Recommended Reading List?: Philosophy Forums

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Recommended Reading List?
Each forum has their own "recommended list"; what are the MUST reads here?

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Recommended Reading List?

Rypcord
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Posted 08/02/09 - 02:11 PM: Subject: Recommended Reading List?	#1
What does everyone think are the "must read" philosophy books/novels? 10 or 20 or so; whatever you think should be MUST READ and that everyone should read.

Phaedruswax
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Posted 08/07/09 - 12:18 PM:	#2
Rypcord wrote: What does everyone think are the "must read" philosophy books/novels? 10 or 20 or so; whatever you think should be MUST READ and that everyone should read. Expression and Meaning by John Searle.

sheps
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Posted 08/08/09 - 03:55 PM:	#3
Politics/"How a state should be run" wise: On Liberty - Mill The Social Contract - Rousseau Politics - Aristotle The Communist Manifesto - Marx and Engels The Prince - Machiavelli On the Wealth of Nations - Smith Leviathan - Hobbes Two Treatises of Government - Locke The Republic - Plato They're the bare, bare, bare bones.
The Midnight Sun Never Sets.

Hessian
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Posted 08/10/09 - 11:40 PM:	#4
Within Modern Western Philosophy (if one is privilaged with patience): Immanuel Kant: The Critique of Pure Reason Martin Heidegger: Being & Time Martin Heidegger: On The Phenomonology of Religion Arthur Schopenhauer: The World in Will & Representation Friedrich Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human Friedrich Nietzsche: The Antichrist Baruch Spinoza: The Ethics Soren Kierkegaard: Sickness Unto Death Karl Marx: The Communinist Manifesto Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Men & Women (two different books) Everything you can by Darwin.

Rypcord
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Posted 08/20/09 - 12:24 PM:	#5
Any other recommendations?

Aetixintro
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Posted 08/20/09 - 12:33 PM:	#6
I would start with a contemporary, introductory book in each subfield of Philosophy and take it from there! Have a nice ride! Cheers!
Efficacy of "for since it is at present manifest to me that even bodies are not properly known by the senses nor by the faculty of imagination, but by the understanding alone" - Descartes, Meditation II I'm always wanting more, Anything I haven't got, Everything, I want it all, I just can't stop - The Cure, Want

rigelrover
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Posted 08/20/09 - 12:39 PM:	#7
"Godel, Escher, Bach" - Hofstadter. "Godel's Incompleteness Theorems" - Smullyan. (anything else by Raymond Smullyan).
I am more interested in questions than answers; dialog than dictation. If we can reasonably believe that there is not just a breach, but a fundamentally unclosable gap between the individual mind and the ultimate nature of the reality; the primordial thing in itself, then 'true' mystery does exist.

quickly
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1 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 08/20/09 - 02:27 PM:	#8
I can only speak from experience, so: Group I (or, constructing a social materialism) Spinoza's Ethics (I think, a better foundation for understanding Marxism and materialism than Hegelian gymnastics) Marx's Capital w/ Appendix (Application of monistic materialism to a philosophy of social consciousness and development) Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Pt. I (Understand how the power structures Marx identifies operate, by example) Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (Or, reconstructing Marx from Foucault and Althusser, under Spinoza's watch) Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice (A well-researched anthropological treatise confirming many of Anti-Oedipus's theories) Group II (or, how we construct the social through language) Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (The foundation of all speculative and non-empirical theories of language - more interesting than Chomsky's progeny) Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Along with Syntactic Structures, the foundation of all empirical theories of language - less interesting than Saussure's progeny; more correct than Saussure, Strauss, and Foucault) Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind (Tour-de-force structuralist fever dream, building off Saussure). Foucault's The Order of Things (Really, a way to turn Strauss's discoveries into a more plausible historical setting using a thoroughly post-modern formulation of Saussure) Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (Incredible response to Chomsky's syntactocentrism and the wild speculation of the French) Group III (or, your life is over - i.e., still working through these ones) Hume's Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding Kant's Critique of Pure Reason Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind (...enough said) Book to read which is not no the list, but from all accounts, will be: Metzinger's Being No One
Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura quae legis hic; aliter non fit philosophyforums.com (cf., Martial, Epigrammata I.XVI)

sheps
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Posted 08/20/09 - 02:46 PM:	#9
If you want an introduction, try Philosophy: The Basics, by Nigel Warburton. He's the head professor of philosophy at the Open University. I've only listened to his podcasts which are taken from his book, but he explains things lucidly and calmly.
The Midnight Sun Never Sets.

Schlitz
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Posted 08/20/09 - 06:11 PM:	#10
Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" is good, Berkeley's "Three Dialogues" is good, Descartes's "Mediations and Discourse on Method" is good, Plato's dialogues are good (Look for the edition "5 Dialogues" translated by Grube, and Moritz Schlick's 'Positivism and Realism' is a good introduction to the 20th century, paired with the Tractatus. You can probably buy all these for less than $50 US. Schlick's paper is available widely on the internet for free.

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