Summer Reading List

Tommy Bahama Beach Umbrella

Summer is a great time to lie back and enjoy some of the books you might not have gotten to over the past year. Load your cooler up with your favorite drinks and snacks and lie back and enjoy Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics and Criticism for example or if your despondent about the current events and need to feel that there is an overarching meaning to all the suffering how about Hegel’s Phanomenologie des Geists. You might remember Hegel was the guy that Marx called upon for his dialectical materialism, e.g thesis, antithesis, synthesis. You take evil (Trump) and the worst of two evils (Clinton) and bingo you get…what? Well at least food for thought. Or let’s say the crazy lazy days of summer get you to wondering where does all this jihady terrorism comes from? Take a crack at the Egyptian philosopher Sayyid Qtub’s Fi Zilal al-Quran, In the Shade of the Qur’an. Or perhaps the cloudless skies and beckoning seas will make you wonder about the state of relationships. What better book for the beach than De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, which was the basis for Pasolini’s Salo, a favorite summer read for coprophiliacs. Or perhaps lying in paradise you’ll be reminded of Camus famous remark form the Myth of Sisyphus that “There is only one really serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.” And if that’s too heavy a load to bear on an August afternoon why not settle back with either Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit or Sartre’s L’Etre et L’Neant?