Library

Philosophy & Psychology

74 books in this section — 33 with a full summary so far

00936 Kế & 36 Đối Kế— Listed in source catalog as Ngô Như Tùng & Hoàng Phác Dân — see Source Notes for an important discrepancy
36 Kế & 36 Đối Kế is a Vietnamese-language strategy book built around the classical Chinese text Tam Thập Lục Kế (the Thirty-Six Stratagems), a centuries-old compilation of military and political maneuvers, several with roots traceable to Sun Tzu's Art of War and other classical…
034Being Peace— Thich Nhat Hanh
Being Peace, one of Thich Nhat Hanh's earliest and most influential English-language books, makes the case that peace in the world cannot be separated from peace within a single person's daily consciousness — that international peace movements often fail because the people…
060Đạo Đức Kinh (Tao Te Ching)— Lão Tử (Laozi), translated and annotated by Nguyễn Hiến Lê
The Đạo Đức Kinh is the foundational text of Taoism, traditionally attributed to the sage Lao Tzu (Laozi) and dated to around the 6th century BCE, though its actual composition likely spans a longer period and multiple hands. This edition is the well-regarded Vietnamese…
066Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter— Dan Ariely & Jeff Kreisler
"Dollars and Sense" applies Dan Ariely's behavioral economics research — the same body of work behind his earlier bestseller "Predictably Irrational" — specifically to everyday spending decisions, co-written with comedian and former lawyer Jeff Kreisler, whose contributions give…
080Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility— James P. Carse
*Finite and Infinite Games* is a short, aphoristic work of philosophy structured as a sequence of numbered propositions rather than conventional narrative chapters, built around a single central distinction: there are at least two kinds of games in life, finite games, played for…
082Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Flow presents psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's decades of research into what he calls "optimal experience" — the state people across radically different activities and cultures describe in nearly identical terms: complete absorption in a task, a merging of action and…
092Giáo Trình Thiền Học (best-guess identification — see note below)— Thích Chân Quang
Giáo Trình Thiền Học is a curriculum text by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Chân Quang, written and taught as a formal 20-lesson course on meditation studies (Thiền học) for monastic students (Tăng Ni sinh) at the Long An Province Intermediate Buddhist School, where the…
099Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance— Angela Duckworth
Grit presents psychologist Angela Duckworth's research argument that sustained passion and perseverance toward long-term goals — what she calls "grit" — predicts achievement across wildly different domains (West Point cadets completing a grueling training program, National…
100Hàn Phi Tử: Tư Tưởng và Sách Lược (Han Fei: Thought and Strategy)— Han Fei (Hàn Phi), with translation/commentary
This Vietnamese edition presents the core writings of Han Fei (Hàn Phi Tử), the 3rd century BCE Chinese philosopher regarded as the definitive synthesizer of Legalist (Pháp gia) political thought, organized around his central argument that a stable, prosperous state must be…
102Hạnh Phúc Mỗi Ngày (Happiness Every Day)— Ajahn Brahm
"Hạnh Phúc Mỗi Ngày" is a Vietnamese translation of a collection of accessible dharma teachings by Ajahn Brahm, a British-born Theravada Buddhist monk known internationally for delivering Buddhist teaching through humor, storytelling, and everyday, non-technical language rather…
103Happiness: Essential Mindfulness Practices— Thich Nhat Hanh
Happiness: Essential Mindfulness Practices assembles roughly fifty short, concrete meditation exercises that Thich Nhat Hanh developed out of decades of retreat teaching at Plum Village, organized less as a single sustained argument than as a working manual. Each entry names an…
105Hiểu Về Trái Tim (Understanding the Heart)— Minh Niệm
"Hiểu Về Trái Tim" is one of the best-known contemporary Vietnamese books on emotional and spiritual self-understanding, written by Minh Niệm, a former Buddhist monk turned mindfulness teacher and writer. Structured as a series of short, self-contained essays rather than a…
123Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life— Héctor García and Francesc Miralles
Ikigai grew out of two Spanish authors' fascination with Okinawa, Japan — one of the world's "Blue Zones" with an unusually high concentration of centenarians — and their attempt to understand what actually explains such long, apparently contented lives. The book's central idea…
131Kinh Dịch: Cấu Hình Tư Tưởng Trung Quốc— Dương Ngọc Dũng & Lê Anh Minh
This is a scholarly study of the *Kinh Dịch* (I Ching / Classic of Changes) written for a Vietnamese academic readership by two Vietnamese scholars of Chinese thought. Rather than functioning as a how-to divination manual, the book treats the Kinh Dịch as a philosophical and…
150Man's Search for Meaning— Viktor E. Frankl
Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's account of surviving three years in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau, fused with the psychological framework he built out of that experience: logotherapy. The book opens as a spare, unsentimental memoir rather…
153Mạnh Tử - Tư Tưởng Và Sách Lược (Mencius: Thought and Strategy)— Trí Tuệ (compiler/author)
Mạnh Tử - Tư Tưởng Và Sách Lược is a Vietnamese-language compilation and commentary on the life, philosophy, and political strategy of Mencius (Mạnh Tử), the classical Chinese Confucian philosopher who lived roughly a century after Confucius and became recognized as…
160Mindset: The New Psychology of Success— Dr. Carol S. Dweck
Mindset distills decades of Carol Dweck's research into a single, deceptively simple idea: the belief you hold about whether ability is fixed or developable changes almost everything about how you pursue goals, handle setbacks, and relate to other people. Dweck calls these two…
161Minh Tâm Bảo Giám (明心寶鑑, "Precious Mirror for Enlightening the Mind")— Traditional compilation, historically attributed to Fan Liben (范立本); Vietnamese circulation associated with early translators including Trương Vĩnh Ký
*Minh Tâm Bảo Giám* is a classical East Asian moral compilation — not a single-author book in the modern sense, but a curated anthology of proverbs, maxims, and short teachings drawn from Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist sources, along with sayings attributed to historical sages…
167Nam Hoa Kinh (Trang Tử)— Zhuangzi (Trang Tử); dịch và chú giải: Nguyễn Hiến Lê
Nam Hoa Kinh is Nguyễn Hiến Lê's celebrated Vietnamese translation and commentary on the core writings attributed to Zhuangzi (Trang Tử, c. 4th century BCE), one of the two foundational figures of philosophical Taoism alongside Laozi. Nguyễn Hiến Lê, one of twentieth-century…
186Những Tư Tưởng Gia Vĩ Đại Phương Đông (Great Thinkers of the Eastern World)— Ian P. McGreal (editor)
Great Thinkers of the Eastern World is a large reference anthology, edited by Ian P. McGreal, that gathers short scholarly essays profiling major philosophers, religious founders, and intellectual figures from across the traditions of South Asia, China, Japan, and the broader…
187No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering— Thich Nhat Hanh
No Mud, No Lotus takes its title from an image Thich Nhat Hanh returns to throughout the book: a lotus flower cannot bloom in clean water or on marble — it needs the mud of a pond to grow at all. His central claim is that suffering and happiness work the same way. They are not…
193Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations— Dan Ariely
Payoff began as a TED talk and grew into a short, focused book in which Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist known for research on irrationality in everyday decisions, turns his attention specifically to motivation — what actually gets people to work harder, care more, and feel…
196Phi Lý Trí (Predictably Irrational, Vietnamese edition)— Dan Ariely
Predictably Irrational, published in Vietnamese as Phi Lý Trí, is Dan Ariely's first major popular book and the work that established him as a leading public voice in behavioral economics. Its central argument runs directly against the classical economic assumption that people…
202Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Phi Lý Trí)— Dan Ariely
Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, wrote *Predictably Irrational* to challenge the core assumption of classical economics: that people make decisions by rationally weighing costs and benefits. Drawing on his own research (much of it conducted in his MIT and Duke behavioral…
208Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking— Susan Cain
Quiet argues that mainstream American culture — and, by extension, much of the global business and education systems it has influenced — developed a specific, historically recent bias toward extroversion: prizing boldness, fast talk, and group charisma as the default signs of…
237Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji)— Sima Qian
Records of the Grand Historian, known in Chinese as the Shiji, is the founding work of Chinese historiography — a monumental attempt, compiled by the Han-dynasty court historian Sima Qian around the late second and early first centuries BCE, to record the entire arc of Chinese…
220Same As Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes— Morgan Housel
Same As Ever argues that most forecasting and planning effort is misdirected. People spend enormous energy trying to predict what will change next — interest rates, technology, politics, markets — when the more reliable and more useful project is studying what never changes: the…
226Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise— Thich Nhat Hanh
Silence argues that the constant sensory and mental noise defining modern life is best understood the way Buddhism understands food: as something we consume, often compulsively, whether or not it nourishes us. Thich Nhat Hanh opens the book by naming this "steady diet of noise"…
234Stillness Speaks— Eckhart Tolle
*Stillness Speaks* is deliberately unlike Eckhart Tolle's earlier bestseller, *The Power of Now*: rather than a continuous narrative argument, it is composed of roughly two hundred short, self-contained entries, organized into ten thematic chapters, each entry meant to be read…
251The Alchemist— Paulo Coelho
The Alchemist opens with a brief framing tale — the alchemist himself reading a retelling of the Narcissus myth — before settling into the story of Santiago, a young Andalusian shepherd who gives up traveling with his flock to chase a recurring dream: a child leading him to…
256The Art of War— Sun Tzu
The Art of War is a classical Chinese military treatise traditionally attributed to a strategist named Sun Wu, better known by the honorific Sun Tzu (Master Sun), who later Chinese historians place in the state of Wu around the 6th century BCE. Exactly who composed the text, and…
326Thinking, Fast and Slow— Daniel Kahneman
Thinking, Fast and Slow synthesizes decades of Nobel Prize-winning research by Daniel Kahneman (much of it with Amos Tversky) into a single organizing model of the mind: two systems that drive how people think and decide. ', and reacts to a sudden loud noise without any…
355Virtual Society: The Metaverse and the New Frontiers of Human Experience— Herman Narula
Virtual Society, written by Herman Narula (founder of the virtual-world infrastructure company Improbable), argues that the metaverse and other immersive digital environments aren't a new, unprecedented cultural development but the latest expression of a capacity humans have…

On the shelf, not yet summarized (41)