Decline of the West

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1. unravellerMay 2024
   Jacques Barzun - From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present (2001)

   The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1864)

   Intellectuals By Paul Johnson

   Daniel J. Boorstin - The Discoverers

   The Great Courses - The Industrial Revolution (audiobook/lectures)

   Decline of the West - Spengler

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2. dredmorbiusAug 2022
   This is a fairly broadly-held view, yes.

   It's also one that emerges throughout history. The term "Seneca Cliff" refers to an observation by the Roman rhetoritician. Apocalyptic concepts are common in the Bible. Eastern religions tend to take a more cyclical view, of recurring expansion and collapse. Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West is a classic. There's a modern literature largely spawning from the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth (1972) of which I'd include Tainter. James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency is a more recent take on that.

   Broad-brush observations and gut feelings tend to be less substantive and articulable than specific indicia and mechanisms. Tainter's work is of interest in that he does point to a general rule that is common to multiple instances.

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3. lew89Dec 2020
   For me, the biggest boost lately was Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Black Swan, Antifragile. He's a real philosopher in a sense that he addresses real world problems instead on messing with theory. He's an insightful practitioner who builds proper terms to describe phenomena he observes and follow consequences. For me, his books were not only very inspiring because of its messsage (not popular, but seems very true, using terms he proposes contributed much to my understanding of the world), but set a good example of forming a good base for finding out stuff. He's inspiring, because he has similar interests to me, especially cognitive biases and he shows with his success that you can refuse to do bull*t people do nowadays and be successful. Plus, he's much into Probability Theory, so he's a good choice for an engineer who prefer mathematics over more social stuff.

   I would also recommend The Structure of Science Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn), very important book to understand how science works, what are its limitations, how should we treat scientific facts. It also show very nature of learning about world (it's not lineary incremental like most people think). It also emphasize that there is always quite a lot of dogma in science (you need some assumptions that can't be really proved right, only wrong if you dwell on it and eventually fail). If you are interested in modern science belief system and what are stuff it can't explain (according to Kuhn, any science paradigm has smaller or bigger blind spot), it's quite well explained in The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake.

   If you are interested in nature of non-linearity of learning, what were steps in forming human's worldview, I think Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West make a good point. I can't say for sure, because I have only started (it's very long, 1500 pages), but I definitely like the guy. :)

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4. curi0ustttOct 2020
   This a very personal opinion based on some popular classic book lists like those found on 4chan /lit/ etc. (Note: All books are new and I calculated the price from Book Depository [0], you might be able to purchase more from Better World Books [1]):

   - The Holy Bible - Moby Dick by Melville - The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky - The Master And Margarita by Bulgakov - Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes - The Iliad by Homer - The Odyssey by Homer - Meditations by Marcus Aurelius - The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandra Dumas - The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler - The Qur'an - The Prince by Machiavelli - The Art of War by Sun Tzu - Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky - The Confessions by Saint Augustine - Les Miserables by Victor Hugo - We by Yevgeny Zamyatin - The Book Of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi - The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric - Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andric - Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun - Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger - All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque - The Divine Comedy by Dante

   --- This list totals out at 311.14EUR and has 23 books. [0] - https://www.bookdepository.com/ [1] - https://www.betterworldbooks.com/

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5. forgotpwtomainJan 2017
   Oswald Spengler's 'The Decline of the West'. The primary thesis of the author is of a cyclical development and decline of civilization (and his estimate that western civilization in particular is in the declining phase, hence perhaps the not so apt title to modern eyes). More importantly though Spengler's breadth of knowledge and culture (across science, philosophy, architecture, fine-arts, jurisprudence, literature) is just staggering and way beyond that of his contemporaries or present-day-authors.
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6. mightyhamJul 2026
   "Gothic cathedrals and Doric temples are mathematics in stone. Doubtless Pythagoras was the first in the Classical Culture to conceive number scientifically as the principle of a world-order of comprehensible things—as standard and as magnitude—but even before him it had found expression, as a noble arraying of sensuous-material units, in the strict canon of the statue and the Doric order of columns. The great arts are, one and all, modes of interpretation by means of limits based on number (consider, for example, the problem of space-representation in oil painting). A high mathematical endowment may, without any mathematical science whatsoever, come to fruition and full self-knowledge in technical spheres." ~ Spengler, Decline of the West
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