Meditations by Marcus Aurelius - Stoicism at its best, I count this as the most motivational book I've ever read.
Wikipedia lists seven popular english translations. Is there a particular one you can recommend?
I have using Rationale from Austhink back when I was taking Philosophy classes. It was actually pretty good compared to what others offer but unfortunately limited to Windows. Ever since that time I have been thinking on and of about what software could be developed to both share ideas and refine our collective thinking in a better way. While there are tons of projects attempting such things most are either horribly designed or targeted at a non existing market.
I've read through the discussion above and I wonder why a semantic web approach wasn't mentioned. I think the SemWeb can play an important role in these kind of applications. For example RDF statements could be used as part of the argumentation schema. This kind of approach would also allow us to publish in a more decentralized manner, which is where the power of the web lies.
Although semantic web technology hasn't seen a broad adoption yet, I think in the next two years this will finally change. The lack of adoption comes mainly from a cold start problem but over the last year the need for this kind of tech seems to be increasing. Search engines like Google are beginning to leverage the SemWeb to improve their search results since they seem to be losing the war on spam at the moment. Tim Berners-Lee's Linked Data format is gaining ground in the public sector as the standard format for governments to publish open data. I think this is the first time we are starting to see interest in the SemWeb from outside the academic world, which to me is a sign that we are finally gonna see some widespread use.
Anyway I can see this being the way forward in online communication.
We used Rationale in the philosophy classes at school. It's an argument mapping tool. Too bad it's Windows only :-(. I would really like to see a platform independent or online version.
That is an absolutely amazing piece of writing by mr Dennett! Thanks.
This link now seems to be returning a 404. The list can still be accessed through the way back machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120505014228/http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/favbooks.html