Reading List

These primary texts form the epistemological backbone of the Areas of Knowledge section. They are not all easy, but they are all specific: they make arguments, not gestures.

Entries marked ★ are the books to choose from for your semester reading — one accessible whole-book read per Area of Knowledge. Your one book for the semester is any one of the ★ titles below — choose the area that excites you.

★ E.H. Carr, What is History? (1961) — The most readable introduction to the philosophy of history in English. Carr’s opening chapters on the historian and the facts, and on causation, remain essential. His central claim — that history is “an unending dialogue between the present and the past” — is the starting point for this entire unit.
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946) — Harder but deeper than Carr. Collingwood argues that all history is the history of thought, and that the historian’s task is to re-enact past thinking in their own mind. Part V (“Epilegomena”) is the core. One of the few works of philosophy that genuinely transforms how you read historical evidence.
Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (1949, posthumous) — Bloch wrote the book in occupied France in 1941–1943 from the manuscript he had with him in hiding; he was shot by the Gestapo in 1944 before he could revise it. His distinction between intentional witnesses (those who set out to inform posterity) and unintentional ones (parish registers, ledgers, court depositions) is the methodological core of source criticism. Short, autobiographical in places, written by a historian on his own craft under conditions that gave the question its urgency.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) — Trouillot’s argument that history is silenced at four moments — the making of sources, the making of archives, the making of narratives, and the making of significance — and that the Haitian Revolution provides the clearest case study of how an event can be made unthinkable by the historians of its own time. Essential reading for anyone who takes the politics of historical knowledge seriously.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) — Technically about natural science, but its argument that knowledge is produced within paradigms that shape what questions can be asked applies across all areas of knowledge. Read Chapter 1 and Chapter IX (“The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions”).
Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (1963) — The introduction and Chapter 1 on the criterion of falsifiability. Essential for both the Natural Sciences and Mathematics units; in History, it raises the question of whether historical claims can ever be falsifiable.
Samir Okasha, Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction (2002, 2nd ed. 2016) — Roughly 150 pages, covers Popper, Hempel, Kuhn, scientific realism, and the demarcation problem at the right level for a TOK student. Used in the Natural Sciences unit for the flagpole counter-example to the deductive-nomological model. The most efficient route into the philosophy of science currently in print.
★ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995) — On what science is, what it is not, and why the difference matters. The “Fine Art of Baloney Detection” chapter is a working toolkit; the Mars-canal and recovered-memory chapters do the case-study work. Sagan writes for the curious adolescent better than anyone of his generation.
G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (1940) — A short, elegant meditation on mathematical beauty and the difference between discovery and invention. Raises for mathematics the same question that Collingwood raises for history: what kind of knowledge is this?
Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (1976) — Lakatos’ Socratic-dialogue reconstruction of how the proof of Euler’s polyhedron theorem developed through repeated counterexamples. The clearest demonstration in print that mathematics is a dialectical practice, not a deductive deliverance — and one of the great pieces of philosophical writing of the 20th century. Doubles as the canonical paperback for the Logic unit.
Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), Chapter 1 — Hofstadter’s exploration of self-reference as the common structure underlying Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Escher’s impossible figures, and Bach’s fugues. Difficult, brilliant, and unexpectedly funny.
★ Simon Singh, Fermat’s Last Theorem (1997) — Narrative-driven account of Andrew Wiles’s proof, framed by the history that runs from Pythagoras through Euclidean axiomatics, Gödel, and the elliptic-curve / modular-form machinery Wiles needed. Treats mathematics as a story, which is the right register for a student deciding whether to take the philosophy of mathematics seriously.
Aristotle, Poetics (c. 335 BCE) — The first systematic theory of narrative and representation. Aristotle’s distinction between poetry (which says what could happen) and history (which says what did happen) is still the sharpest formulation of the relationship between art and historical knowledge. Chapters 1–9 are the relevant section.
★ John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972) — Four essays on the relationship between images, knowledge, and power. Berger shows how what we see depends on what we have been taught to see — a point that applies to historical sources as much as to paintings.
Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977), Chapter 1 (“In Plato’s Cave”) — Sontag’s argument that photographs do not show us the world but a particular relationship to it — one in which seeing is the substitute for knowing, and possessing the image is the substitute for possessing the thing. Indispensable for any thinking about visual evidence in art, history, or science.
Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (1904–1917) — Weber’s essays on “objectivity” in social and economic knowledge, and on the distinction between value judgements and value-free analysis. Directly relevant to the question of whether history (or any human science) can be objective.
★ Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Chapter 1 (“Performances”) — Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of social interaction as performance. The opening chapter gives the conceptual apparatus — front stage and back stage, idealisation, dramaturgical loyalty — that frames everything Goffman writes after. A model of human-science theory that emerges from observation rather than from method.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998), Introduction and Chapter 1 — Scott’s concept of legibility — the state’s drive to make populations measurable for the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and rule — gives a unifying frame for cases the Human Sciences unit otherwise treats separately: Goddard’s Ellis Island IQ tests, the IMF’s Washington Consensus, the choice of GDP as the metric of national welfare. High modernism, Scott’s name for what these share, is technocratic certainty applied with state authority that refuses the local practical knowledge (mētis) that would have warned against the plan.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (2007), Chapter 1 §1 and Chapter 4 §1 — Taylor’s refusal of the “subtraction story” of modernity — the idea that disenchantment was simply the removal of an enchanted layer of cosmology — reframes Weber’s Wertfreiheit programme: disenchantment is not value-neutral subtraction but a positive reorganisation of the moral and cosmological frame, with its own normative cargo. Useful for the Human Sciences unit’s lesson on whether social science can be value-free, and for thinking about why “the modern grasp of society is ineradicably bi-focal” — the same agent who imagines herself a member of an egalitarian moral order can imagine “the poor” as a population on which administrative correction is operative.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Part IV — “Choices” examines how we reason under uncertainty and construct narratives about past events. The chapters on hindsight bias and the “narrative fallacy” are directly relevant to historiography. (Part I, “Two Systems,” is the natural ~100-page short-route entry to the Human Sciences unit; the rest is read in chapter-sized doses.)
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), Chapters 4 and 7 — Accessible exposition of relativity (Ch. 4) and entanglement (Ch. 7). For students whose prior physics goes only as far as Newton, Greene is the cleanest route into the genuinely strange ontologies of contemporary physics — without the popularising glibness that often accompanies the genre.
Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” (1960) — A short essay in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics. Wigner’s puzzle — why should abstract mathematics, developed without reference to the physical world, turn out to describe it so precisely? — is fundamental to the Mathematics unit and raises questions about the relationship between human-made knowledge systems and reality.
Akira Kurosawa (dir.), Rashomon (1950) — Four irreconcilable accounts of the same event, all sincerely told, none demonstrably false. The film that gave its name to the “Rashomon effect” and a 90-minute argument about the insolubility of historical perspectivalism. The clearest cinematic statement of the historian’s epistemic problem.