Reading List
Stephen Cave
Philosopher and Writer
Stephen Cave is a British philosopher and writer. He studied and taught philosophy for a decade, earned a PhD in metaphysics from Cambridge and worked for the British Foreign Office before turning to writing. His first book, Immortality, argues that the urge to live forever drives civilization, and that every culture’s answer follows one of four paths: staying alive, resurrection, the soul or legacy. He later co-edited AI Narratives, a history of how people have imagined intelligent machines. His essays have appeared in The New York Times and the Financial Times.
01
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Gilgamesh
A New Translation of the Ancient Epic
by Sophus Helle
“It’s brilliant. I love it. It has a very distinctive verse style that really stays with you. It’s haunting, beautiful and in a tradition with which we’re not familiar, but which speaks to us immediately.” — via Interview, April 2012
02
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Life After Death
by Alan F. Segal
“Segal is extremely good at showing us how the history of religion is the history of humans encountering each other and the common sets of problems among different traditions, and how they all intermingle and evolve in trying to find solutions to them. He does that in particular by looking at afterlife beliefs.” — via Interview, April 2012
03
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Escape from Evil
by Ernest Becker
“But in Escape From Evil, you feel he is more free to express his own views. He was dying when he wrote it, and a lot of it was done posthumously by his estate. It’s much more passionate and clear. It’s wild in places, speculative in places, but it’s full of ideas and wonderfully written.” — via Interview, April 2012
04
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Mortal Coil
by David Boyd Haycock
“This is very much about the first path to immortality, of just staying alive, here in this body, forever and ever. It begins with Francis Bacon – one of the founding figures of science – and the wonderful story of how he died trying to figure out how to preserve life.” — via Interview, April 2012
05
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The Aleph and Other Stories
by Jorge Luis Borges · Short Stories
“This story is about a Roman officer who finds the fountain of youth, a river that cleanses men of death, as he puts it. He becomes an immortal and meets the other immortals who have found the river, and the story is about the consequences of this – namely, madness and meaninglessness. There’s a great deal of speculation among philosophers and religious types about what it might be like to live together. These 20 pages capture it so perfectly. It’s such a fine example of Borgesian writing – tense, lucid, packed with meaning so you immediately feel like reading it again in case you missed something.” — via Interview, April 2012
