Books on Ideas That Will Make You Smarter — Curated from The Seen and the Unseen Podcast

"The Seen and the Unseen" is India's premier long-form podcast hosted by Amit Varma. The podcast, which has been running since 2017, features long-form conversations with intellectuals, writers, economists, historians, and thought leaders from India and around the world. I am only sharing the books recommended grouped into broad thematic categories that align with traditional library and academic classification systems in philosophy, psychology, ethics, and literature:

Psychology and Cognitive Science

1. The Elephant in the Brain — Kevin Simler & Robin Hanson
2. Human: The Science Behind What Makes Your Brain Unique — Michael S. Gazzaniga
3. Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman

Ethics, Morality, and Philosophy of Goodness

1. The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People — Michael Shermer
2. Better Never to Have Been — David Benatar
3. The Difficulty of Being Good — Gurcharan Das
4. The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress — Peter Singer
5. On Bullshit — Harry Frankfurt

Philosophy and Intellectual History

1. Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud — Peter Watson
2. The Hedgehog and the Fox — Isaiah Berlin
3. The Open Society and Its Enemies — Karl Popper
4. The Logic of Scientific Discovery — Karl Popper
5. History Of Western Philosophy — Bertrand Russell
6. History of European Morals — W. E. H. Lecky

Sociology, Social Psychology, and Mass Behavior

1. Crowds and Power — Elias Canetti
2. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind — Gustave Le Bon
3. The Argumentative Indian — Amartya Sen

Literary Criticism and Classics

1. Why Read the Classics? — Italo Calvino
2. Testaments Betrayed — Milan Kundera
3. Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable — Timothy Cleveland