Each year, I put together lists of the books and articles I've I read that I found most interesting. This started out as a way to motivate myself to take better notes when I read. Now, I occasionally also get a nice message from someone who stumbled onto something new. Please share your list below!

Here's a peek at my list:

* Differential Privacy by Simson Garfinkel (2025)

* The Philosopher in the Kitchen by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1825)

* After Adam Smith: A Century of Transformation in Politics and Political Economy by Murray Milgate and Shannon G. Stimson (2009)

* Philosophical Analysis: Its development between the two World Wars by J. O. Urmson Haskins (1956)

* Tales of the Weird: An Uncanny Introduction (2023)

* An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise by John R. Pierce (1980)

* Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy by Steven D. Hales (2006)

Here's my list so far:

Differential Privacy (2025) by Simson Garfinkel. This is an accessible and enjoyable introduction to differential privacy from the MIT Press essentials series.

The Philosopher in the Kitchen (1825) by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. This is a primer on gourmandism or the art and science of cooking, eating, and hosting. An interesting look at the French intellectual milieu at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy (2006) by Steven Hales. This book argues for relativism about philosophical propositions, e.g., metaphysical statements. I came across this book and picked it up after enjoying a few articles from Hales' blog [0].

I usually put up a list at the end of each year. Here's the list from last year [1].

[0] https://hilariusbookbinder.substack.com

[1] https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-books-2024/

Are you also eating breakfast and lunch? Lots of my colleagues that have struggled with jitters and such also practice fasting.

There are lots of great books on the Vienna Circle. Check out Dave Edmonds' Wittgenstein's Poker (2001) for a fun and accessible intro.

Thanks for the recommendation. I’m currently reading Journey To The Edge of Reason,¹ which is nominally a biography of Kurt Gödel but the first third is about the rise and fall of Austrian intellectual dominance and the Vienna Circle is a central piece of that story.

¹ https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Edge-Reason-Life-G%C3%B6del/d...

Reading and writing about old books and articles [0]. It's a nice distraction from work while still being mentally stimulating.

I'm increasingly thinking about mowing the yard and managing the garden. That's a hobby, right?

[0] e.g. http://bcmullins.github.io/research-from-1825/

You're right that this doesn't work. I seem to have thought of verifiability as provable from outside the theory and discoverable as provable from inside the theory. This clearly doesn't get at what Greg is arguing.

Thanks for pointing this out! I'll update the post.

I'm now not sure what's the distinction between verifiability and discoverability among truths in a formal system.

This is a fun side project I've been working on now for a few years that looks back at research from 100, 150, and 200 years ago. Some stuff is well-known, others have been forgotten, and still others were never read at the time.

I've had lots of great suggestions from HN readers in the past. If I've missed anything cool that you like, please share!

Love the premise and I see several years are posted. I like your philosophy of science section especially, because while most would neglect that area, it's probably got good predictive/foreshadowing juice in general (although not necessarily for any given year).

Skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1875_in_science the twin studies and behavioural genetics is interesting. The challenger-deep thing too since it's earlier than I would have guessed, but IMHO it would be more exciting/appropriate to categorize as "exploration" than science. Did they publish a "paper" about stuff like that back then, or just tell the royal society, tell the newspapers and call it good?

A pointless but fun question to think about is, how to decide the most important thing that happened in a given year? Sometimes a discovery, sometimes an idea, sometimes a project, election, or war. But for a slow year.. maybe it's just that someone who will have that idea or start that project later was born.

I find the naturalism vs spiritualism debate to be one of the most compelling parts of what's going on in the late nineteenth century and plan to continue covering it in future installments.

It's always an interesting exercise choosing which books or articles to write about. There's a balancing act between what I want to read, what I think is important or representative, and what do I know enough about to have anything to add.

Likely the best resource to learn about philosophy is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [0]. It's meant to provide a rigorous starting point for learning about a topic, where 1. you won't get bogged down in a giant tome on your first approach and 2. you have references for further reader.

Obviously, the SEP isn't perfect, but it's a great place to start. There's also the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy [1]; however, I find its articles to be more hit or miss.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu

[1] https://iep.utm.edu

This reminds me of undergrad philosophy courses. After the intro logic/critical thinking course, some students can't resist seeing affirming the antecedent and post hoc fallacies everywhere (even if more are imagined than not).

Agreed! If people move to a area and don't feel like they're part of the community, reading the local paper is a great way to figure out what's going on.