Philosophy discussion

Being new to Philosophy, and wanting to know more, I was just wondering what you consider to be the best philosophy books that you've read, ones that make you think and challenge your mind and train of thought!!

Thank you, and please recommend me books as I'm trying to expand my knowledge of the subject!

*Περὶ πολιτείας [The Republic] (Plato), and more generaly, all writings of Plato
*Ἀπομνημονεύματα [Memorabilia] (Xenophon)
*De Natura Deorum [On the Nature of the Gods] (Marcus Tulius Cicero), and more generaly, all Cicero's philosophy books...
*De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things] (Lucretius)
*Ἑρμότιμος ἢ Περὶ Αἱρέσεων [Hermotimus or Concerning the Sects] (Lucian of Samosata), and more generaly, all Lucian works...
*Ἠθικά [Moralia] (Plutarch)
*Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences [Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences] (René Descartes)
*Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes)
*An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (John Locke)
*A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (George Berkeley)

I do not recommand Aristotle or Kant am begining : they are quit hard, in my opinion. But they are usefull too...
I don't know anything about philosophy in XIX and XX century.

Very impressive books according to me, when I first start reading philosophy, were Nietzsche and (the late) Wittgenstein (More concretely I'm thinking about Gay Science of Nietzsche and Philosophical Investigations of Wittgenstein - don't start with Thus Spoke Zarathustra or Tractatus Logico-philosophicus). They are both similar in the way that they write without philosophical jargon, but nonetheless manage to be cryptical. They were an inspiration to think for yourself, rather than to present you clear philosophical theories you either agree or disagree with. They contain very interesting questions and remarks (aphoristic style), more than clearly defined arguments - next to that they talk about nearly all subjects.

Nietzsche, Descartes and Plato are relatively easy. I would recommend you look at Ayer and Wittgenstein too as a beginner. Wittgenstein ain't all that easy though. Ayer isn't exactly the least contradictory of philosophers either. Feyerbend is good if you want to challenge your ideas about science in terms of how much it is rated as a way to knowledge. Locke, Hume and Bjerkeley are quite important. Nothing wrong with throwing in a little Leibniz and Goethe and Spinoza either. Marx for obvious reasons. Kant is difficult at the start but if you just read the parts where he describes what he plans to do in the Critique of Pure Reason to begin with you will eventually be able to continue on.

Henri Bergson's ideas on intuition and duration are very interesting.

Then, there is Heidegger's Time and Being.

Leonard Seet

I don't think of philosophy as a subject to study in a structured way, where you go through all the canonical works one by one, like they do in educational institutions. I see it more as a (difficult) artistic or irreligious spiritual quest. You think and read about ways of solving questions that are raised in your mind. I believe that all philosophy springs from doubt, and that you have to practise it in some sense to properly understand it. Your personal quest might end up with reading canonical works, but it is unrealistic to expect easy enlightenment. A book I found inspiring was Irrational Man by William Barrett, an accessible yet serious treatment of existentialist issues, but there are many diverse avenues of approach.

I like Irrational Man as well. Some people benefit from a structured study of philosophy, but I think another good approach might be to read from the general to the specific and choose books accordingly.

You're right that insight doesn't come easily or by simply reading one or more of the classics. I'm afraid too many people are looking for instant insight, an experience I've certainly never had. I, too, see philosophy as a quest more than a discrete canon of famous works or thinkers. It's the journey as much as the destination that yields enlightenment.

Depending on what you think philosophy is, you can stay with the "canonical" authors, as somebody said above - Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, arguably Nietzsche - and you'll get the rationalist view on everything, a barren view, nonetheless, in my opinion.

Personally I prefer philosophy that speaks about man as flesh and blood. My suggestions: Tolstoy (yes, War and Peace is a philosophical book, if you pay attention), Dante, St Augustine, Maxim the Confessor, Gregory Palamas, Unamuno, Ficino, Sartre and probably the most important of all, Emil Cioran.

Symposium And The Death Of Socrates - Plato
Key Philosophical Writings - Descartes
History as a System and other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History - Ortega y Gasset
A Kierkegaard Anthology - Kierkegaard
Basic Writings - Heidegger
Basic Writings - Sartre

Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. It is a literary work, but I find the best avenue into philosophy for a beginner is through literature as the aim of the art is to instruct by delighting (as the traditional formula goes). I strongly believe that only by grasping some aesthetic/phenomenological/experiential sense of one of the philosophical paths can one acquire the passion to pursue the more technical, rigorous aspects of the discipline later on. Otherwise, the discipline fails to connect to the heart of what drives you in your life, and the things of the mind should not be so disconnected. The hope is that at some point, the person would gain a passionate sense of philosophy as a way of life - their way of life.

Why THIS literary work? Because of its comprehensiveness and its relevance to our own modern and postmodern condition. The whole work is an attempt to grasp the meaning of the life of mind as it has emerged so far in our historical period, as well as of the cultural, spiritual, and philosophical paths. No other work I can think of is at once so beautiful, so comprehensive, so fundamental, and so compelling. It touches the heart of where mind stands, now. Furthermore, it introduces topics for philosophical reflection that you will be interested to pursue in a more rigorous, argumentative fashion later on. All the issues of our time are somewhere in there.

Andrew wrote: "I don't think of philosophy as a subject to study in a structured way, where you go through all the canonical works one by one, like they do in educational institutions. I see it more as a (difficu..."

SoundEagle likes your approach to philosophy. May you eventually attain some (form of) enlightenment!

Meditations - Aurelius
Sophie's world - gaarner. Is a good primer

Depending on your definition of the subject, I've found considerable thoughts in many off topic books.
Incognito - eagleman
48 laws of Power - I forget the author
Crucial conversations - "
Is the Internet changing the way we think - "

Try "The structure of scientific revolutions", by Thomas Kuhn. Despite its non systematic character and its various derived flaws, it's a truly revolutionary book that challenges what most people understand as "science". Its somewhat begginer-friendly but still a great intellectual challenge on many levels. It should get you started on many different issues such as truth, scientific knowledge and progress and the sociology of research. Without a doubt, a landmark book that will get you closer to understand contemporary philosophy of science.
The "Discourse of Method" by Descartes (recommended by others before) is a great way to introduce yourself into philosophical modernity, basic questions on knowledge, mind and reality and applied sceptic arguments while at the same time being written in a prose both exquisite and easy to understand."De Rerum Natura" (On the Nature of things) by Lucretius, while adopting the form of an epic, narrative poem, its a deliciously beautiful and systematic exposition of the much maligned Epicurean way of thinking, including their atomistic physics and materialistic ethics. A read as enjoyable as illustrative, and an ideal approach to Hellenistic schools of thought, which could be complemented with a reading of Marcus Aurelius, Cicero or Sextus Empiricus.
Nietzsche, sometimes overly poetic and complicated, sometimes deceivingly simple, has some pretty great books that can be life changing. "The Gay Science" or "The genealogy of morals" expose most of the points that made him infamous... Try at your own risk! While not being any more than a loose collection of ideas and reflections, their revolutionary relativism and fierce defiance made me really sick at first (not because I hated them, they made me fell ill in the most literal of senses!) but without that I would have been a pretty different person, a less free one, dare I say.

So go ahead with them, taste the abyss and when you come back, tell us what it looked like...

To Bogdan: I see most authors you mention as being highly philosophical, but I believe most of others also talk about "man flesh and bone", specially Nietzsche, the epicureans, most sociologists of many different allegiances, Hobbes and Machiavelli... etc.

My introduction into the world of philosophy was Plato's Republic, and till this day it's arguably my favorite book (although some of the ideas are crazy). So I would recommend that. Some of my favorite philosophers are Plato, Hume, Nietzsche, Camus, and Wittgenstein. They all have good books.

Don't know if this book even qualifies- it's Jung's "Memories, Dreams, Reflections".

Read it for the first time ca.35 yrs ago and loved it!

Greta wrote: "Don't know if this book even qualifies- it's Jung's "Memories, Dreams, Reflections".

Read it for the first time ca.35 yrs ago and loved it!"

I would not classify it as philosophy, except in the woo-woo category, a category of Daniel Dennett. To be sure this is my interpretation of the book, not Dennett's.

It should be classified under psychoanalysis, which has no empirical basis. In other words it is dreamed up.

I’ve divided my suggestions by era:
Ancient: The Republic by Plato and Ethics by Aristotle
Medieval: Summa of the Summa by Thomas Aquinas edited by Peter Kreeft (focuses on the philosophical parts of the Submma)
Modern: Descartes, Meditations
19th century: Kierkegaard’s The Point if View (don’t read anything else by Kierkegaard til you read this. It’s his autobiography and helps make sense of things.)
20th century: Plantingas Warranted Christian Belief is awesome

Plato, hands down.

Reading something more contemporary or modern is probably going to be much too biased - though implicitly. You'll hear second-hand opinions, analyses of past works, etc., without having read them. That in itself could do damage to your later reading of the ancient classics, Plato specifically (imagine if you were to read Nietzsche as your commencement into philosophy and decided to read Plato a year later - I think it'd be rather impossible to read unbiased at that point).

That being said, Plato is great. He's embodies the original philosophic method, easy to read, and you leave with more questions than answers - which is the fitting place to begin any subject.

I agree. Even Kierkegaard went back to Plato when the intelligentsia of his day were caught up in Hegel. But I also think that Machiavelli is important too (in case he was not also mentioned above: I may not have seen him referenced when I scanned through the earlier posts, even if he was). Also, a rather odd author to include in this list would be Douglas Hofstadter, whose book, Godel Escher Bach helped me to understand Republic. I would like to go back to GEB at some point to see what else I might have missed (after having gotten a foothold in Republic), and then to some of Hofstadter's other works, which I very strongly suspect should be approached with great attentiveness. I recently ordered I Am A Strange Loop, yet after starting to read it, I became thoroughly convinced that in order to understand what was being communicated that I would need to go back to GEB and proceed through other of DH's texts (quite notably, the ones that he cites in I Am A Strange Loop). I just don't know that I'll have the time!!! :D :D

By the way, I could not stand the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (although, I must confess that I listened to an audio version of the book rather than to sit and critically read through it). I turned it off somewhere between half to two thirds of the way through, exclaiming what a meathead I thought he was ;). I could be wrong; yet even if there was something of substance that I failed to glean on first approach, his style was so tedious that I would much prefer to disgorge myself rather than to "read" through this book again.

Bertrand Russell hands down. I'm surprised no one has mentioned A History of Western Philosophy. It is about 350 pages of Greek philosophy categorized primarily as pre/post Hellenistic. 175 pages of Jewish and Catholic thought. Then entering early Renaissance to the Enlightenment and finally concluding with the developments of logic of the early 20th century. Going through the various philosophers while providing analytical input into fallacies within each subsequent philosopher; although, he does settle on one. It is vivid and very informative. An overall must read for introductory philosophical studies. You can pick and choose the major works you find interesting and go on your journey through the various works from there.

When I taught Intro, I used Russell's Problems of Philosophy, Descartes' Meditations, Berkeley's Three Dialogues, and Ryle's Dilemmas (which has a particularly nice chapter on free will and fatalism). For getting into ethics, I recommend the anthology by
Gensler and Spurgin. Ethics: Contemporary Readings

many people begin with Plato, this should give an idea what it is to think philosophy, though no doubt some of his ideas are perhaps mistaken, short books I found very influential are Descartes, there are also works of buddhist philosophy by Nagarjuna, Zen by Dogen, but of current interest I find Bergson, who is easy to read, with great intuition about time and creativity that is different than preceding western work, I have read too many to narrow the field more...

hey guys! im looking for a fun read. i know this is odd, but im tired of my regular philosophy courses at university, i want something to read simply for the sake of personal reading rather than for discussion or essay writing. something like platos republic, etc..

I’ve recently written a book based on philosophical characters and philosophers so it’s spot the philosophers/philosophies - it’s fictional and hopefully fun too especially if you like hiking!

https://www.amazon.com/Jacks-Path-Jac...

Thanks jack! I followed your link but unfortunately the title is not up for purchase :(

Hi Karen,
Thanks for letting me know. Depends where you are based - if you go to your local amazon account and type in the ‘Jack Pilgers Jack’s Path’ it should come as purchasable form your store 😃

I'd always nominate Aristotle over Plato ('hands down').

Yes, there's many edifying, fundamental, or introductory works of philosophy such as Descartes, Wittgenstein, Russell, or Whitehead afforded us. There's many entertaining writers such as Kahlil Gibran, Robert Pirsig, FW Nietzsche, Gaston Bachelard, or Herman Hesse.

But what sole, lone, specific titles in philosophy are worth white-knuckling over? What tracts can you hold to your heart? What ones are life-changing?

In my opinion: humans most urgently need to know how to live in this world, rather than a theoretical world. 'Abstract logic' doesn't always apply.

Therefore: Aristotle is arguably the most pioneering and --at the same time --the most useful thinker ever. He doesn't dictate what you ought to think: instead, he shows you how to think. How to think for yourself.

Both giants (Plato & Aristotle) are always grounded in human-scale practicalities; and Plato surely dazzles, but he too often travels the aether. Can you truly apply 'The Republic' to your daily life? What about Immanuel Kant? Or Jean-Paul Sartre?

Difficult. So: My narrowest, highest tier of philosophy books are built on this principle: "help me get through the day".

As such:
# 1) Epictetus - The Discourses (favorite book)
# 2) Aristotle - Metaphysics (favorite thinker)
# 3) Merleau-Ponty - Phenomenology of Perception (most impacting book)
# 4) Kant - Critique of Pure Reason (takes 'secondary commentaries' to understand)
# 5) Heidegger - Being and Time (secondary commentaries needed)

runner ups: Plato, Descartes, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Hume, Thoreau, Emerson, Camus, Marcus Aurelius

Start with Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. Audiobook it at x2speed if you can. Once you have an overview of the tradgetory of fundamental ideas, you will be able to make a educated decision as to what is right for you to dig your teeth into. Philosophy is never a easy read. It demands time. I suggest you make sure you don't waste it. Russell, who was one of the great philosophers, will help with that. A History of Western Philosophy

Boradicus wrote: "By the way, I could not stand the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (although, I must confess that I listened to an audio version of the book rather than to sit and critically read through it). I turn..."

we are on the same page here. It is a no brainer

Like many others before, I started with Betrand Russel - History of western philosophy.
Since then:
Thomas S. Kuhn - Structure of scientific revolutions
David Hume - An enquiry of human understanding
Alexandre Koyré - From the closed world to the infinite universe
Alan Watts - Spirit of zen
Albert Camus - Myth of Sisyphos

I would also recommend to read Hermann Hesse as his writings are heavily influenced by Philosophy (eg. Siddharta...)

-Camus - The Stranger
-Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Fiction
-Martin Hagglund - This Life
-Louis Menand - The Metaphysical Club
-Edmonds and Eldinow - Wittgenstein's Poker

I could add several more, but I won't (at this time). I realize there are a couple of novels here - but I have learned so much from them that I had to include them on this list.

It is an interesting question to reflect on. Here are a few that I have found particularly significant in my own pursuit of wisdom. Not an exhaustive list, by any means:
1. Maurice Blondel "Action (1893) Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice." The opening sentence alone is so delightful, "Yes or no, does human life make sense and does man have a destiny?" Blondel is a very unique voice in philosophy, and the journey is intense and thorough. This book recognizes that the desires of thought do not free us from the demands of action.
2. Gillian Rose "Mourning Becomes the Law." A beautiful, impassioned and well-reasoned defence of philosophy. By turns a lament and a way forward.
3. Tanabe Hajime "Philosophy as Metanoetics." The Japanese philosopher's post-war book reads as philosophy in the mode of confession. Central concepts include tariki (other-power) zange (repentance) and faith-action-witness. You can probably sense a theme in my favourite philosophy books.
4. Bernard Lonergan "Insight: A Study of Human Understanding."
5. Miguel de Unamuno "Tragic Sense of Life."
6. Hegel "Phenomenology of Mind."
7. Adorno & Horkheimer "Dialectic of Enlightenment."
8. Franz Rosenzweig, "Star of Redemption."
9. Kierkegaard "Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death."
A few other authors that I have found to be particularly insightful/moving are: Masanobu Fukuoka, Gaston Bachelard, Hannah Arendt, Nishida Kitaro, Alain Badiou, Plato, Leibniz, Richard Hooker, Zhang Shizhao, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Gayatri Spivak, William James, Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Dogen, Augustine, Hermann Cohen, and Murray Bookchin. It is a bit eclectic, perhaps, and I am still working out the connections.

Tom wrote: "Being new to Philosophy, and wanting to know more, I was just wondering what you consider to be the best philosophy books that you've read, ones that make you think and challenge your mind and trai..."

I would suggest 'The Mind of God' by Paul Davies. He is a physicist and more businesslike than most philosophers. I see no point in choosing a more difficult book. and most of them are. He cannot solve any philosophical problems but then neither can the authors of most philosophy books,. and they use many times more words to say so.