Everyone should read these

Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (BBC Publications, 1973)

Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (Harper & Row, 1956)

Richard Byrne, ‘Imitation as Behaviour Parsing’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B358 (2003)

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976)

David Deutsch, ‘Comment on Michael Lockwood, “‘Many Minds’ Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics”’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47, 2 (1996)

David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (Allen Lane, 1997)

Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (Routledge, 1963)

Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge, 1945)

Further reading

John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Clarendon Press, 1986)

Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford University Press, 1999)

Nick Bostrom, ‘Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?’, Philosophical Quarterly 53 (2003)

David Deutsch, ‘Apart from Universes’, in S. Saunders, J. Barrett, A. Kent and D. Wallace, eds., Many Worlds?: Everett, Quantum Theory, and Reality (Oxford University Press, 2010)

David Deutsch, ‘It from Qubit’, in John Barrow, Paul Davies and Charles Harper, eds., Science and Ultimate Reality (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

David Deutsch, ‘Quantum Theory of Probability and Decisions’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A455 (1999)

David Deutsch, ‘The Structure of the Multiverse’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A458 (2002)

Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (BBC Publications, 1965)

Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All (Allen Lane, 1998)

Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979)

William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979)

Douglas Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop (Basic Books, 2007)

Bryan Magee, Popper (Fontana, 1973)

Pericles, ‘Funeral Oration’

Plato, Euthyphro

Karl Popper, In Search of a Better World (Routledge, 1995)

Karl Popper, The World of Parmenides (Routledge, 1998)

Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Allen Lane, 2000)

Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers (Basic Books, 2001)

Alan Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind, 59, 236 (October 1950)

Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men (Faber, 2002)

Vernor Vinge, ‘The Coming Technological Singularity’, Whole Earth Review, winter 1993