12 Books That Will Permanently Change How You Think

TL;DR

The world's greatest thinkers read not to collect information but to retrain how they think, returning to books that force reasoning most people never practice. Twelve works, largely in ethics and value theory, from Levinas and Nietzsche to Kant, Rawls, and Moore, destabilize your beliefs and rewire your mind. Reading even four permanently changes how you reason.

Transcript

Most people read books to collect information, [music] but the world's greatest thinkers read books to retrain how they think. Over my more than 12 years as a peer-reviewed scholar, I've returned repeatedly to a core group of books that forces your brain to engage in the type of reasoning most people never practice. In this video, I'll share 12 of ... Read More

Key Insights

• Emmanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity argues that ethics takes priority over ontology, meaning responsibility to other people comes before knowledge or explanation. His concept of the 'face of the other' claims you are obligated to others before you choose or reason.
• Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals does not tell you what is right or wrong but asks where your ideas of right and wrong originated. This destabilizes entrenched cognitive schemas and, per cognitive science, increases cognitive flexibility and reduces ideological rigidity.
• Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons argues you cannot understand moral truth without first understanding personal identity, questioning whether your present and future self are the same person and exposing an unproven assumption within rational choice theory.
• Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is essential because his ideas influence virtually all Western scientific, political, and philosophical thought. Concepts like the golden mean, ergon, and telos serve as tools for regulating decisions and thinking about function and purpose.
• Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals presents the categorical imperative, which challenges you to reflect on the consistency of your values and decisions. Much of what we understand about how the nervous system processes information validates many of Kant's ideas.
• John Rawls's A Theory of Justice introduces the 'veil of ignorance,' a thought experiment requiring you to design a system without knowing your future role within it, training you to think objectively about justice and fairness.
• Terence Cuneo's The Normative Web counters J.L. Mackie's error theory, which claims moral truths do not exist. Cuneo argues that if moral truth is not real, then epistemic normativity, the idea we ought to believe certain things, cannot be real either.
• Michael Slote's From Morality to Virtue exposes a blind spot he calls the 'self-other asymmetry': modern ethics is obsessed with what we owe others but neglects what we owe ourselves, distorting moral judgment and ignoring personal well-being and projects.

Questions & Answers

Q: What are the 12 books that will change how you think?

The twelve books are Emmanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity, Friedrich Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals, Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, T.M. Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other, W.D. Ross's The Right and the Good, Terence Cuneo's The Normative Web, Michael Slote's From Morality to Virtue, and G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica. Most center on ethics and moral reasoning.

Q: Why do these books change how you think rather than just teaching information?

These books do not invite passive reading; instead they force you to think critically by destabilizing entrenched cognitive schemas and forcing you to revise beliefs rather than accept them mindlessly. Research in cognitive science shows this kind of restructuring increases cognitive flexibility and reduces ideological rigidity. The discomfort felt while reading is not a downside but the signal that a fundamental change is happening within your mind, retraining how you reason instead of merely adding facts.

Q: What is Levinas's concept of the face of the other?

In Totality and Infinity, Levinas argues that when you encounter another person, you are already obligated to them before you choose, before you reason, and before you justify yourself. Responsibility is therefore not something you opt into; it precedes your freedom. This forces you to confront the unsettling question of why you think you get to decide whether you are responsible at all, permanently altering how you think about selfhood, responsibility, and moral reasoning.

Q: What is the veil of ignorance in Rawls's A Theory of Justice?

The veil of ignorance is a thought experiment that forces you to design a system without knowing who you will be or what role you will have within it. Because you lack that information, which mirrors how things actually work in real life, it forces you to admit what types of policies, rules, or systems you would be willing to consent to and prescribe for others. In other words, it trains you to think more objectively about justice and fairness.

Q: How does Parfit's Reasons and Persons connect personal identity to morality?

Parfit argues that we cannot truly understand moral truth without first understanding personal identity. He asks whether you now and you in the future are the same person or fundamentally different people, and what justification you could have for favoring your future self's interests over your current self-interest. He exposes an unvetted assumption in rational choice theory, namely that it potentially is not irrational to fulfill present desires at the expense of greater future ones.

Q: What is the difference between Kant's and Mill's ethical approaches?

Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is based on principles, specifically the categorical imperative, which challenges you to reflect on the consistency of your values and decisions. Mill's Utilitarianism instead demands outcome-based evaluation, what Mill calls the greatest happiness for the greatest number. The presenter personally disagrees with Mill's foundations but stresses that the brain benefits tremendously from evaluating and weighing a completely different moral paradigm, learning to struggle with the ideas.

Q: What is Cuneo's argument against error theory in The Normative Web?

Terence Cuneo goes after J.L. Mackie's error theory, which argues moral truths do not exist and rest on a category error, assigning reality to something with no correspondence to physical reality. Cuneo responds that if moral truth is not real, then epistemic normativity, the idea that we ought to believe certain things, is not real either. If no moral 'ought' is real, there can never be a reason to believe anything at all, including scientific truths.

Q: Why are so many of these books about ethics and moral decision-making?

The presenter's academic field is value theory, which explores what value is and how it drives human behavior, and ethics is one subfield. Ethics forces you to think deeply, face some of the hardest questions, and constantly evaluate and re-evaluate models of moral judgment for flaws. By weighing radically different moral paradigms, from virtue and principle to outcomes and duties, the reader builds critical reasoning skills that most people never develop, which is how genius is eventually born.

Summary & Key Takeaways

• The premise is that most people read to collect information, but great thinkers read to retrain how they think. Over more than 12 years as a peer-reviewed scholar, the presenter returns to a core group of books that force the brain into reasoning most people never practice, permanently changing the mind.

• The list is dominated by ethics and value theory. Levinas prioritizes ethics over knowledge, Nietzsche questions the origins of morality, Parfit links moral truth to personal identity, and Aristotle and Kant provide foundational frameworks like the golden mean and the categorical imperative for evaluating decisions.

• Later books offer competing paradigms: Mill's outcome-based utilitarianism, Rawls's veil of ignorance, Scanlon's contractualism, Ross's conflicting prima facie duties, Cuneo's defense of moral realism, Slote's virtue ethics, and Moore's open question argument, each stretching and rewiring reasoning through disagreement and struggle.