
• The Wages of Fear (1953). Herni-Georges Clauzot. (Watch it till the end!)
• Gangster Paradise: Jerusalema (2008). Ralph Ziman.
• Mad Men, Season 4 (2010).
• Black Mirror, Season 2 Episode 4 (2011).​

Essays (academic): 

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

• Kendall Walton (1970). Categories of art. In his Marvelous Images.
• Monroe Beardsley (1970/1982). The aesthetic point of view. In his The Aesthetic Point of View: Collected Essays.
• Frank Sibley (1974). Particularity, art, and evaluation. In his Approach to Aesthetics.
• Richard Wollheim (1980). Criticism as retrieval. In his Art and its Object.
• Monroe Beardsley (1982). Aesthetic experience. In his The Aesthetic Point of View: Collected Essays.
• Jerrold Levinson (1989) Refining art historically. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
• Noel Carroll (1997). The ontology of mass art. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
• ​Stephen Davies (2015) Defining art and artworlds. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.​

Ethics, meta-ethics, and applied ethics

• Amartya Sen (1979). Utilitarianism and welfarism. The Journal of Philosophy.

Personal identity, personal ontology

• Eric Olson (2001). A compound of two substances. In K. Corcoran (ed.) Soul, Body, and Survival.
• John Lippitt (2007). Getting the story straight. Inquiry.
• Richard Menary (2008). Embodied narratives. Journal of Consciousness Studies.

General metaphysics

• Jonathan Schaffer (2007). From nihilism to monism. Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

Books (fiction):

• Muriel Spark (1962). The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. 

Book (non-fiction): 

• Richard Moran (2015). The Story of my Life. (This is not really a book but a 'longer paper' on the narrative approach to self-knowledge and identity.)

This month, I have read, watched, and liked these:

Films, documentaries, and TV series:

• The 39 Steps. (1935). Alfred Hitchcock. 
• Out of the Past. (1947). Jacques Tourneur. (A film noir masterpiece.)
• Sunset Boulevard. (1950). Billy Wilder. (Another film noir/mystery/drama masterpiece.)
• Dr. Strangelove. (1964). Stanley Kubrick. (A classic. And always fun to watch!)
• Mad Men, Season 3. (2009).
• Exit Through the Gift Shop. (2010). Banksy. (Interesting documentary on street art focused on the figure of Mr. Brainwash and on the process of 'validation' in the artworld. For those interested in thinking about the nature of art and artistic value, including the monetary value of art.)

Essays (academic):

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

• Morris Weitz (1956). The role of theory in aesthetics. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Reprinted in Peter Lamarque and Stein H. Olsen (eds.). Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Blackwell Publishing
• Arthur Danto (1964). The artworld. The Journal of Philosophy. Reprinted in Peter Lamarque and Stein H. Olsen (eds.). Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Blackwell Publishing
• George Dickie (1975). What is anti-art? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 
• Jerrold Levinson (1979). Defining art historically. British Journal of Aesthetics. Reprinted in Peter Lamarque and Stein H. Olsen (eds.). Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Blackwell Publishing
• George Dickie (1983). The new institutional theory of art. Proceedings of the 8th Wittgenstein Symposium, 10. Reprinted in Peter Lamarque and Stein H. Olsen (eds.). Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Blackwell Publishing. 
• Monroe Beardsley (1983). An aesthetic definition of art. Reprinted in Peter Lamarque and Stein H. Olsen (eds.). Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Blackwell Publishing. 

(All important contemporary papers on the definition of art.)

Ethics, Meta-ethics, Applied ethics

• Kwame Anthony Appiah (1990). Racism. In Hugh LaFollette (Ed.) Ethics in Practice. 2nd Edition. Blackwell Publishing. 
• Loretta Kopelman (1994). Female circumcision/genital mutilation and ethical relativism. Second Opinion.
• Miranda Fricker (2013). Styles of moral relativism. In Roger Crisp, Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics. Oxford University Press. 
• Jonathan Wolff (2002). Economic competition: should we care about the losers? In Hugh LaFollette (ed.). Ethics in Practice. Blackwell Publishing.

Essays (popular/non-academic):

• Pelagia Horgan (2014) Sacred Art. Aeon. (This is a nice short piece that ends with the question(s): can (and how) 'secular people' appreciate sacred art? I discussed these issues in my 'The Will to Make-believe'.)

Books (fiction):

• Angela Carter (1979). The Bloody Chamber (I didn't like all of the stories in this collection—for example, I didn't like 'The Erl-King'. However, 'The Bloody Chamber', 'Puss-in-Boots', 'The Lady of the House of Love', and the last two stories are delightful.)

Books (non-fiction):

• David Papineau (2002). Thinking about Consciousness. Clarendon Press. (I find his discussion of the phenomenal concept strategy quite convincing.)