Jeremy Lent, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2017). An in-depth investigation of the themes discussed in the first week’s sessions.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years (London: Vintage, 2005). A ground-breaking approach to world history that explains some of the deep structural reasons why Eurasia developed at a faster pace than the rest of the world.

George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003). Pioneering the field of cognitive linguistics, it shows how virtually all abstract ideas are formed as metaphors from the scaffolding of more tangible experiences. (Discussed in Session 2).