needing some advice about books on philosophy

[mdppptro]

Hey there, I am looking to become a little more well rounded in my philsophical knowledge. I really haven't read too much on the subject. I will soon be incarcerated for a year, so I will have plenty of time to study up. I am basically looking for a list of books that will give me a well rounded foundations. All opinions are greatly appreciated.

[Cunninglinguist]

Hey there, I am looking to become a little more well rounded in my philsophical knowledge. I really haven't read too much on the subject. I will soon be incarcerated for a year, so I will have plenty of time to study up. I am basically looking for a list of books that will give me a well rounded foundations. All opinions are greatly appreciated.

I'm deeply sorry to hear that.

A well rounded foundation? Secondary resources are probably the best place to start; they'll give you a feel for the landscape without demanding too much time. For good secondary resources I would suggest Wiki and plato.stanford.edu. Unfortunately you probably wont have indefinite access to these resources.

For an introduction to western moral philosophy I would suggest Simon Blackburn's Being Good. It's short and should give you a good feel for the landscape. Also, Plato's Republic is a must.

For western theoretical philosophy, the most useful thing, imo, you can read is Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, or at least the sections: Aesthetic, Analytic and Dialectic. The whole thing is quite a Herculean labor, but can definitely yield the most valuable of fruits. To prompt oneself for it, one might want to read Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and Kant's Prolegomena, wherein he approaches the same content from a different angle, as it were. I've also heard good things about the book Theoretical Philosophy after 1781.

Nietzsche is also fun to read in general.

Beyond the western sphere I don't feel qualified to say anything.

[Baudolina]

Philosophy is probably a subject that is best read in historical sequence, because later thinkers build on the ideas of those who came before them. For example, I've heard that Nietzsche is very prone to being misunderstood by those who aren't familiar with Western philosophy up until that point. So maybe someone with a philo background can lay out the canonical books and the order in which they should be read. For a fun summary there's always Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, However, I get the impression that it's sort of like a Devil's Dictionary; Russell was a character and I wouldn't necessarily trust his interpretations lol.

[arrytus]

Most people begin with the dialogues of Plato on the Trial of Socrates [phaedo, euthyphro, crito, apologia]. Other first year philosophy students read other short works such as Descartes' Meditations, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Camus' Myth of Sisyphus, Rousseau's Social Contract and Ayer's Language Truth Logic.

But here is a list of great books, in order of ease.

* Marcus Aurelius- Meditations [this will assuage your soul. it might be most fitting]
* Tao Te Ching
* Sextus Empiricus- Outlines of Skepticism/Pyrrhonism [very overlooked]
* Writings of Confucius
* Aristotle- Metaphysics
* Spinoza- Ethics
* Kierkegaard- Concluding Unscientific Postscript
* Nietzsche- Thus Spake Zarathustra [actually a poetic composition: it might do better to suggest to you Beyond Good and Evil]
* Heidegger- Introduction to Metaphysics
* Sartre- Being and Nothingness
* Kant- Critique of Pure Reason

All of this can be difficult, and keep in mind any one of these books can be the focus of years of scholarship. If you don't like a certain style move on, as there are plenty of perspectives. Obviously this is a broad list which excludes much, but philosophy can be like following a trail, as almost every book refers to other philosophers' positions [even in Plato], and thus you are even catching up. It might take several readings to comprehend, and even then you may dispute or find its intent insipid. As well there are many categories, and who knows which you shall enjoy, or what shall inspire you, if it is epistemology, which forces you into neurology, or perhaps linguistics, or history and narrative theory, or perhaps poetic takes.


And some modern classics:

* Badiou- Being and Event
* Jean Luc Nancy- Being Singular Plural
* Derrida- Speech and Phenomena
* Agamben- Homo Sacer
* Baudrillard- Simulacra and Simulation
* Husserl- Logical Investigations
* G.E. Moore- Principia Ethica
* Rorty- Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
* Bergson- Matter and Memory
* Bakhtin- Dialogic Imagination
* Quine- Word and Object
* Blanchot- Space of Literature
* Ricoeur- Hermeneutics

[Xeros]

Zygmunt Bauman's books are quite amazing in my opinion. I've read "Liquid Modernity" and now I'm currently reading "Liquid Love".
I think he has a very accurate perspective on nowadays society, perhaps you'll find it interesting.
(The whole liquid thing is a metaphor of how "all that is solid melts into air", once said by Marx if I recall correctly)

[rajeevrnair]

Bhagvat Gita

Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and Of Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637) by Descartes

Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass

Purgatorio , Paradiso - Dante

A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful -

Edmund Burke

Art - Clive Bell


I wonder why very few of us have contributed to this thread..seems very important...

[Judas130]

John N. Gray is fast becoming a very relevant philosopher in Britain, insomuch as its becoming hard for academics to ignore what he has to say. Check out Straw Dogs, perhaps Black Mass - but that is mainly marketed to the layman. If you want deeper stuff then his Enlightenment's Wake is quite a good deconstruction of Western political value.

A little outside of philosophy, perhaps Edward Said's Orientalism could provide an interesting and culturally humbling read, especially alongside Fanon's Wretched of the Earth which must be, unfortunately, read with that historical hindsight that paints all revolutionaries as naive. If you get the 2003 Penguin edition of Orientalism there's a good preface by Said - written in 2003, the year he died - that discusses topics such as the Iraq War in relation to his cultural theory.

Tom Paine's The Right's Of Man is, for me, an infuriating polemic. But texts such as that, as well as Rousseau and Voltaire, belong to the Enlightenment tradition of which we still base so much of our core liberal values upon in the West. From a literary perspective, comparing Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France alongside Paine really unravels the groundlessness of liberal value - founded in repetitive deistic assertions and figurative antagonisms.