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/lit/ - Literature

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5685312 No.5685312 [Reply] [Original]

can somebody please share the /lit/ philosophy beginner essential list?

>> No.5685316

All you'll ever need to read is A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and $ignifying Rappers.

>> No.5685334

>>5685312
Anti-Duhring
The German Ideology

>> No.5685338

>>5685312
a-z what is your familiarity with phil?

>> No.5685345

Fart with the French

>> No.5685346

Buy a beginner's textbook or something.

>> No.5685494

>>5685346
what would you recommend?

>> No.5685498

>>5685312
LE START WITH LE GREEKS MAYMAY XD

>> No.5685504

>>5685312
>>5685498

'Greeks' is a massive troll. If you start with the Greeks (and especially if you read them in Greek, which you would have to otherwise why the fuck read them) you can spend about 50 years getting through that before you either reach the postmodernists and realize metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and all the rest is a massive troll, or piece that insight together for yourself. Start with Nietzsche, end with Nietzsche, be a free spirit.

>> No.5685582

>>5685312
Read Nietzsche beyond good and evil, if that went well read Plato's republic and Kant's critique of pure reason. If it didn't go well read The prince, Ecclesiastes and the new testament, then read Plato's republic and Critique of pure reason.

>> No.5685586

>>5685504
>Don't start with the greeks

stay pleb

>> No.5685592

>>5685312
All right anon I'm gonna reveal to you a huge /lit/ well kept secret. For philosophy, you don't need to read the primary texts, just read in depth summaries/analysis of principle arguments of principle philosophers and you're fine and will know as much as anyone else. Nobody reads phenomenology of spirit or Being and Time, not even most scholars they just read monographs. You can read the Republic and some Nietzsche if you want some good reading material, but to understand the philosophies, secondary sources are fine

>> No.5685599

>>5685592
I've been reading primary sources for a philosophy uni course and agree completely. Summaries are so much better. The best analogy is watching parts from a sketch show like key and peele online. The singular sketch (like a key point of a philosophical work) has a just as much meaning on it's own as it does in the work. Reading the full work gives you more points, and to be honest most of the time their shit. The important meaningful ones usually make the summaries.

>> No.5685603

>>5685599
that said, The rebel by Camus is a nice place to start

>> No.5685606
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5685606

I have some of those chart thingys, if you really need them.

>> No.5685608

Parmenides, just for the lulz. It'll take you 15 minutes max to read what survives of his corpus and at the end of it you'll REALLY understand what Zeno's paradoxes were all about. Plus, its fun to start with someone who is 100% objectively wrong, establishing a set of your own beliefs which can be tested against all the subjective stuff like Nietzche, et al. Philosophy isn't about learning, it is about self-discovery. Have fun with it!

>> No.5685610
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5685610

>> No.5685804
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5685804

>>5685610
mfw Wittgenstein didn't actually complete philosophy

>> No.5685820
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5685820

>>5685504
>Start with Nietzsche, end with Nietzsche
Grow up.

>> No.5685836

>>5685606
>tfw you didn't know/read any of them when first seeing this image
>tfw you read about 10 since then
>feels good man

>tfw you'll never read all of them
>feels bad man

>> No.5685840

Read the following in the following order and you'll have a better understanding of the major fields than most people on this board. Alternatively just read the SparkNotes summary and you'll still be better off than most:
>Descartes Meditations
>Berkeley's Dialogues
>Hume's Inquiry
>Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
>Sartre's Being And Nothingness

>> No.5685846

>>5685582
That is honestly the worst advice, without a founding understanding of Aquinas, Descartes and Berkely, Nietzche cannot be properly understood and you just end up spouting the philosophy-lite, athiest drivel that most Nietzche followers regurgitate

>> No.5685853
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5685853

>> No.5685880

>>5685312
Jesus Christ it's so easy

Read:
Plato
Aristotle (neither entirely)
Descartes
Locke (maybe Berkeley too)
Hume
Kant
Hegel if you wish to study Marx or Hegel or continentals
Schopenhauer
Nietzsche
Popper
Quine
Wittgenstein

Basically anything past early 19th century is optional
You can add more or less of what you're curious in, but you cannot skip anything up until Hegel if you want a good basis of understanding

Also, reading Plato through Kant well should take you a year so don't come back in 2 weeks like you're some hotshot in philosophy

Also, whatever the Christian contrarians might tell you, there's nothing of irreplaceable value in medieval Christian philosophy

>> No.5685883

>>5685504
>start with Nietzsche
>don't read the Greeks

Worst advice ever, do not follow

>> No.5685891

>>5685608
Yeah, zenos paradox had nothing to do with actual arrow flight, it had to do with infinite divisions if number (and thus no "smallest thing") from which to start reasoning. The Greeks thought all proportions were perfect ratios, but found that pi is irrational. They couldn't make sense of why the proportion of diameter to circumference wasn't a goddamn ratio

At least as far as I've learned

>> No.5685896

>>5685804
He did. Hume and Wittgenstein are the end of philosophy

Kant's a hack who has deceived philosophers into thinking the universe can be contained in the mind

>> No.5685900

>>5685883

There has never been a work in philosophy that wasn't utterly useless, but at least Nietzsche is entertaining.

>> No.5685903

>>5685840
>Sartre

Stop.

>> No.5685904

>>5685896
i was referencing the goedel line in
>>5685610

>> No.5685909

>>5685900
Considering your post is philosophical in nature, to take it seriously I have to ignore it. So I'll just ignore it like I would under the presumption that you're fucking retarded, and the same result follows

>> No.5685910

Why would anyone want to read Plato?
That guy was an idiot

>> No.5685914

>>5685904
Oh, Godel was a logician, and an insane one. People put too much value in his work who don't understand logic very well and think if it follows in logic, it must explain reality

>> No.5685923

>>5685504
>Start with Nietzsche, end with Nietzsche, be a free spirit.
Nietzsche would hate you. No one would recommend starting with the Greeks more than Freddy.

>> No.5685987

>>5685910
Because nearly all philosophers make comments about his work

Don't "study" them, just know them

>> No.5686084

>>5685923
Nietzsche loved the early Greek philosophers and tragicians, but loathed everything post-Socrates.

>> No.5686089

>>5685853
>Quine
>positivist

>> No.5686192

Learning philosophy is mainly 1. Learning its history and 2. Understand the various fields and what they deal with.
Ignore all these "le greeks maymay just read Nietzsche xD" retards. These are people who don't take philosophy seriously at all.
If you're not willing to study Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas etc. then honestly, don't bother. Read some self-help books, subjective mystical new age shit or just get into scientific fields. What happens when people don't take philosophy as a serious field is movements such as logical positivism. Now I'm not saying that guys like Wittgenstein weren't really fucking interesting and had unique insights, but they wanted to reduce philosophy to their little special understanding of it, like it's some sort of general overview of science or even worse, pure word games that don't mean anything.

You don't have to take my word for it but I'd recommend studying philosophy from the viewpoint of the aristotelian/scholastic system. Now this is some really serious shit that doesn't look for easy answers. What I've realized with great shock over time is that Catholic writers turn out to be the most objective and comprehensive when it comes to real philosophy. Take a guy like Copleston, who wrote such a great general introduction that it's still read after more than fifty years. Similarly, Anthony Kenny. Now compare them with a guy like Bertrand Russel, who is supposed to be this great analytic philosopher, mathematician and whatnot, but his overview of philosophy is awful, awful. The guy is horribly prejudiced for any kind of system that doesn't fit his view. Why? Because he doesn't take metaphysics seriously.
Study metaphysics, epistemology and logic, this is the holy trinity of philosophy as far as I'm concerned. Everyone who says that ontology is a bunch of word games is an idiot and not interested in actual learning at all.

Start with the Greeks, and I mean get really seriously into the Greeks. And also don't ignore the medievals, they're just as brilliant as any modern philosopher if not more. It's funny and sad at the same time that people argue about the same things and use the same arguments as a bunch of monks who wrote a thousand years ago, they just can't bother to read them.

>> No.5686209

Dude, you've miraculously emerged from an infinite darkness and have been granted a few sweet cosmic breaths in the realm of existence, and your plan is to waste them reading the idle thoughts of centuries-old virgin aristocrats who were afraid of birds. Godspeed.

>> No.5686224

>>5685610
add Stirner to the list

>> No.5686244

>>5685910
Are you retarded?

>> No.5686789

>>5685312
read tweets of that negro Will Smith kid

>> No.5686797

>>5686192
>If you're not willing to study Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas etc. then honestly, don't bother

So the majority of academic philosophers shouldn't bother. Got it.

>> No.5686894

Spin the Spinoza, OP!

>> No.5686926

Most philosophers are absolutely terrible when it comes to clarity, taking them paragraphs to explain things that could be said in a sentence. That's why I didn't continue beyond masters level.

I'd really recommend some introductory texts:

Philosophy of mind: 'Mind and Cognition: An Anthology: Lycan and Prinz' (this is a big fucker, but full of essays absolutely central to the topic)

Philosophy of language: 'Key thinkers: Philosophy of Language' edited by Barry Lee (my tutor wrote a segment of this, it's by far the best intro that I've seen. In my opinion this is the most difficult bit of philosophy, bar some arcane continental piece)

Moral philosophy is a slightly more difficult one to have a normal introductory text for. You could start ultra basic with something like Justice by Sandel, this covers some political philosophy too, it's about as distilled as you can get.

Metaethics by Andrew Fisher wasn't a bad introduction.

If in doubt refer to the SEP.

>> No.5686951

>>5686209

Have a better suggestion?

>> No.5686963

>>5685334
>Anti-Duhring
it's good because it shows very clearly how retarded DiaMat ist

>> No.5686965

>>5686963
>it's good because it shows very clearly how retarded DiaMat ist
usefully Anti-Duhring provides a critique of diamat even while it provides an exposition. Poor Engels should have stuck to sociology and history.

>> No.5687054

Kant was wrong about everything.
PROVE ME WRONG.

>> No.5687064

>>5686965
I'm a Marxist and I fully agree.

Dialectics of Nature was even worse, yeesh.

>> No.5687082

>>5687064
And you know who loved that Diamat? Lenin. Fucksake, and people read Lenin for philosophy. Empiro-criticise my nuts.

>> No.5687148

>>5686797
You mean there are academic philosophers who don't?
My God, is it that bad?

>> No.5687194

>academic philosophers

>> No.5687248

>>5686926
Not OP, but thank you for providing a helpful and civil response.

>> No.5689143

>>5686192
>Everyone who says that ontology is a bunch of word games is an idiot and not interested in actual learning at all.
I must be an idiot, could you explain how it isn't?

>> No.5689176

>>5687054
I kan't

>> No.5689180

>>5687054

It's just be so awesome if he'd be right

>> No.5689427

>>5687148
Nah, analyticals have been overly busy writting about our extensive continental philosophers since the 70s. It's just the students barely reading more than 5-6 full books in their whole bachelors degree.