The list is tired of Strauss and the neocons so most of these are on bookshelf around the corner where I don't have to see them.
At this exact immediate moment, I am scanning through Malraux's Lazare a mediation on the dialectic between mass extermination and fraternity. I was thinking of recommending it to Joanna, but it isn't really a story, although it has a fictional account of the first German gas attack at Bolgako on the Russian front in the spring of 1916.
But over to the current reading pile in no particular order are Hegel's The Philosophy of History, about a third through the introduction, which is a small book length all its own. This one of those books that is so rich and so dense I can only take a few pages at a time. This is a very, very good book.
Next to it is George di Giovanni's Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors. This is also a very good, but very rich book. Di Giovanni is a great writer. Very detailed, very well nuanced in each small turn, highly descriptive so that you can follow it like a narrative history, except it is all about ideas rather than events. It is great compliment to Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment which is extraordinarily detailed the other way with events and people, and relatively thin on the specific ideas involved.
Next in line to open and at least get started on is Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism---no I've never read it, and it is a must read for background on Weimar, which is background on you know who.
Next to Weber, I also have the Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers which I visit for a few days every now and then. Some of these letters are complete essay sketches for books or trains of thought that Arendt or Jaspers or Heinrich Blucher were following and shared. They give me a much better idea of how these people thought, how they interpreted their time through their studies. They are actually a kind of model on how to do that.
The real problem with reading is keeping myself away from the computer to background somebody I don't know much or anything about, so I look them up and get lost reading about them on the web. In fact today I was going back over AD's post on Quine and Davidson, and thinking about the sterility of these positions in terms of subjects, thought, language, and so forth, and then I pulled out Cassirer's first volumn and re-read some sections on the problem of representation and pretty soon the day was gone.
I also thought about Rakesh's meanderings around zero, and thought absently about how I've tried to play with zero. It is the other half of the dialectic 0 and INF. They are a complementary pair. If you propose one, the other shows up on its own. And yet I can not actually conceive either one.
I think Byers is probably wrong. Logic needs zero. It appears in at least one version of the axioms on set theory, the axiom on infinity:
There exist a set containing 0 and containing the successor of each of its elements. (Paul Halmos)
There is a subtle sort of problem with considering zero as a point. To actually be a point on a line, it needs the negative numbers to approach on the other side so it can be properly sandwiched in between. You can see this dilemma with the harmonic series that doesn't converge, but the alternating harmonic does converge, to zero. In some abstract sense this is the linear version of the same complimentary you can imagine on the plane with zero mapped to the center of a circle. The point has its reciprocal at all points at infinity, under a conformal transformation (see circle of inversion).
Notes for AD, ``Ross King, Brunelleschi's Dome...''
There is great book on Brunelleschi's dome, done by an Italian in the 70s. It's a large format book (just smaller than coffee table type) and has lots of photos, drawings, and diagrams that outlines exactly how B constructed this thing. I wish I could remember the name, sorry. Once you see it, you'll recognize it. It is unlike any of the other books on B. I found it by accident at Doe at UCB about ten years ago and studied it for weeks, with my Italian dictionary on hand, renewing several times. I can't remember now, if it was the same book or another, but you might also want to look for his use of perspective and his uses of the golden section. He orchestrated all these together to achieve his stunning feeling of space.
But I agree the whole series: Gilberti, Alberti, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, Mantegna. To see space explode look at Niccolo Dell'Araca's Lamentation. The whole series creats a new sense of space, open public spaces, power, and dynamism unchained. I've done sketch studies of a lot of these works and as I made my copies I could feel it just in re-creating the lines in their open gesture, especially in drawing the folds that flow behind the forward throw of grief in Lamentation. It must have been decided to be too difficult to attempt to cast so it was left as is. That and Donatello's Mary Magdellen gotta be some of my all time favorites.
CG