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<em>Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays</em> seems like exactly what you're looking for. It's a collection of fourteen chapters written by different authors about aesthetics and porn.

From the introduction: >The chapters in this collection are ranged under four broad themes. Part I tackles the central issue of whether or not art and pornography are mutually exclusive in the most direct way. Part II explores the topic of imagination and fictionality in relation to pornography. Issues surrounding medium and genre provide the central focus of Part III, while Part IV addresses ethical and feminist concerns about pornography.

The book is on Oxford Scholarship Online, so if you're connected to a university in some way you should be able to access the book for free.

You might be interested in Dewitt's Worldviews: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science. I think that after reading that book, your views on science will be strengthened in some ways and weakened in others.

That book is fairly accessible. If you'd like something a bit deeper/more technical you could check out Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Popper's In Search of a Better World, and Feyerabend's Against Method.

Those books offer three very different views on science. The first two are more popular than the last, which is a less impacting, but very interesting in my estimation.

Ultimately, this doesn't really say anything about the quality of your education. Whether it's a good idea to read selections or a full work depends chiefly on what questions you are asking in any given class.

But to answer your question, I read a handful: at least the Republic, the Nicomachean Ethics, Descartes' Meditations, Spinoza's Ethics, Being and Time --- and probably many other ancient texts that are pretty short (i.e., De Anima, Gorgias, Phaedo, and so on).

It strikes me as I am writing this that it's a lot easier to read complete books if you are doing the history of philosophy. The contemporary analytic philosophy courses I took would have selections from books, of course, such as Williamson's awesome Knowledge and Its Limits, but we were always jumping around from problem to problem, such that reading a complete book would have been weird.

I don't think Aristotle would find the matter decidable in the abstract. His goal in the Nicomachean Ethics is to develop a conception of the ethical life as one in which one develops the habits to virtuously meet any situation they're confronted with. The idea that we can abstractly evaluate cases based on some predefined decision procedure is quite alien to his approach (which is the point made in this section of the SEP article on his ethics).

I would add to the opinions that urge you to embrace the struggle. Reading philosophy isn’t like reading Harry Potter or something - it’s a bit of a slog at times, but the payoff is immense.

To make the question of what to read a bit easier, maybe try a good reader. One that students always gave me good feedback on is the Hackett Classics of Moral and Political Theory reader. You get Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Hume,Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber. Well edited.

Well, you could start with Plato's early dialogues. There's a helpful collection by Hackett here of five short dialogues:

https://www.amazon.com/Plato-Dialogues-Euthyphro-Apology-Classics/dp/0872206335

A lot of those other books look like good choices. Some that you might add are:

Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Might I direct you to Nick Riggle's magnum opus On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck

If it's major works from the history of philosophy you have in mind, one typical way to start is with early modern philosophy, especially with Descartes. For Descartes, the Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy are the typical starting points. Hume is also relatively accessible and will help give an "empiricist" counterpoint to Descartes' "rationalism", as representing two major currents in early modern philosophy. The typical starting place with Hume are his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.

Another typical place to begin with the history of philosophy is with Plato and Aristotle. The first entry in this list, noting the dialogues on the death of Socrates, list the readings people typically begin with. And the series of "introductory" and "intermediate" dialogues on that list provide some suggestions on how to continue with Plato. You can also try to start with Aristotle, or better yet continue to Aristotle after at least the "introductory" readings from that Plato list. His Physics Books I-II and Nicomachean Ethics Books I-V are good and typical places to begin.

Another good place to begin is with Hellenistic philosophy, it seems people especially appreciate Stoicism. For classical Stoicism, the writings of the major Roman Stoics (Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius) are all relatively accessible. To continue with Hellenistic philosophy after reading some of these, the writings of Cicero (on Academic Skepticism), Epicurus (on Epicureanism), and Sextus Empiricus (on Pyrrhonism) are natural places to turn to next, and are also relatively accessible.

I'm also pretty new to this stuff, but I found the Philosophize This and Partially Examined Life podcasts helpful as very brief simplified starting points, like appetizers, for a lot of philosophical material. Another podcast I can't recommend enough that is heavily focused on the work of Lacan and Hegel is called Why Theory. It's by a couple college professors and every episode is consistently an educational experience for me. One of the professors on that podcast, Todd McGowan, just released a book on Hegel. They also just interviewed Zizek who I know is also heavily influenced by Hegel and his work could also be a good starting point. The reason I am recommending podcasts is because I personally find it really helpful to hear the material in the experts own words before I dive into it on my own. Hope this helps!

Depends what you mean by “Mathematical Philosophy.”

Intro to Mathematical Philosophy is kind of an abridged version of Principia Mathematica. Russell is attempting to derive mathematics from basic logical principles.

Many of the principles you read about in this book are covered in the first couple weeks of a Real Analysis class, though, Russell definitely has his own style. It reads less like a textbook and more like Russell giving a lecture. Knowledge of Analysis would help. Though I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary. If you have a fair bit of math knowledge, and you go slow, I think you’ll be fine.

If you’re interested in the Philosophy of Mathematics, I would highly recommend Philosophy of Mathematics by Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam. It is an anthology of different writings on the philosophy of math and even includes portions of Russell’s intro to mathematical philosophy.

I highly recommend this delightful book by Raymond Smullyan, who was a logician, raised and trained in the "west", but also a Taoist. Similar to Watts in spreading "Eastern" ideas to a "Western" audience, but he specifically deals with Taoism.

To go down the more psychedelic route, Richard Alpert/Ram Dass and Terrence Mckenna are classics, I don't know if you're familiar with them and similar figures?

Podcasts are great too, I recommend Philosophize This.

Lacking purpose can be a factor in depression. Finding life meaningless is in fact a common symptom. Victor Frankl argues convincingly in Man's Search for Meaning that there are three ways by which we may discover meaning in life: One is by creating a work or doing a deed, or in other words, accomplishment. Another is by experiencing something or encountering someone. Lastly, it is by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. Someone having an existential crisis may be understood as suffering from a crisis of meaning, of failing to discover meaning in one of these three ways.

If you've recognized that your initial reasons for rejecting Catholicism were wrong, perhaps you should revisit Catholicism without the Randian baggage.

> where do I start? Who should I read?

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is worth reading. Aquinas built a compelling system of Christian virtue-based ethics off of that foundation. It has had a contemporary defender in Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue and Whose Justice, Which Rationality? - both are excellent).

> Is there any expert consensus on moral philosophy in the same way most Biologists believe in evolution or most doctors support vaccines?

Eh, maybe on some points. But if you read MacIntyre, you'll understand why "expert consensus" in moral philosophy is of dubious value. Although I'm not sure I would start with him - he talks a lot about the broad state of moral philosophy, and I imagine one would need a decent background in the field to appreciate it.

> Am I just looking for another dogma?

Is this necessarily a bad thing? If truth aligns with dogma, then we should believe the dogma.

Not necessarily the easiest reads but the works that have had the biggest impacts on philosophy generally are (in no particular order) as follows:

• Philosophical Investigations - Wittgenstein Basically this work (and the Tractatus to a lesser extent) changed the entire discourse for philosophy of the past century.

• Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle Set up the groundwork for ethical theory for the next millennium. Heavily influenced Christian ethics, and, until Utilitarianism was the dominant ethical framework for moral thought (arguably it still is).

• Naming and Necessity - Kripke Heavily cited recent work on meaning and reference. Changed the discourse in philosophy of language and discredited the idea that philosophy was merely "linguistic analysis."

• Critique of Pure Reason - Kant Tied together the rationalist and empiricist traditions ultimately offering a picture of philosophy under which a priori synthetic knowledge is possible.

• Theory of Justice - Rawls This one I know the least about but Rawls' importance beyond philosophy extends here in his treatment of a well structured society. This work is also heavily cited and spawned a number of responses, notably Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Edit: formatting

First four chapters of An Introduction To The Metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas by James F. Anderson.

Introduction To Metaphysics by Henri Bergson. It's short and the Hackett edition provides a preface that introduces pretty well concepts from Bergson that you need to know to understand the book. It's also heavily relying on epistemology (which is why I'm recommending this to you).

But really, I think the book that is hands down the best introduction to the significance of ontology and metaphysics for layreaders is Some Lessons in Metaphysics by Jose Ortega y Gasset: https://www.amazon.ca/Some-Lessons-Metaphysics-Ortega-Gasset/dp/0393005143

It's perfect because it's starts big and becomes more and more narrow as you go through. It's not strict ontology per say. He doesn't introduce big ontological terms but he makes you think about the questions that can only be answered by ontology (what is human being and its circumstances?). If you know what existentialism is it's also going to reform your definition of it (in a way that's much better than Sartre imo).

And of course if you're actually more advanced (since you've read Hume) you should read Aristotle's Metaphysics, especially Book IV where the first two lines introduce, word for word in the most fundamental way, what ontology is. This book is the absolute starting point for ontology but problem is it doesn't provide the kind of significance that people are looking for. Aristotle gives reasons why ontology is necessary but these reasons are less inspirational than what people are usually looking for. Heidegger's reasons why we need ontology are different than Aristotle's for instance.

A used ROTC? (Two big blue volumes.) If so, great find.

Aristotle is worth reading. What you should read depends entirely on your interests. His most read works are undoubtedly the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics (easy reads), followed probably by parts of the Metaphysics (less easy reads). But, really, there are interesting parts throughout his corpus, even the parts that seem less "relevant" - his biological works included (I'll knife fight anyone who says otherwise).

So, what fields are of interest to you? Have you read any Plato or Aquinas? Are you into argumentation? Phil of Science? Pick your poison.

Haha, I remember reading Descartes's Meditations for the first time and finding it impenetrable. It is a fairly quick (re)read now. Camus is a great writer, but I found tMoS to be a poorly written text in terms of building an argument. Wittgentein tends to be an awful place to just "dive in".

I think it is the same advice you'd give to someone learning how to swim - start in the shallows and don't go too deep unless you have a helping hand (classes, friends, a teacher). You need a foundation. Both for context, but also for experience that isn't bashing your head against a wall. Get practice with less rough texts, or be prepared to just read very slowly. Author's like Witty require something like learning a new language.

Based on your interests... Platonic Dialogues are good. Meditations by Marcus Aurelias will get you into the system (interesting and influential). Reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics or Poetics may be a lot of fun. For these Greek/Latin writers make it a habit of looking up Greek/Latin words and their more nuanced meanings.

For more, check out the FAQ post

Edit: Structure and bad spelling

I think that /u/willbill's reply is spot on, so I'll just add 2 things to it.

A book recommendation When I asked this question in school, my professor recommended Postmodernism: A Beginner's Guide by Kevin Hart (no relation... unfortunately). Even if you just read the first two chapters, you'll have a pretty good grasp of some ideas that are called "postmodern." So in addition to Lyotard's ideas about metanarratives, you'll also learn that postmodernists tend to reject essentialism and foundationalism. So (if we just look at "foundationalism"), postmodernists reject that there is one basic set of principles that grounds all knowledge, especially principles that are wholly independent from culture and social values. But the book is super accessible, so check it out.

A thought about the popular use of "postmodern" We're hearing a lot about postmodernism lately from people like Jordan Peterson. As far as I can tell, Peterson thinks that Marxism is postmodern, which is just not true (see /u/willbill's reply). But Peterson has had a big influence, so when people use the word "postmodern," they might be using it in a sense that's unfamiliar to academic philosophers. Contrapoints has a great video criticizing Jordan Peterson, in which she talks about this funny use of the term. She's an ex-PhD student and does a really good job explaining what's going on. Just my two cents.

Once Made Equal to Man, Woman Becomes his Superior. – Socrates. Wear Your Philosophy. by Ruth's prints. White Samsung Case Samsung Galaxy S9

You've got Socrates approved Samsung case.

Jacques Derrida has some very interesting thoughts about forgiveness and the unforgivable in his book <em>On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness</em>. That text speaks particularly well to your question because he makes reference to the kinds of heinous acts you mention (he mentions "crimes against humanity" repeatedly). He focuses on a paradox inherent to the idea of forgiveness:

>it is necessary, it seems to me, to begin from the fact that, yes, there is the unforgivable. Is this not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness? [. . . .] forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable. (32)

A little later on he asks: >what would be a forgiveness that forgave only the forgivable? (36)

If a deed can readily be forgiven, then it was not serious enough to warrant forgiveness in the first place. Derrida argues that forgiveness is impossible, but with his characteristic subtlety, he insists it does happen anyway. There is a kind of miraculous character to forgiveness because it happens only when it (seems like it) could not have.

What's so great about pleasure anyway?

In all seriousness, you've taken for granted that pleasure per se is, let's say, "what's great" and it's deeply unclear why anyone should accept that premiss. Regardless of the source of pleasure, we can deny that pleasure is all that has value in itself - even while still accepting that pleasure is sometimes also valuable! My personal favorite counterargument to pleasure as all that is of final value is to turn the Millsian argument for pleasure or happiness on its head: people pursue pleasure and pursue the satisfaction of their desires but the things they are aiming at in their pursuits are not (ordinarily) the resulting pleasure or satisfaction of their desires - they are aiming, for example, at their children being raised well, at learning more from the book they read, at winning the sports match, etc. Pleasure comes about as a result of achieving these goals but it's the goals themselves (caring for their children, etc.) that are what people want and regard as valuable for themselves, not the resulting pleasure and not satisfying their own desires (in the sense that their aim was not the desire satisfaction, but the goal itself).

That said, some places you can find your premiss questioned are: Plato's Philebus especially but also Republic, Book IX; Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, 1152b-1154b; Kant's Groundwork to a Metaphysics of Morals, start of Section I where he proposes that only a good will is good in itself; Mill's Utilitarianism, start of Ch. II questions the primacy of trivial and simple pleasures over intellectual pleasures; G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica, ch. 3; Nozick's Anarchy, State, Utopia, ch. 3, section 'The Experience Machine'; and, to end this list somewhere recent, Russ Schafer-Landau's The Fundamentals of Ethics, chs. 1-4. I hope that helps!

The chapters on friendship in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and C.S. Lewis' chapter on friendship in The Four Loves, made me value friendship much more than I had previously. Not sure if that involves a philosophical theory exactly, but it's philosophical reflection on the nature of friendship.

Foucault's prose is dense, as you might expect from a continental philosopher, but he wants you to understand, and makes a excellent job summarizing his arguments for the layman in his lectures and interviews. Look out for <em>Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings</em>, which contains the transcription of two introductory lectures given by the man himself as well as the interview where he develops the concept of Heterotopias.

I'd recommend reading a general introduction to his work before tackling his writings directly. Gary Gutting's Foucault: A Very Short Introduction is excellent. After you're done with that, the introduction to Paul Rabinow's The Foucault Reader will introduce you to a lot of Foucault's terminology through significant passages from his debate with Noam Chomsky. With those under your belt, you should be able to read Power/Knowledge in a new light, and get a lot out of the chapters titled "Two Lectures", where Foucault describes his philosophical project, and "Questions on Geography" where he discusses the concept of Heterotopias.

If you're still interested in Foucault after that, follow bierstadt's advice and read Discipline & Punish!

so, one of the big names in this field is Issiah Berlin, and his Two Conceptions of Liberty. It is a very influential article which outlines in broad terms what he saw as the distinction between liberal/capitalist societies and totalitarian/communist societies.

It is an important text, but it has largely been superceded.

If you want a good overview of how views of freedom have developed from there, I cannot recomend highly enough Adam Swift's "Political Philosophy: A Beginners' Guide for Students and Politicians". Section 2 concerns liberty, beginning with Berlin, and going through notions of property and redistribution. It is a very effective summary, and ends with some further reading. The book is on at least the third edition atm, but I only have the second, so I wont offer page numbers or anything as that might change.

edit: i realise i didn't really answer your question. I would say yes, but this question turns on what you think are the legitimate and illegitimate freedoms. Freedom in a moralised sense. Whether "freedom to starve" is actually a bad thing rathe than a rhetorically charged description requires a story about what are legitimate and illegitimate freedoms.

Your question implies a bit of a misunderstanding of Christian morality. According to Thomas Aquinas, a moral action is one which binds a soul closer to God, and sin takes a human away from God's grace. Therefore, an action is not right or wrong based on the dictation of God, but rather an action is right or wrong insofar as it brings you closer or further from God. Basically, morality comes down to human benefit. Because God is the source of all goodness and happiness, it would be beneficial for humans to form habits which bring them closer to God. This gets a bit more into theology rather than philosophy. Thomas Aquinas uses a lot of Aristotelian language to describe morality and he borrows heavily from Nicomachean Ethics. The difference is that St. Thomas takes God's properties (omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, omnipresence) to be axiomatic. If you deny any of those properties, then Christian morality will indeed seem a bit strange or nonsensical. If you're interested in reading about it more, I'd recommend St. Thomas's Summa Theologiae. A ton of Christian Theology is derivative of this source, and Thomas is remarkably clear in most of his arguments.

It is definitely not a dumb question, and virtually every single conceivable answer to this question has been defended.

I think the most plausible, best-supported position is that Plato is not using his dialogues to convey Socrates' ideas at all.

See Lloyd Gerson's article &quot;The Myth of Plato's Socratic Period&quot;.

It follows that whatever the historical Socrates believed, if he really did hold positive beliefs of his own (as opposed to just interrogating other people), is lost to history. We might be able to round out a picture of the man and his project from contemporaneous sources: for example, it's safe to say he had a snub-nosed and wanted to learn about virtue and denied having any knowledge. Did he think that wrongdoing was always involuntary? Did he think that injustice harmed the wrongdoer? These are the "traditional Socratic paradoxes," but I don't see how we could ever conclude that the historical Socrates originated them. (Gerson's line in the article I linked provides a defense of this assertion.)

As for the Kierkegaard point, I think we can make sense of that attribution in different ways. The most likely one is that Kierkegaard doesn't actually care about the historical fact of whether Socrates thought of himself as a midwife, but that he is inspired by Plato's character, Socrates, who calls himself a midwife.

It is deeply unlikely that the historical Socrates would have ever described himself as a midwife of ideas: when character-Socrates calls himself a midwife, he makes it sound like he is disclosing a secret, which would be weird if it were common knowledge, and it is probably a cue from Plato to people who would know that the historical Socrates never said it to the effect of "ya, I know I am taking some creative license here."

I think it would be good to get clearer on what is meant by "socially constructed". This is usually considered a good place to start: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Social-Construction-What-Ian-Hacking/dp/0674004124

Looks like hammertime for Heidegger starts around page 99 in this edition.

https://www.amazon.com/Being-Harper-Perennial-Modern-Thought/dp/0061575593/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1516155044&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=being+and+time

I think Kaufmann gives a good "not a fascist" reading, to quote him...

> The type that Nietzsche himself most admires is by no means his own invention. He resembles Socrates and the great­-souled man of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (IV, 3) as well as Shakespeare’s ninety-fourth sonnet and these lines from Measure for Measure: “O, it is excellent/To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous/To use it like a giant.” To cite Zarathustra (“On Those Who Are Sublime”): “There is no­body from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are powerful: let your kindness be your final self-conquest. Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws”.

or again...

> Every morality is a recipe for a certain type of man, an ex­plication of a vision of what man might be. Nietzsche sug­gests that we examine every morality with this in mind, and ask ourselves what we think of this vision – or that. And he offers us a vision of his own.

The hard part is that Nietzsche is, perhaps purposefully, not someone who can be put easily into 'layman's terms' without losing something. Hence the subtitle of Zarathustra - A Book for All and None

Nietzsche is very accessible, but difficult to understand. He writes in brief aphorisms; putting them together into a large picture is the difficult part. I'd recommend picking up "Beyond Good and Evil" as a starting place; it's a lovely book.

You should read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. It's by far the most accessible Aristotle.

Also, Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism," Heidegger's "Discourse on Thinking (also called "Memorial Address)," and Kant's "Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals" and "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?" are all accessible works by otherwise difficult thinkers.

https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/What_is_Enlightenment.pdf

http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1308144.files/February%203/Heidegger%20-%20Memorial%20Address.pdf

Books and an article (in no particular order):

• 1. Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics
• 2. Alasdair MacIntyre - After Virtue
• 3. Christine Swanton - Virtue Ethics: A Pluaristic View
• 4. Philippa Foot - Virtues and Vices
• 5. Thomas Hurka - Virtue, Vice and Value
• 6. Rosalind Hursthouse - On Virtue Ethics
• 7. G.E.M. Anscombe - "Modern Moral Philosophy"

Usually, I talk about what I'm focusing on (phil of sci), but I also have a strong interest in ethics so I explain that too. Still, it seems like studying ethics doesn't really require much of an explanation. You ought to do what you ought to do. To do what you ought to do, you must know what you ought to do, so you ought to know what you ought to do. To know what you ought to do, you must study what you ought to do, so you ought to study what you ought to do.

So ethics. It seems tedious to lay it out like that, and I think it can throw one off when asked why they study ethics. It seems like it's a field everyone should take an interest in.

As for philosophy of science, I chose it because it's a branch of philosophy of topics that I hope to make central themes to the films I make. I don't really feel that science is a big enough theme in our culture. There's something we call science in films that becomes a big theme, but it's not really science. Remember when Blizzard gave us this gem?

> he was taken under the wing of Dr. Harold Winston, who taught him science

We have this fetishization of technology and cleverness (watch me grow poop plants on Mars!), but science is never explored. The only film I can think of that comes close to what I would want is arguably Primer.

Certainly, I find pretty much every field in philosophy to be extremely important and interesting, but with the plans I have for my life in particular, phil of sci is going to be the most instrumental.

edit: poop pants to poop plants, latter is Matt Damon, former is me irl

It looks like, concerning American anti-intellectualism specifically, these two books are popular on the subject:
Richard Hofstadter: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols

Think by Simon Blackburn.

and

Five Dialogues of Plato.

Yes.

But you probably want more than a yes/no answer. If there's something confusing or unconvincing about the arguments in, say, the Nicomachean Ethics, I (and others here) will be glad to help you out!

Kierkegaards Either/or. The beginning of a long road down existentialism and later phenomenology for me.

Biggest impact of all though is Virtue Ethics, so Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. After that, On Virtue.

Surprised that the SEP article makes no mention of Patricia Churchland, see, e.g., her new book Conscience: The origins of Moral Intuition (2019) as well as her older book Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells us about Morality (2011).

I suppose this will vary from person to person, but I find Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to be practical. His work is aimed at answering that question "What is the good human life (for the individual)" and offers much insight.

I would also list stoic philosophers such as Marcus Aurelius and EDIT: Epictetus to this list. This is a focus more on one's inner world and the cultivation of attitude / character. This is also practical.

Overall, I find most/any philosophy readings to give applicable insights to living a "better" life, for if you come across points / perspectives you did not previously consider, you are expanding your own horizons and developing your potential as a human being. This is a "better" life in my eyes.

This is a very interesting question!

If what you mean by "Classical Platonism" is the system, based on Plato's writings and oral teachings, discussed in antiquity, then probably, the chief text is the Timaeus; the Theaetetus would definitely be up there, too. The Republic, in contrast, would have not been nearly so important. The Phaedo was very important, same as it is today. Every Platonist would have read the First Alcibiades, which few people have read today, even though it is wonderful. However, if you want some list of "essential" readings that you should do to understand Plato's thought, I would really recommend the Republic more than the Timaeus or Theaetetus, as good as they (and especially the latter) are.

For more information about "Classical Platonism" in the ancient sense, you can check out Lloyd Gerson's <em>From Plato to Platonism</em> and Charles Brittain's &quot;Plato and Platonism.&quot; Both are great.

As for Aristotle, his Metaphysics (especially book twelve, also called Book Lambda) was super important in the ancient world and still great today; still, you should probably start with the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. My personal favourite is the Posterior Analytics, a work (very broadly) concerned with epistemology and logic. His De Anima and Physics are two other works that mattered a lot in antiquity and still matter today.

This quote, while expressing a general Aristotelian sentiment, is not Aristotle's own, to my recollection. I believe it is a a quote by Durant, who wrote some a popular book on the history of philosophy.

Read Nicomachean Ethics if you want to see how it all works. Or, read the page at the SEP to get a sense: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/

Will MacAskill specifically covers this in his paper Replaceability, Career Choice, and Making a Difference which is one of my favourite applied ethics papers.

In it, he makes the strong claim that we are ethically obligated to strive for lucrative career paths (if able) due to the greater flexibility of capital over humanitarian aid. He also uses the principle of replaceibility in two sense: First to say that it's guaranteed that someone else would be a malaria doctor in your place, and secondly that it's very unlikely that another investment banker would donate 50% of their income to pay for 10 malaria doctors.

As /u/AllenGinsbrg said, other writers within the Effective Altruism movement, such as Peter Singer, have argued on these issues, though I don't think anybody has done it quite as comprehensively as MacAskill.

1. Hit them with a stick until they submit.

2. There's also the argument from scientific realism, in that the results of our mathematical computations do seem to match up to empirical reality to the point where we consider said reality to be predictable given our knowledge of material conditions.

3. And my personal favorite, Husserl's surplus of meaning.

There isn't great evidence for or against this claim. Just know that Socrates is a character in the work of several different authors (most notably Xenophon and Aristophanes), and he features prominently in discussions of the development of ancient Greek philosophy (such as <em>Lives of Eminent Philosophers</em> by Diogenes Laertius). People often try to argue that Socrates doesn't exist because he never produced a written work of philosophy. So, in essence, he might as well be just a fictional character spawned by Plato or some other source. This argument isn't convincing. First, don't be confused into believing that the dramatic portrayal of Socrates within the works of Aristophanes or Plato is really anything like the real person. Plato often romanticizes Socrates while Aristophanes basically drags him down to mere sophistry. Any account by these authors is necessarily biased and fictionalized, which may give one the sense that there is no real Socrates behind the fiction. Second, just because he never wrote anything doesn't mean he doesn't exist. There are similar disagreements about the existence of Homer, and we have written products--the Iliad and Odyssey. That doesn't detract from the possibility that Homer was merely a singular, fictional author to whom these works (that may have been compiled in fragments by various authors) were attributed. Finally, the SEP has an article on Socrates that addresses this rather explicitly.

What reasons do you have for doubting that Socrates was a real person beyond the fictional accounts that we have? And what is your motivation in asking this question?

There are many ancient philosophy specialists who do not think that Plato's character of Socrates represents in any meaningful way the historical Socrates, and so there's not a remarkable amount of "reliance" on Plato's account of him.

See, for instance, this article: https://www.academia.edu/7531379/The_Myth_of_Platos_Socratic_Period

Nostalgia is a theme I want to pick up soon in my own research. I'm currently starting on this book, which goes through the history of nostalgia in philosophy, medicine, and literature.

As a more general answer, it is (sorta) a theme through the existential phenomenologists (Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) and could be approached through Hermeneutics (Ricouer's Memory, History, Forgetting comes to mind). If the past is the origin of our current meaning, it makes sense that we would existentially seek to dwell there. It is simple, non-hazardous in shallow reflection - the future carries with it the extreme anxiety of the unknown.

The phenomenon of 'return to the past' nationalism/conservatism may also be an an area to look into. I am less helpful with that, but maybe a search on amazon may help, or someone else could suggest some works.

This is not the case, the most influential greeks in the last 1000 years are Gregory Palamas, and Plethon, and possibly Vlastos but he was half Scottish and lived in the US. Palamas has helped to define Russian Philosophy, and continues to be the greatest source of contention between Eastern and Western Christianity. Plethon helped to create the Renaissance and modern Orientalism, specifically with his positing of Zoroaster as the originary source of Platonism, and his reintroduction of Neo/Platonism into the West.

Both of these men are highly important, but notice a crucial factor. Both lived prior to the creation of the Ottoman Empire. The reason for the destruction of Greek Philosophy in short is the colonisation of Greece by the Ottomans, and to a lesser degree the Latin West. https://www.amazon.com/Colonizing-Christianity-Religious-Identity-Contemporary/dp/0823284433 This is a short but excellent book in general on the shattering of Greece. What you must remember is that Greece/Byzantium went from likely the richest part of Europe to now nothing but a idle nothing corner. The only significant reason for this was the looting and destruction of Greece by the Latin West and then the Ottomans. The vast majority of Good "Orthodox" Theology and Philosophy comes out of Russia, again because it is richer though more unequal.

In short Greek Philosophy stopped because of the conquest of Greece by the Turks. Subsequent history did not help.

Also Greek Philosophy still defines modern debates. The Revolt against British Idealism was for GE Moore centred on what he thought was their incorrect reading of Plato.

This book by Aronson is the one I would recommend. Aronson is a Sartre scholar who has a good grasp of the both the philosophical issues and the political/human disagreements.

Another good book is this one, which provides more context and also gives the texts in question that stand at the very heart of their estrangement.

Edit: I have not read the book you mentioned, so I have no opinion on it.

We don't have any surviving work of Socrates, since he mostly taught by speaking. Still, Plato's early dialogues (often called the socratic dialogues) are said to be closer to Socrates' original thought than his later dialogues.

For your question in itself, yes and no. Some of Plato's dialogues are very easy (mostly his socratic dialogues), and some others will require more thinking but will be manageable even by a beginner (for example the Republic). On the other hand his later dialogues, such as the Laws can be very difficult if you have not a solid background in Plato. So if you want to read them, read them later.

When it comes to Aristotle, it's a bit more difficult. At least, more difficult than Plato. His Nicomachean Ethics is quite easy to grasp, but his metaphysics is more difficult and I know that many people have a hard time reading it when they first dive into Aristotle, so that's yours to see.

Still, philosophical texts are philosophical texts, they are not made to be easy, but to do philosophy ... So don't be scared to dive into harder texts (such as the Metaphysics) once you are familiar with basic philosophical writings. Considering that even Plato's and Aristotle's more difficult books are still very reasonnable (compared to, say, Kant or Hegel), then I indeed think they are good reads for beginners. But you don't have to begin with the greeks if they don't interest you.

You're interpreting this Marx quote in a sort of personal or existentialist way. I would not do this, since Marx is making a much wider comment on political and social philosophy. Here's an analysis of the passage that quote is from by Werner Blumenberg.

You might be interested in two (somewhat similar) reading lists:

• http://www.lewisrgordon.com/teaching/syllabi/black-existentialism-honors.pdf
• https://www.academia.edu/1738698/Second_syllabus_for_Black_Existentialism_

Lewis Gordon recommends himself a lot, but he's certainly not wrong that he belongs on the list.

Here's an article that you can use to supplement any book recommendations you get here:

Timothy Williamson's &quot;How Did We Get from Here to There?&quot; The Transformation of Analytic Philosophy&quot;

You might also like Scott Soames' Analytic Tradition in Philosophy, Vol 1: Founding Giants. The second volume is in progress, as far as I know.

If you don't have a good understanding of propositional logic and first-order logic, modal logic will likely be too difficult for you. It isn't incredibly hard, but it's not terribly easy either.

In case you aren't well-versed in the logics I mentioned but would like to learn about them as well as modal logic, here's a (free!) book you might find useful: Logic for Philosophy, by Ted Sider.

For a book about his life, thought, and influence:
* Luis E. Navia, (2005) <u>Diogenes The Cynic: The War Against The World</u>. Humanity Books.

For a compilation of ancient testimonies & anecdotes:
* Robin Hard (2012) <u>Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes, With Other Popular Moralists</u>. Oxford World Classics.

Personally, I wouldn’t worry about Hegel. You’ll pick up what you need just learning about Marx.

I’d recommend starting off with an overview of Marx’s thought like this one.

A few options that come to mind:

• Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
• The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant
• The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
• Think by Simon Blackburn
• An anthology of classic and contemporary readings, such as this one
• Descartes' Meditations
• What Does It All Mean? by Thomas Nagel
• This collection of Plato's five dialogues
• Plato's Republic

Finding meaning in one's life is a question that is always present for everyone. As paradoxical as it sounds, I think you're fortunate to be in a place in which meaning is something you can consider and search for yourself rather than chosen for you. Perhaps a better way to view it is not a loss of these things but a liberation from them being imposed upon you. And this isn't about being a white male, as indeed many young white men these days attempt to claw back into a counterfeit re-enactment of some of these beliefs, but about being a thoughtful and social individual. This is an opportunity for philosophical reflection. This is an opportunity to consider who you are, what you want from life, and what "meaning" is, or the ways "meaning" exists.

Maybe I can suggest some reading to that have been helpful, at least for me, in considering "meaning" in the sense above:

Plato's Crito

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics

Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy

Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or

Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Frederich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, in that order.

Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus

Vikto Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning

Those are just a few that come to mind at the moment, in chronological order I think. There are certainly others I'm forgetting.

One of the biggest problems with reading Aristotle is definitely the vocabulary. He uses certain words that we all know and understand (virtue, nature, technology, etc.) but a lot of those words actually first appeared in Aristotelian texts, which means that you can't assume you know what that word means when it pops up in the text, since to read Aristotle "properly" you need to pretend like it's the first time you've seen that word in your life.

Aristotle is a drag to read sometimes, mainly because translating ancient Greek to modern English will always make it a bit clunky, no matter how good the translation. Just take it slow. I find with Aristotle it generally helps to just blow through a section once or twice without trying too hard to understand every word so you get the general gist of what he's trying to say, and then going back and going through it slowly and making sure you understand each sentence.

The Nicomachean Ethics, for what it's worth, is a fairly easy read (at least the easiest Aristotelian text by a huge margin), but reading philosophy is never as easy as, say, reading a novel. A lot of the time if I have to read a philosophical text "only" two or three times to fully follow, I say it's an easy read.

The function argument at Nicomachean Ethics i:7 (and again the answer to it at i:13) is appealing to Aristotle's psychology, so it would be beneficial if you were familiar with his On the Soul.

In the context of the argument from i:6-i:7, the point of the function argument isn't merely to identify some function which humans accomplish, but rather to identity what it is to be a human being, i.e. to identify the "essence" or "nature" of humanity. Since, if (per the argument of i:6) the term 'good' can only be understood under the qualification a good such-and-such, then (per the argument of i:7), the goal of ethics must be to determine what a good human is. But, just like to know what a good knife is we need to know what it is that makes something a knife--i.e. to know the essence or nature of knives--so to know what a good human is we need to know what it is that makes something a human.

If the thing we're talking about isn't something "peculiar" ("idion") to, in the sense of "definitive" of, human beings, then it's not our essence or nature, and accordingly having excellence in this thing would not entail being an excellent human. So humans have a function of, for instance, walking, but being a good walker doesn't entail that you're a good human, since to be a walker is not definitive of being a human.

You're probably reading a bunch of Europeans doing Continental philosophy. Dense and esoteric was the name of the game for a while. The Greeks are an easier starting point -- things like Plato's dialogs. Aristotle can be tougher, but at least read the Nicomachean Ethics. The Stoics are relatively straightforward, too, both Greek and Roman.

Sources that have had a noteworthy impact on me, in terms of being useful in everyday life, becoming a better person, and which I also generally enjoy include: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Poetics; a variety of sources from Hegel, but I suppose especially the various introductions; a variety of sources from Dilthey, but I suppose especially the Poetics and various epistemological works; and a variety of sources from Freud, but I suppose especially the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and various works on the Oedipus.

I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned David Lewis' <em>On the Plurality of Worlds</em> (1986). He argues there for the startling thesis that our theory of propositions, counterfactuals, and modality will be greatly and commendably simplified—in ways otherwise unavailable—by postulating the existence of infinitely many concrete worlds, spatiotemporally separate from—but just as real as—our own.

It was part of a broader movement in analytic philosophy towards taking metaphysics seriously, which encompasses the now serious and widespread discussion of questions like the nature of parts and wholes, the existence of abstract objects, and the concept of essence.

There isn't enough information in the diagram to remotely understand what is trying to be conveyed, but it would be a long shot to say that it is a theory of consciousness.

But if this diagram has intrigued you in that you think it is highlighting a way of understanding the physical basis of consciousness by focusing on the causal interaction of a system's parts, which you are inclined to agree with, or at least are curious about, you may like to read about the integrated information theory of consciousness (a prominent theory in the sciences), which at its core says that whether or not a system is consciousness depends on the particular causal interactions of that system.

Simon Blackburn wrote: "In the 1920s, phenomenology was not sharply separated from other philosophy, on the Continent or in the Anglo-American tradition. Husserl was carefully studied by Bertrand Russell. Phenomenological technique demands a serious concentration on the nature of lived experience, which has always been a goal of philosophy."

Russell is more known for his response to Meinong, but interestingly, he had a planned a critique of Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen while in jail in Britain, but then wrote to Husserl in April 1920 that he had not in fact written it. A couple years later, Husserl went on his famous ill-fated English tour, where his ideas were not received well, a response blamed by some on Russell's treatment of phenomenology that had not sufficiently or accurately introduced him to the British audience.

If you are at an academic library or have journal access, this is probably worth reading to provide some context for Husserl's British reception and Russell's involvement.

Have you read the sections (Books III-V) in which Aristotle describes the eleven virtues? He is quite clear that he thinks each virtue has a very specific structure, and he has an argument (mostly in Books I-III, though there is relevant material in VI and VII) that that structure is uniquely good. So it's at best highly uncharitable to say that Aristotle "assumes" what the virtues are. He goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the states of character he identifies as virtues actually are.

To some of your specific points: Aristotle doesn't shirk from criticizing what seems "normal" in the society around him, nor does he think that everything that has an "essential part" in ethics -- such as shame -- is a virtue. (He has a section on shame in Nicomachean Ethics, and grants it a role in ethical life, but denies that it is a virtue.)

That said, many virtue ethicists today would be happy to deny Aristotle's (apparent) claim that there is an exactly specifiable, set list of the virtues. The more interesting claim, to them, is that the goodness, desirability, and rightness of human action and character are most fruitfully and accurately discussed in terms of the excellence of character and the excellent exercise of human capabilities -- a deeply Aristotelian claim that is nevertheless compatible with denying that there is a culture-invariant set of virtues.

I agree with /u/ShitOfTheseus that this is better for /r/AskHistorians or /r/AskSocialScience.

I'm doubtful that self-help is a recent phenomenon, though. Some of the oldest literature from Sumer and Egypt is very self-helpish, the wisdom literature. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is self-helpish. As is stoic literature. Augustine too. And the existentialist.

Self-help has a long history, and what I consider to be the more recent phenomenon is philosophy's efforts to distance itself from self-help. This undoubtedly is because of how garbage most self-help is. And I'm not sure when that type of stuff gained popularity or if has had it for a long time.

• Plato's Symposium and Theaetetus
• Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Poetics
• Descartes' Meditations
• Leibniz's New Essays on Human Understanding
• Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge
• Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
• Jacobi's David Hume on Faith or Idealism and Realism
• Hegel's Encyclopaedia and Lectures on the History of Philosophy
• Dilthey's Philosophy of Existence
• Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception
• Gadamer's Plato's Dialectical Ethics
• Taylor's Sources of the Self
• Sellars' Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man
• Putnam's Realism With a Human Face
• Friedman's Dynamics of Reason.

For the record, the theory that Plato's dialogues contain some of Socrates' thought was popular for a period in the second half of the 20th century, but virtually nobody believes it today. Here is a good article that explains why.

Came here to post that.

Moreover, if you're interested in some of the practical ethics stemming from Singer, Parfait, et al, William MacAskill's Doing Good Better is an excellent read. Further, the effective altruism movement is a worthwhile venture if the above interest you.

Personally, I found The Myth of Sisyphus to be a little invalidating. Don't get me wrong, I love Camus. I just find that absurdism can be a quite dark and disillusioning, and that its creed is a little difficult for those who are in the throes of depression, etc. to fully appreciate and embrace. When I was hospitalized after a suicide attempt several years back, a friend of mine swapped my Camus collection with Aurelius' Meditations and Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

Visiting a therapist/counselor is probably going to be of more help than any philosophy, if its within your means. But to answer your question, the works Stoics (Like Seneca's Letters and Marcus Aurelous' Meditations), Camus and Nietzsche are popular choices for people looking to come to terms with life's struggles. Man's Search for Meaning is a commonly recommended book, too, although not really the sort of thing you'd encounter in academic philosophy.

Begin with Plato's Alcibiades. After that, look up summaries of the dialogues, and choose whichever is most interesting to you. The Republic would be a good choice, but perhaps read the Clitophon before you start the Republic. The Alicibades really, really has to come first. Probably everything but the Sophist is manageable.

There are nice sequences in the dialogues: for example, reading the Lysis before reading the Symposium is probably the most worthwhile way to approach the latter. Reading the Symposium before you read the Phaedrus is pretty much mandatory. In addition, the Symposium sets up the background for the Euthydemus. But you can sidestep these troubles if you read the Clitophon and then the Republic.

Next, you can read Aristotle, whom you'll find more difficult than Plato. It makes sense to read the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics first. Then, check out De Anima. After that, you're pretty much good to go. Reading the Physics and Metaphysics would be difficult but rewarding; I'd also recommend the Posterior Analytics but maybe that's just me.

Also, you should consider purchasing the complete works of both Plato and Aristotle. It is really helpful. In the complete works of Plato, there is a fantastic page-long introduction to each dialogue written by the editor. It will help you determine whether the dialogue will be interesting to you.

Try Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel, for a little extentialism and how to endure suffering.

Also, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

It really depends what approach you want to take and how much effort you want to put into it. E.g., some people want to read classics from the history of philosophy, for others they'd probably accomplish their goals quicker reading some intro textbooks.

If you want some of the classic first/early reads from the history of philosophy:

• Plato, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo
• Plato, Republic (Books I-II)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Book I)
• Aristotle, Physics (Books I-II)
• Descartes, Discourse on the Method
• Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Rules 1-5)
• Descartes, The World, or Treatise on Light (Chapter I)
• Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
• Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (Book I, Chapter I)
• Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Introduction and Sections 1-24)
• Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Chapters 1-5)
• Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Book III, Part 1)

There is a long and intricate tradition in moral and political philosophy - but also in Christian theology and Eastern mysticism - that considers the question of the perfectibility human nature. This theme is closely related to idealism concerning the divine and its possible manifestations in man. The ideas stem from Homeric Greece, but can be more easily annexed to Plato's concept of the Form of the Good in his Republic. For Plato, and for many others besides, the development of virtue was the perfection of the soul. It was in the dialectical examination of the form or ideal of virtue itself - considered as a species of rational moral knowledge - that humans had the possibility to elevate themselves above their baser natures.

A similar theme can also be observed in Plato's Symposium in which Diotima makes reference to man's desire for immortality. For example, she says that there are at least three ways that people seek to be immortal: 1) the genesis of progeny; 2) the performance of heroic deeds; and 3) the attainment of virtue and knowledge in the soul. And so it is in this beautiful striving to move beyond death that Diotima believes the human being achieves their own eternal or perfect good.

Aristotle provides yet another view on human perfectibility. This can be seen in his Nicomachean Ethics wherein he rejects Plato's higher, transcendental Good for the practical good that is most realistically achievable to normal people (i.e., the elite nobility). Essentially, the entire Ethics is a series of lectures notes on how to make progress along the path of eudaimonia by becoming a good human being. Aristotle is similar to Plato in considering the virtues as ideals, but differs insofar as the virtues are practically achievable for human nature; that is, through moral upbringing and extensive character training.

As a starting point you might want to look into John Passmore's The Perfectibility of Man

To piggyback on this post, I'd recommend another study of Native influence on American philosophy (pragmatism, in particular): Scott Pratt's Native Pragmatism.

You're using undefined terms and making baseless assertions without any sort of logical structure. This is not argument; it is rhetoric.

EDIT: Here, you may find this helpful.

I have a fairly well received book of thought experiments that I'd be happy to share. I write as a hobby, not a money maker, so I'm happy to give it to you for free (otherwise the ebook is 99 cents on Amazon). You can read the entire intro and first chapter on Amazon.

The link is here, check it out and message me if you have interest and I will forward over a PDF. https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Games-Thought-Experiments-Imagination/dp/0692604790/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=

You might be interested in checking out Liberation Theology.

Starting with a definition of theology as "critical reflection on praxis in the light of the word of God", the Peruvian Dominican priest Gustavo Gutierrez sought to clarify the role and purpose of Church in a Marxian world of exploitation and class struggle. Gutierrez framed oppressive social structures as systemic, or institutional sins and identified emancipatory activity with fulfilling God's purposes, while condemning inaction and acquiescence as sinful instead.

This is the founding text on Amazon, you can also find a bunch of newer material here, probably of varying quality.

A good way to think about it is in terms of probabilistic tradeoffs. If someone would rather have X guaranteed than a 50% chance of getting Y then you can infer that X offers more than double the utility of Y.

You can also think about things as ordinary tradeoffs (one X or two Y) but then you have problems from the law of diminishing marginal utility, meaning that the utility of 2Y is less than 2*(utility of Y). You can also look at how much money people are willing to pay, but this makes interpersonal comparisons impossible unless they have the same amounts of money.

In reality the picture is complicated by human biases and irrationality. I'd recommend Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely to fill in a better understanding of the complexities involved.

Note that there's no need for the scale to be 1-10. Really it should have negative numbers for poor lives, and certain scenarios may warrant higher and higher scores.

But in practice it's not commonly useful or easy to directly calculate happiness like this. Check out Bentham's writings on applied policy and jurisprudence for how he weighs costs and benefits in a more intuitive fashion - I'd suggest Rationale of Punishment and Rationale of Reward but there may be others.

Here's an example which is a useful calculation, requiring a subjective judgement of how much worse some experiences are than others: http://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/

>Also, is this like the 'theory of everything' goal in physics? Or is that all philosophers have created said 'theories' for themselves but merely disagree for other reasons?

As of the 20th century, this kind of philosophizing is just dead. "System building" has gone out of style, perhaps for a mixture of reasons (sociological, philosophical, etc.). Especially with the rise of analytic philosophy, philosophers now typically focus on specific problems rather than trying to invent an entire theory that explains everything. As Bertrand Russell wrote,

>It [analytical philosophy] has the advantage, as compared with the philosophies of the system-builders, of being able to tackle its problems one at a time, instead of having to invent at one stroke a block-theory of the whole universe. Its methods, in this respect, resemble those of science. I have no doubt that, in so far as philosophical knowledge is possible, it is by such methods, many ancient problems are completely soluble.

—Bertrand Russell in The Philosophy of Logical Analysis, Chapter XXXI of "A History of Western Philosophy" (1945)

>Kant for instance seems to have separate systems for metaphysics, ethics and aestetics (based on my limited understanding perhaps)

Really? I always found Kant to have a unified system and is considered one of the big system builders. He is always after universality by way of formality, and was always interested in finding the "conditions of possibility" for various things. For example, his categorical imperative (ethics) is a "purely formal principle", his aesthetics involves a "purely formal purposiveness", and his epistemology involves "forms of intuition of space and time", etc.

Camus' The Myth Of Sisyphus helped me contextualise a lot of my feelings as a teenager. Not just philosophical stuff but it definitely dampened some of my angsty pessimism. I liked the philosophy too, sufficiently enough to work through Russell's A History of Western Philosophy, which I really liked, and from there decided to study Philosophy at undergrad. Funnily enough I ended up at a deeply analytic department (although I didn't know what the analytic/continental divide was at the time) and now my PhD work is firmly within an analytic framework. As a result I have never studied Camus, and now I don't really want to. I'm not even sure if people study him at continental departments.

During undergrad, the bits of philosophy that convinced me I needed to pursue graduate study were Tim Williamson's Knowledge and its Limits, which remains maybe my favourite piece of philosophy. It is sensationally clever, well written, utterly beautiful philosophy. I also really liked Martha Nussbaum's Human Functioning and Social Justice, Rae Langton's Speech acts and unspeakable acts, and Judith Jarvis Thomson's A Defense of Abortion (which I have shouted out on this subreddit before).

Is this a question for class or something? If it is, you might have better luck giving us your answer, and we can tell you how you've done. One good place to look for this is Book I of Nicomachean Ethics.

I'm going to miss out on a lot of works and it'll, of course, be slanted in terms of my own interests, but if I were forced to name a few off the top of my head, I would say:

• Plato: The Republic, Theaetetus, Apology, Euthyphro and others.
• Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, De Interpretatione and others.
• Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.
• David Hume: Treatise and Enquiry.

I think Plato, Aristotle, Kant and David Hume are the greatest philosophers to ever live.

• Rene Descartes: Meditations
• John Stuart Mill: On Liberty
• John Locke: Two Treatises on Government
• Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan

20th-century / contemporary:

• A.J. Ayer: Language, Truth and Logic
• Gilbert Ryle: The Concept of Mind
• Bertrand Russell: "On Denoting", Principia Mathematica (not actually readable, but it is one of the most important works)
• Wittgenstein: Tractatus, Philosophical Investigations
• Saul Kripke: Naming and Necessity
• John Rawls: A Theory of Justice
• Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State, and Utopia
• Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery
• David Chalmers: The Conscious Mind
• Derek Parfit: Reasons and Persons

I am not acquainted with Continental Philosophy enough to say anything. But I would guess Heidegger's Being and Time is one of the most important works there. I'm also not familiar enough with giants like Quine and Putnam to think of their books off hand.

> Doesn't that just lead to the same is-ought problem as every other attempt to ground morals in facts?

The is-ought distinction isn't a game-stopper for ethics, it's just making the point what one ought to be clear about the basis of one's normative claims. Classically, the virtue ethicist has an account of where norms come from; indeed, has one of the classic and most influential accounts of where norms come from, given paradigmatic form in what is a candidate for the most important work of ethics in the western tradition, i.e. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. We're not getting anywhere meaningful against this account by just referring to the is-ought problem, what we have to do is find some place in this account where we can reasonably purport there's been an invalid inference.

It could well be that there is such a place, and if you're committed to skepticism about ethics, or about a certain kind of ethics which includes virtue ethics, you might be inclined to expect there is. But what invalid inference has been made, if one has been made, isn't evident merely from the observation that human nature serves as a ground of moral claims in the relevant theory.

First of all, excellent decision. Studying virtue ethics is one of the most rewarding things you can do with your time in philosophy.

Your first stop should probably be ancient ethics. The ancient Greek ethicists all had basically the same goal, namely to help people become happy, but they had different ideas about what the best way was for people to arrive at happiness. This is really fun stuff to read, because it depends on empirical claims about psychology, but they are claims based on life experience that you can think about and debate without any specialized training. The mix of observation and abstract thought that this involves is very enjoyable and rewarding.

Aristotle is a central figure in ancient Greek ethics due to the influence of the Nicomachean Ethics. The Stoics produced a lot of valuable work as well, especially Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epicetetus. Psychotherapists have allegedly found, in their clinical experience, that reading the Stoics tends to be beneficial for people suffering from depression.

Two modern books on this topic I can recommend are Viktor Frankl's 'Man's Search for Meaning' (it totally applies to women too) and Owen Flanagan's 'The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a material world'.

Both take on the overall question you're asking here. Neither provide answers like "you should do X and Y to be happy". Rather, they're frameworks to help you think about the question for yourself. I think Frankl will particularly be helpful to you, because his focus is on figuring out what you should do with your life based on the specifics of who you are and what your abilities are.

> Nah, because Aristotle tore into the idea of Forms in Book 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics. Not that he immediately became more popular, but a few centuries later there was a pro-Aristotelian consensus that continued for a millennium.

What do you have in mind here? It seems to me that the Hellenistic schools were dominant from the 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE, and then Neoplatonism was dominant at least for the next millennium or so.

There were some important neo-Aristotelians in the 1st-2nd centuries CE, but Aristotelianism never had the dominance the Stoic and then Platonic school had. Likewise, while Aristotelian philosophy was an important element in Neoplatonic thought, it was here typically interpreted in the context of rather than as refuting Platonism. Even the Aristotelianism of the scholastics in the 13th century remained within the context of the Neoplatonic interpretation.

Plato's idea of forms would be reinterpreted by the Middle Platonists in the 1st century BCE as ideas in the mind of God, and the reception of this current of thought would remain prominent in philosophy through the medieval period. For that matter, it doesn't even vanish with the anti-Aristotelianism of the early modern period, but rather is reinterpreted as the debate about innate ideas--the connection being rather transparent in cases like that of Malebranche.

Incidentally, I agree that the bit in Nicomachean Ethics I about the Platonist's theory of the Good is relevant, but the big Aristotelian criticism of the forms is in the Metaphysics (especially XIII-XIV) and probably also in the abstractionism of the Posterior Analytics and De Anima and the hylomorphism of these works and the Physics.

Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, and books one and two of Republic.

Those first four cover the trial of Socrates and are something like the traditional way to start reading Plato. The first two books of Republic is another good one to read early, as are the Protagoras and Meno, so those were good recommendations.

After that, if you want more Plato, the Phaedrus, Philebus, and Theaetetus are some good ones to turn to once you've got some Plato under your belt. The rest of the Republic and the Symposium would be good ones to read after those. Or if you'd rather move on to Aristotle, any or all of the Organon would be good, although some people find this material too dry and prefer something else. Nicomachean Ethics (especially book one, or if you want more especially books one through six, or all of it if you like) and Physics (especially books one and two, or all of it if you like) are good places to start. If you want more Aristotle and are interested in these subjects, the Poetics and Rhetoric are good early reads. Or if you want to move on to modern philosophy, the best place to start would be with Descartes' Discourse on the Method. And if you read through that and want some more modern stuff, come ask and I'll make some suggestions for the next step.

Try to get familiar with these people. You can learn by reading primary sources or secondary sources; however, I would strongly recommend secondary sources to start (since they will serve as a guide in the absence of a teacher).

In no particular order:

1. John Stuart Mill (On Liberty; utilitarianism, free speech, harm principle)

2. David Hume (Enquiry ... Human Understanding; edit: Treatise; Enquiry ... Principles of Morals; causation as a constant conjunction, the is-ought problem, Hume's Fork, Hume's Guillotine, morality as being grounded in sentiments rather than reason, etc.)

3. Immanuel Kant (Groundwork; on his moral philosophy: namely, Kantian deontology and the Categorical Imperative, synthetic a priori)

4. Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics; function argument, arete, the virtues; modern treatments of virtue ethics)

5. John Rawls (A Theory of Justice; veil of ignorance, difference principle, reflective equilibrium)

6. Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia; patterned vs. unpatterned theories of distributive justice, entitlement theory of justice, rights as moral side-constraints). A phenomenal secondary source for ASU I found yesterday is Robert Nozick by Ralf Bader.

7. John Locke (Second Treatise; classical liberal theory of rights, labor mixing theory of appropriation, social contract)

8. Plato (The Republic; Euthyphro; tripartite theory of the soul, criticisms of democracy)

9. Karl Marx (I would suggest reading G.A. Cohen for Marxism)

10. Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan; social contract, the state of nature)

...

I get to supply the SEP link this time!

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humor/

The SEP article on the philosophy of humor is super interesting. Particularly the early emphasis on the destructive aspect of humor.

> Plato, the most influential critic of laughter, treated it as an emotion that overrides rational self-control.

and

> Aristotle considered wit a valuable part of conversation (Nicomachean Ethics 4, 8), he agreed with Plato that laughter expresses scorn. Wit, he says in the Rhetoric (2, 12), is educated insolence. In the Nicomachean Ethics (4, 8) he warns that “Most people enjoy amusement and jesting more than they should … a jest is a kind of mockery, and lawgivers forbid some kinds of mockery—perhaps they ought to have forbidden some kinds of jesting.”

and

> “If people dislike being laughed at,” Scruton says, “it is surely because laughter devalues its object in the subject's eyes” (in Morreall 1987, 168).

give a taste.

Also as a side note of interest, a friend of mine is a stand up comic who now studies philosophy at Cambridge. She has a little routine based on this article where she quotes the jokes of the various famous philosophers cited in the article.

> The heir of a rich relative wished to arrange for an imposing funeral, but he lamented that he could not properly succeed; ‘for’ (said he) ‘the more money I give my mourners to look sad, the more cheerful they look!’

Oh Kant you're a gas!

There’s no decisive way to answer some of these questions: there isn’t some secret stash of evidence, sadly, that would settle some of these questions once and for all. There’s an excellent book called Who Speaks for Plato that collects more than a dozen short essays by academics trying to answer this question. My favourite is Lloyd Gerson’s, but that might just be me.

I can also recommend Lloyd Gerson's &quot;The Myth of Plato's Socratic Period&quot;.

I will also add that characterizing Plato's dialogues as "the main source for Socrates' views" is kind of tendentious: the dialogues might not be sources for Socrates' views at all, let alone the main one --- but we also have Xenophon's writings, and fragments of other people (e.g., Phaedo of Elis). But there is no reason in particular to think that any of these writings are "sources for Socrates' views." There was a genre in the ancient world called the 'Socratic dialogue', and Plato didn't invent it. He participated in it. And there are plenty of Platonic writings that don't feature Socrates as the main speaker (e.g., Timaeus), some in which he loses the argument (e.g., Clitophon, Parmenides), and some in which he doesn't appear at all (e.g., Laws). But check out Gerson's article on the Socratic period stuff to get an argument.

I think a page like Gutenberg contains many original texts.

It's obviously not focused only on philosophy, but searching for a specific philosopher should net you results.

If you're specifically interested in logic rather than philosophy in general as your post seems to imply, this is a teach-yourself-logic guide for Philosophers and Mathematicians. It also has a great deal of sources it suggests for further reading on logic, including some more simple introductory texts.

On the more philosophical side, someone has already mentioned that The Republic is the must-read to end all must-read lists. Aside from that if you have any interests, even passing, we can probably give you an expanded list of related philosophical texts.

For example, choose one or two off this list and we can help: mind, knowledge, ethics, politics, the precise nature of the world (metaphysics), science in relation to philosophy, beauty/love, language, human nature, lived experience, god, how to live a good life, etc.

> For what reasons?

So very, very many. One thing is certainly that I've never quite encountered someone who could explain a significant contribution to knowledge made by Derrida (the closest is someone who explained something about the indeterminacy of language, which didn't seem to imply anything that Gödel and Quine and others hadn't demonstrated years before), something to demonstrate this status that he has.

Aside from that, though, I think the real problem is a type of intellectual dishonesty, the same type of problem Foucault had with him (incidentally, Foucault is reasonably well respected by most of the analytic philosophers I know, even if he isn't engaged with directly very often): Derrida seems to be among the worst perpetrators of obscurantist terrorism. In the eyes of good philosophers, this kind of practice is thoroughly irresponsible and deplorable.

Dennett is in no way an eliminativist about qualia. He explicitly says that whatever subjects report experiencing is something that a theory of consciousness should account for: even if the reports are illusory, the theory should explain why they're illusory. Neuroscientists have known for a long time that there's a blindspot in our retinas (of roughly 7° in diameter) where there are no photoreceptors since that's where optic nerves gather to exit the eyeball. This means that there's no peripheral information reaching the brain from this part of the visual field. And yet our visual field feels subjectively homogenous. Should we trust subjects when they report this? Sure. Does this mean they're right? No. But we need not worry since we can explain the mismatch. (The story would go like this: each conscious visual experience is an integration of several saccades, etc. etc.)

Dennett is not a reductionist either. In Consciousness Explained he defends a functionalist theory of consciousness, i.e. the multiple drafts model, in which contents only become conscious when they're available to be stored in memory or participate in behavioral modulation (specially verbal reports). It typically takes considerable time to determine whether the content had these effects. When we consider very brief intervals of time, e.g., t < 500 milliseconds, it may not be metaphysically determinate whether any of the mental states you had during t was or wasn't conscious. Dennett states that during this temporal window both hypothesis can be empirically equivalent. This is one of the most original features of his theory.

In addition to Sophie's World, a great introduction book for younger readers is The Complete Philosophy Files by British philosopher Stephen Law.

It looks at several big questions in philosophy and presents all major viewpoints in an approachable manner.

Other great introductory authors are Julian Baggini and Nigel Warburton (who you already mentioned) , who have each written several introduction books.

Aristippus was from Cyrene, hence the name of his school, the Cyrenaics. You can check him out.

As for introductions, I think most books on world philosophy includes African philosophy, such as The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy.

It's a mainstay in any Latin teacher's class haha. Also a fun tip, when linking on amazon, you only need to paste the "/dp/<10 letter code>" like so: https://www.amazon.com/dp/158234826X

Well, the Christian tradition borrows a lot from Aristotle with regard to virtue. You should read Nicomachean Ethics for a detailed explanation, but Aristotle argues that virtue will make us fulfilled, as it will align our desires with that which is good for us. Fulfillment is an end unto itself, therefore we should hold it as our ultimate goal.

Sun Tzu. He doesn't place a huge emphasis on the spiritual which I guess is why I'm drawn to him. His "The Art of War" was meant for battle strategy but can be really applied to many real-life situations since we don't have to worry about defending our borders from hordes at all times.