So you want to study philosophy: https://www.susanrigetti.com/philosophy
Copying a post I made a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28388844
Since this is HN, you might be interested in language, logic, and similar topics. If this is the case, you will likely enjoy analytic philosophy, especially Quine, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Popper.
However, if you are coming at philosophy cold, I really don't recommend the academic analytic path. It's too easy to get lost in the weeds and decide that all this stuff is just too obscure and abstruse to be useful.
If that's the case, I suggest a very brief reading list to shake up your default preconceptions of how the world works. The goal here is to make you question your basic assumptions, which is when philosophy is at its best.
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and On the Shortness of Life by Seneca. Classic Stoic works. Very accessible entry points to classical philosophy and Stoicism.
- Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche. If you read this and understand it, your entire conception of ethics, values, and how we use labels like "good" or "evil" will be shaken up.
- Republic by Plato. If you live in a Western country, you probably think that democracy is the highest and best form of government. Plato thinks otherwise and it's worth understanding why.
- A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics by Donald Richie. This is a fairly recent book but it serves as an excellent introduction to East Asian and Japanese thought via art and aesthetics.
- I Ching. The Chinese classic is super easy to read and is diametrically opposite to the static, eternal universal Platonic model much of Western thought it built upon.
- You should also probably read something from India, the Islamic world, and Russia, but I wanted to keep my list fairly short. Some recommendations here are The Bhagavad Gita, Ḥayy ibn YaqáşÄn, and anything by Dostoyevsky. For reference: I have a bachelor's in philosophy from a program in the US which is almost exclusively analytic in nature.
Once while looking for âOn the consolation of Philosophyâ, by Boethius I came across the near title âThe Consolations of Philosophyâ by Alain de Botton.
After having self studied philosophy for over a decade, Bottonâs dash review of great thinkers is accessible and refreshing. Boethius is not for the newb.
Find personalities, or eras, or thought topics which appeal to you and read everything you can of that vein.
The old stuff seems cringe today, though many great thinkers speak in a timeless language. Some tellings and narratives mar these often reclusive legends. One must struggle to find authentic and revealing accounts where their original language is not available to you.
Audiobooks and long drives (or workouts) are a worthy competitor of books.
Nigel Warburton's A Little History of Philosophy. Cathcart and Klein's Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar. Both are easy-going and fit the description of an overview. Further reading can be segued to Oxford University Press A Very Short Introduction Series. Concise but in-depth reads written by modern philosophers.
I would recommend jumping in the deep end and start reading primary sources from the east and west and all the places inbetween. Once you start reading and searching - perhaps university library catalogs, you will find many more. Guttenberg and other free ebook sources are great because most of the greats are well out of copyright.
Kant "Metaphysics of Morals"
Singer "Animal Liberation"
Plato "Repulic"
Einstein "Philosophical Works"
Hobbes "Leviathan"
Rousseau "Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men"
I have a degree in Philosophy and it is the best thing ever.
Peter Adamson has a podcast called History of Philosophy without Any Gaps (HOPWAG). It's the best introductory Philosophy material that I have seen.
Podcast episodes were later turned into books, sans the interviews. You can get started with those. They are really nice.
If you ask me for one recommendation, then that's it.
I also liked Past, Present, Future podcast episodes on Philosophers.
Most people only read Western Philosophy all their lives, but, I suggest that you read Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Philosophy, too.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/) is not a gentle introduction but is, honestly, one of the best things on the Internet
Understand What Philosophy Is: Philosophy is the study of fundamental questions about existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It involves critical thinking, argumentation, and reflection on complex topics.
Read Introductory Books: Start with beginner-friendly books on philosophy. Some recommended titles include "Sophie's World" by Jostein Gaarder, "The Philosophy Book" by DK, and "The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained" by DK.
Explore Philosophical Topics: Philosophy covers a wide range of subjects such as ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, aesthetics, and more. Read short articles or watch videos online to discover which areas interest you the most.
Even you can watch YouTube videos of more tutorial, btw you can try YouTube ReVanced to watch without Ads https://revancedapk.org/
You can't go wrong starting with Plato. I suggest buying a volume of the dialogues. They're incredibly easy to read and there's a certain charm to them I enjoy very much.
I also have them on audiobook and will sometimes dip in and listen to a particular dialogue I like.
Life of Montaigne (Bakewell) is an interesting look at another personâs attempt to study and write about philosophy. I found the book to be inspiring.
I think the magic of philosophical study is the probing and testing of your own thoughts and answers to important questions, and then comparing/contrasting those to other philosophical writers.
I often just pick a topic, like truth, and start writing. Itâs always amazing to see how my prose will reveal my mind and my dilemmas. And then I have a direction for more study.
There are no wrong answers. Just jump in and see where it takes you.
I started with "The Story of Philosophy" by Will Durant. It introduced me to the high-level strands and terms in philosophy by studying the works of eminent philosophers.
This is difficult to answer without knowing one's background. A fun introduction that's sometimes used in Intro to Philosophy courses is Coffee Meets Philosophy by Bruce Waller [0]. It tries to give the reader context in introducing philosophical problems (frankly the most difficult part of understanding philosophy) alongside primary texts. But it is a little weird!
If you prefer to dive into the deep end a bit, the Contemporary Debates series is excellent. For a given area such as epistemology [1], the books contain original essays for and against various positions. These books will give you a good idea what's going on in an area but can be a little dated.
[0] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Coffee_and_Philosophy/b... [1] https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Contemporary+Debates+in+Epistemo...
A "Philosophy for Dummies" - type book would probably serve as an adequate introduction, as well as the online resources already mentioned.
I'm a big fan of Socratic philosophy, and there's two main sources for this, Xenophon and Plato.
Xenophon's main Socratic work is traditionally titled The Memorabilia and there are two older translations available online, The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates (Henry Morley) and The Memorabilia (H.G. Dakyns). The latter has footnotes and is probably the better translation but the former might be a little easier to read, but they're both pretty old. A good modern option is Conversations of Socrates (Hugh Tredennick/ Robin Waterfield) which includes all of Xenophon's Socratic works (and useful footnotes). My advice is to try and not take the somewhat moralistic tone of Xenophon too seriously.
All of Plato's dialogues that are generally agreed to be authentic are available for free online, per the old but very readable translations of Benjamin Jowett. Everything attributed to Plato is contained in Plato Complete Works (John M. Cooper). Plato Collected Dialogues (Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns) has all of the authentic dialogues plus a few others. The Last Days of Socrates (Hugh Tredennick, I think revised by Robin Waterfield) has the four relevant Platonic dialogues (including Apology {"Socrates' Defense"} which might be the best record of things Socrates actually said.)
The Republic is available on the Perseus Tufts website with lots of good footnotes. I happened to have read Allan Bloom's translation and it has lots of good footnotes and interesting observations too, though I think his opinions may have been somewhat outside those of mainstream scholarship.
Also the third century AD/CE Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (Diogenes Laertius) is interesting and quite readable (though I haven't read all of it) and could serve as a (dated) introduction to ancient Greek philosophy itself.
I find that philosophy becomes dry and irrelevant when only treated as a field of study as opposed to a way of living.
My suggestion is to find a school of thought that you find useful enough that it can actually guide you in your everyday life.
For example, many people on HN find Stoicism easy to understand and fairly applicable - but maybe not always easy to apply - to their daily lives. I can recommend "The Daily Stoic" by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman [0] as a good introduction to stoicism with modern commentary.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Stoic-Meditations-Wisdom-Persev...
How to study philosophy as an amateur[0] by Existential Comics is a good introductory guide.
Philosophy: A Complete Introduction By Sharon M. Kaye [0] is a wonderful book that introduces different philosophers and their main ideas.
Each chapter starts with a thought experiment about a given idea and then it gets into more details.
I liked that the book was written in simple language and gave a good overview of many philosophers. Later you can decide to dig deeper into whatever grabbed you the most.
Adding on to this question: a lot of the (really excellent) recommendations here are quite focused on the Western cannon. Are there similar suggestions for reading other schools of thought?
Read philosophy?
Don't follow anyone's specific path, follow your own. Everyone remembers their first philosopher and the rest is history.
You might want to start with Everyday Examples. An Introduction to Philosophy by David Cunning.
That said, the ancient texts give you the best view of practical philosophy. Hinduism, Buddhism, Greek (and Roman) texts are where you can find the greatest breadth of thought.
Listen to the first five episodes to this podcast to get started. If you like it then keep going. https://www.philosophizethis.org/
If you don't want a snoozefest but rather something engrossing, see Emil Cioran's On the Heights of Despair, a discourse on skepticism.
Also: Bertrand Russellâs "History of Western Philosophy"
My degree is in philosophy, from one of the top handful of schools in that field. Learning by reading is more or less essential in philosophy, however I'm going to recommend against any of the books with a high level overview, or really any tertiary sources. Frankly, they are all either quite bad, or grinding the author's political axe (political in the sense of academic politics).
If you learn by reading, read primary sources: Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel (the Science of Logic in particular), in that order, are basically what you need to get caught up to modernity in philosophy. After that, you should have a strong enough background to truly engage with whatever sub topic you want.
For contemporary English speaking philosophy, the path after the above would be Frege, Russel, Wittgenstein (Tractatus then philosophical investigation), Quine, Davidson, Sellars, McDowell .
If you want to get into extremely contemporary stuff, find professors webpages at top institutions and read the PDFs of their papers they post there, they nearly all make them freely available, but they absolutely are not written for lay audiences: read the background stuff above first.
Secondary sources are also great, when done right: read the primary sources first. Eg "The 25 years of philosophy" is a great trip, but make sure you read Kant and Hegel first! (Fichte and Schelling are optional.)
Some translation are really bad... The Cambridge series is mostly modern improved translations, but do some research on each particular book first. Except Kant, just use the Kemp Smith translation.