PPE – things you might like to read before you get here
We recognize that people will come to the course from all sorts of different educational
backgrounds, and will also want to pursue different interests within the course; so we don’t expect
people to have read anything in particular before they get here. What follows is just a list of
suggestions of things which you might enjoy reading to get into the right frame of mind for the start
of the course.
Philosophy
Three books which are worth reading:
Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean? (Oxford: OUP, 1989). Gives a nice introduction to a range of
central philosophical problems.
Plato, Early Socratic Dialogues (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). Best kind of Plato to begin with:
short and provocative, should often seem outrageous.
Descartes, Meditations in First Philosophy (lots of editions available). One of the founding texts of
early modern philosophy; written with a real sense of drama, again it should provoke you into
disagreement.
And if you like logic puzzles and that sort of thing, try something by Martin Gardner, e.g.:
The Unexpected Hanging and Other Mathematical Diversions (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991); or
My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003)
Politics
Two books in particular:
Gerry Stoker, Why Politics Matters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
Colin Hay, Why We Hate Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007)
And some other things you might enjoy:
Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013 – but there are many
older editions)
Kenneth Minogue, Politics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2000)
Tony Wright, British Politics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2013)
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Economics
Three books you might find stimulating:
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2012)
Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically (New York: Norton, 1993)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2012)
And you might enjoy one of these blogs:
Paul Krugman: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
Mark Toma: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/
Tim Harford: http://timharford.com/
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