I was at a bookstore last week and I picked up Free Will, by Sam Harris, and How to be Free, by A. A. Long. I picked these up as a part of my goal to read more substantive books. I usually read just Science Fiction and Fantasy for fun, or some language study books here and there, but over the past couple of years I’ve been feeling inspired by the sort of character developing advice I’ve been seeing in content I read online.
I’ve completed a first pass of both books, but I’ve only just started to go back over them and make notes. While I read them, I did record a few quick notes here and there, but really just a few thinking points. I’ll probably post more on these two texts over the next couple of weeks.
For the Free Will book, I’m just trying to understand the material and see if I can agree with the reasoning used to support the assertions made by the author. I’m not looking to form an answer to the larger question of the existence of free will, as it seems like something that doesn’t matter, but I’m more curious to see what someone would write about the topic.
With How to be Free, my goal is to get a better understanding of Stoicism. I’ve read a few resources online and I have a copy of Meditations as translated by Hays, but How to be Free is the literal handbook recorded by Arrian of Epictetus’s formal lessons as recorded in the Encheiridion and some excerpts from Discourses. With this text, in addition to my typical notes aimed at understanding, I will be documenting specific aspects of the source material that I disagree with and why.
An overview of both works will (soonish?) follow.
updated: 2023-03-30 07:53:41 -0400
generated: 2023-04-23