/lit/ - Literature

>mfw I have a place to study Philosophy at Cambridge

Can anybody recommend a comprehensive, illuminating, and reasonably short critique of the meditations?

The last condition is most flexible!

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What advice do you have for someone trying to develop a respectable position in regard to Political Philosophy/Economics/Morality/Jurisprudence

Because I've been reading entry level stuff (i.e. Social Contract, Utilitarianism, Nichomachean Ethics, Economics in One Lesson) for the whole time I've had an interest in Philosophy (and just reading generally), my views are a Frankenstein's monster of anachronistic and polarized perspectives that can't really be taken seriously.

It's becoming an issue for me now because I have university interviews etcetera and I need some sort of coherent system of beliefs if I am to answer moral/political questions adequately.

Any suggestions then, for developing a Philosophical perspective that could be taken seriously in the modern day, i.e. what to read and stuff?

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Marcus Cornelius Fronto purportedly stated; "it is better never to have touched the teaching of philosophy...than to have tasted it superficially, with the edge of the lips, as the saying is".

Why?

My immediate thought is that one can derive some absurd conclusions from Philosophy (most obviously that one has no grounds for belief in a material world), and that one untrained could be naive enough to adopt these conclusions as truths. However it's not really the case that this happens very often to those who just touch on Philosophy, so what other reasons could there be?

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