ATHENAEUM DISCUSSION GROUPS

The Boston Athenaeum has discussion groups on different topics. They recently redid their website and appear to have scrubbed the past books from the site.

Philosophy

2021-2022

What’s It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life

Julian Baggini

Hitler’s Philosophers

Yvonnne Sherratt

Lost In Thought

Zena Hitz

The Myth of Sisyphus

Albert Camus

Embattled: How Ancient Greek Myths Empower Us to Resist Tyranny

Emily Katz Anhalt

Rationality

Steven Pinker

The Evolution of God

Robert Wright

The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us About Living Well

Julian Baggini

Against Interpretation

Susan Sontag

2020-2021

Books Without Borders: Homer, Aeschylus, Galileo, Melville, and Madison Go to China

Martha C. Franks

Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

Wolfram Ellenberger

Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction

Stephen Mumford

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

Julia Annas

Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

Edith Hall

Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How To Love and How To Die

Steven Nadler

The Nature of Things

Lucretius

2019–2020

Henry David Thoreau: A Life; and more writings by Thoreau such as “Civil Disobedience”

Laura Dassow Walls

Emerson Among the Eccentrics; plus a few essays by Emerson such as “The American Scholar” or “Divinity School Address”

Carlos Baker

The Peabody Sisters

Megan Marshall

How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Pre-Socratic Philosophers

2018–2019 Selected Works

The Varieties of Religious Experience

William James

Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations

Jules Evan

excerpts from America the Philosophical

Carlin Romano

Free Will: A Very Short Introduction

Thomas Pink

Confessions of a Philosopher

Brian Magee

How Free Are You

Ted Honderich

The Path—What Chinese Philosophy Can Teach Us About The Good Life

Michael Puett

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Dewey for Artists

Mary Jane Jacob

Walden

Henry David Thoreau

2017

At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

Sarah Bakewell

Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

Joshua Greene

American Philosophy: A Love Story

John Kaag

Representative Men

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tao Te Ching

The Bhagavad Gita

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Shunryu Suzuki

editor, A Nietzsche Reader

R. J. Hollingdale

2016

Consolation of Philosophy

Ancius Boethius

Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

Matthew Stewart

The Cave and The Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

Arthur Herman

2015

The Meaning of Human Existence

Edward O. Wilson

Derrida: A Very Short Introduction

Simon Glendinning

The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

Michel Foucault

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

2014

Wittgenstein’s Poker

David Edmonds and John Eidinow

No Logo

Naomi Klein

Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

Jim Holt

_ Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking_

William James

Philosophy and the Mirror of Life

Richard Rorty

ed. The Revival of Pragmatism (first section)

Morris Dickstein

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

Jonathan Haidt

2012-2013