/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11617311]

Can we have a chart thread but only for philosophy?

I want to start reading about philosophy since I have gotten bored with reading fiction.

[Anonymous No.11617349]

Start with Plato and go chronologically

[Anonymous No.11617377]

>>11617349
No, start with the Vedas.

[Anonymous No.11617418]

>>11617311
Start with Deleuze and work your way back anti-chronologically.

[Anonymous No.11617628]

>>11617311
This might help.

[Anonymous No.11617869]

>>11617628
>starting with Homer instead of Hesiod
>getting into philosophy by beginning with Plato instead reaching as far back as possible by reading surviving fragments from the works of Anaximander
>suggesting people to read all of Plato and Aristotle's works, instead of only their most important/unique works (like Plato's Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, Symposium, The Republic, Parmenides, and Timaeus, alongside Aristotle's Organon, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, On the Soul, Rhetoric, and Politics).
>reading Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Cicero, but ignoring Seneca, one of the three great teachers of Medieval Christian Europe
>putting all of St. Anselm's major works in, but entirely ignoring the Islamic Golden Age philosophers, like Avicenna, Averroes, Ibn Tufail, or Al Ghazali, who greatly expanded upon, and afterwards critiqued Aristotle's works by the means of commentaries, and did great contributions in the fields of mathematics, geometry, and medicine.
>making people read all of the Summa Theologica instead of the much briefer Summa contra Gentiles or the Shorter Summa.
>making people read Wittgenstein without previously having touched upon Frege or Whitehead & Russell, to understand what kind of odd-looking symbols Wittgenstein uses in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
>not putting in any post-WWII big name analytic (Austin, Kripke, Dennett) or Continental (Sartre, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari) philosophers
>putting in some basic political theorists and "philosophers", but ignoring ethics or psychology

[Anonymous No.11617882]

[Anonymous No.11617888]

[Anonymous No.11617891]

[Anonymous No.11617895]

[Anonymous No.11617900]

[Anonymous No.11617907]

[Anonymous No.11617908]

Saving all of these. Thanks anons.

[Anonymous No.11617914]

[Anonymous No.11617924]

[Anonymous No.11617929]

[Anonymous No.11617934]

[Anonymous No.11617945]

[Anonymous No.11617964]

[Anonymous No.11618034]

>>11617869
Based and redpilled.

[Anonymous No.11618080]

>>11617869
I'm someone who's into Marx but wants to git gud with philosophy, specifically continental tradition. I haven't read any Hegel either. So I want to start "at the start"; is there some reading list for presocratics, or should I get a book for that?

I already started reading all of Plato, but I might just restrict myself to the dialogues you named; should one read Aristotle in the order you named? Can medieval Christian phil. be skipped, i.e is there a good secondary source for it? Is there a reading guide for the Islamic philosophers?

I hope I'm not asking too many questions, but if I am, then instead of answering them I'd be happy with a link to a good resource. I've already checked out the canonical /lit/ phil guide but didn't find it very useful, especially in light of your criticisms of that chart.

[Anonymous No.11618268]

>>11618080
The best way of starting with the Greeks is by reading Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days first, since they develop part of the foundation for what later on became natural philosophy (and eventually the natural sciences).
https://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Philosophy/IEP/presoc.htm
https://www.hrstud.unizg.hr/_download/repository/Curd,_A_Presocratics_Reader.pdf
Either one of these is equally good.
Heraclitus and Parmenides are particularly important for understanding Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

Many philosophy courses skip straight from Aristotle to Descartes, and that might be just fine if you were planning on studying analytic philosophy (which does not seem to be your case). Plotinus is quite important to knowing about the development of Neo-Platonism, which strongly influenced mystics, theologians, and philosophers from the Middle Ages in the Muslim and Christian world alike. St. Augustine's Confessions posses quite a few interesting questions on the nature of God, how people must worship him, and how to reconcile faith with reason, and later on offers a scathing critique of practically everyone and everything besides himself in The City of God, and offered an answer to just about any question on the matter of theology which he felt could be wrongly answered by heretics, which is seen as one of the classics of the Late Antiquity/early Middle Ages. Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, although not very unique in the light of prior or latter philosophers, is a very beautifully written philosophic poem/series of private reflections on philosophy's place in life. Boethius wrote a few other religious texts, which, although important for their time, might not be all that interesting
Avicenna's Book of Healing, although strongly derivative of Aristotelian teaching, is quite historically important due to its proof for the existence of God, which was later on borrowed by St. Thomas Aquinas and many other theologians in the Christian and Muslim world alike.
Al Ghazali's The Incoherence of Philosophers is a good follow-up to Avicenna, due to its critique of rationality and attempts to explain faith through Aristotelianism, which was later on responded by The Incoherence of Incoherence, written by Averroes, the purist Aristotelian who attempted to rid Islamic philosophy of its syncretic Neo-Platonist Aristotelian roots.
Two great philosophical novels written during the Islamic Golden Age which may be of interest to many are Philosophus Autodidactus and Theologus Autodidactus, the former written by an Avicennist who believed that the principles of Islamic faith could be rationally derived solely by examining a priori knowledge which he thought we all possessed, and the later by somebody who accepted a posteriori knowledge as being a necessary alternative to reason, neither one of which could be solely relied upon by one man to learn all there is to know about faith.
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[Anonymous No.11618297]

>>11618268
Shit this is awesome, thanks so much; if I don't get the chance to reply to your next post then thanks for that in advance too!

[Anonymous No.11618399]

>>11618080
>>11618268
St. Thomas Aquinas flourished around the 13th century, after Aristotle's works were re-translated from Greek over to Latin by Byzantine-educated scholars. Of note are his Summa Theologica (the most important work in all of Roman Catholic theology, and possibly all of Christian theology, somewhere between 5 and 10 volumes long, which he ended up abridging into his Shorter Summa), his Summa Contra Gentiles (which was mostly aimed at non-Christians who'd never been taught about the Christian faith), and several of his works on political philosophy, which expand upon St. Augustine's political/religious doctrine on the authority of the church as the representative of God on Earth.
Other Mediaeval philosophers which many be of interest to some are Eriugena (condemned by the Roman Catholic Church for embracing Neo-Platonistic pantheism), Duns Scotus (who thought of the difference between real distinctions and conceptual distinctions), William of Ockham (most famously noted for his razor, and cementing the basis for empiricism by embracing nominalism, that is, concepts are words, not ideas which exist independently of the mind).
Now, it is not necessary to read every single Christian mediaeval theologian and philosopher, but I would suggest anybody, Christian, atheist, or anything else, to at least read St. Augustine's Confessions, City of God, and either one of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summae. After having read them, one may thus pass judgement as to whether or not they believe that which has been presented unto them. It is better to embrace reason and dialogue to calmly state why you agree or disagree with something than it is to blindly follow or reject something just because someone said so.
The Neo-Platonists from the Florentine Academy did very little which had not already been done many times before, that is, to revive the tradition of Neo-Platonism, which had already died and been revived so many times throughout the previous centuries, and attempt to adapt it to the religious beliefs of the time.
Hermeticism, which is strongly critiqued by both Plotinus and St. Augustine, might catch your attention if you happen to wish to know about what kind of seemingly irrational stuff ancient and Medieval pseudo-magicians/mystics believed in. For that, you may consult the Hermetic Corpus (Corpus Hermeticum). Note that these were the same doctrines that people like Giordano Bruno were said to have been put to death for.
Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Hobbes rose out of the Medieval Scholastic tradition, and offered a break with the then almost continuous tradition of closely building upon Plato and Aristotle, and generate some then-unique and interesting ideas, like the use of empiricism in the natural sciences, the separation between the body and the mind (as entities which exist independently, yet co-dependently), and a more refined version of the social contract.
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