If one were to set aside a year to read primary philosophical works, hoping to get a good taste, and maybe even an understanding, of Western philosophy, what should one read?
Any secondary sources, e.g. books about Sartre’s philosophy, etc., that should be on the reading list?
Think and Being Good: A short intorduction to Ethics bot by Simon Blackburn
Good contemporary stuff.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds - Charles MacKay
You like JP Sartre? Do you want more contemporary thought or a good overview.
teacher hat on
basically narrows down to how lost you want to get whilst delving into your own self. And remember that understanding has degrees and levels. You are the captain…
teacher hat off
I don’t know much about him or his stuff–his just happened to be the name that I was fairly sure I could spell.
Read Plato’s Symposium, a marvelous discussion of love and a wonderful introduction to western/Greek philosophy.
Philosophy Who Needs It
and
The Return of the Primative: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
Previously published as:
The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
Both by Ayn Rand, the former pokes gaping holes in most modern philosophers and philosophies. The latter examines the ongoing Luddite mentality that is becoming so common these days.
You said you’d like to read primary works. That unfortunately severely limits your options, since most primary works since 1800 are far too technical to read. But if you’re willing to study, you should read primary works side by side with secondary works or commentary. Lots of philosophy students do it the same way.
That said, a lot depends on your personal tastes: I’ve heard people with next to no philosophical knowledge reading Merleau-Ponty, Levinas or Heidegger and liking it. I would suggest to give a lot of works a try (borrow them first in the library, or leaf through a few pages in the bookstore) since every philosopher has his personal style. Don’t be put off because you don’t like one work or philosopher; the next may be entirely different.
If you would say something more about specific interests, it would help (logic, metaphysics, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics).
As introduction I’d suggest to stick with relatively short works. Here are some accessible ones. I’m just going to give you classics; with lesser-known works or philosophers you may easily waste time and lose your enthousiasm or be led astray in other ways.
Primary works:
If you are willing to put in more study or have specific philosophers you’re interested in, let me know and I can recommend you some tougher/longer reading.
Secondary works:
Introductions to Sartre
This should do for now. 
Happy reading.
Rereading my post, maybe this is not exactly what you want? Do you want accessible works of all /most of the great philosophers to get the taste of it? Or would you want to know what are considered to be the great works that you are expected to have read or at least read about? Some I can add that are a mix of both:
Good question. I guess I feel like there are philosophical works that are important to Western culture and Western philosophy that everybody should have read to be considered educated. E.g., I had a prof. who once said that one can never be considered educated until one has read Dovstyski–good god, I have no idea how to spell it–that Russian writer. I’m looking to do the same with philosophy rather than literature. (Though I’m sure they intersect!)
Another thing that I’m interested in is being able to read some modern philosophers. It’s my understanding that philosophers often build on each other so that if I pick up book X by author Y and read word Z, the author will be using word Z in some technical sense whereas I’ll be using the common sense and I’ll completely miss the point.
This second issue is, I think, a secondary goal of '04: The Year of Philosophy. (Considering how The Summer of George worked out, I’m not sure what to expect.)
In terms of accessability, I guess I’d tend to more accessable rather than less. I’ve read a little bit: Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy is my favorite book; I enjoyed The Wretched of the Earth; I’ve read both Blackburn books mentioned above; I got a kick out of The Simpsons and Philosophy; I’m currently reading The Consolation of Philosophy; I read The Revolution of Everyday Life because it was recommended in an album’s liner notes. I did fail to make it through Baudrilliard’s (sp?) Seduction, however.
I’m not sure if I’ve cleared things up, or mucked them up. I’ll think some more…
Well, another long post then.
General remarks
Your aims actually are not altogether compatible, assuming limited time.
To have read up on what an educated person should have read: depends whether it is a lay person or a philosopher. In the former case: most people have read very little actual philosophy first-hand. In the latter case: this amounts basically to doing a B.A. in philosophy, which is not a bad thing, but would take a lot of time.
Being able to read modern philosophers, in case they are not specifically aiming at a general audience, may also get close to requiring a full study, unless you are going to specialize in a specific branch. For ‘fashionable’ continental/french philosophy like Baudrillard (which I would not recommend) or Lyotard, Magill gives some of the basic information necessary to approach them. But these philosophers assume a general working knowledge of Kant and Hegel as well. And both write in a difficult style. Do you have specific names you wanted to read?
I would recommend to read with some kind of preference as guideline. Otherwise you may well find yourself stuck in some text that is boring you to death. The works you mentioned are mainly quite general philosophy of a kind that is rare in modern philosophy; that you did like them does show that you can digest the works I mentioned previously. The Machiavelli you mentioned indicates a taste for social/political philosophy.
If you don’t mind, I further have a few general remarks that may prove useful. Feel free to skip them.
Philosophy in general is an on-going debate, which means that if you want to follow it, you do need, as you remarked, understand some of the history. For understanding modern philosophers you must be familiar with some of the jargon (epistemology, categorical imperative), have read certain key passages and examples, and be familiar with certain kinds of argument (such as social contract theory). It’s a bit like getting used to SDMB, understanding the in-jokes and terms like ‘whoosh’. Part of it you just learn by reading and understanding the gist of it from the context.
For studying you may profit from going on in a way similar like a normal university study, only in a more condensed way. That means, reading secondary works to know the basic history and respective influences, interspersed with the most important bits of primary works to get first-hand experience. Many of the great works are almost never read in their entirety; only the good parts are well-read. The books that are commonly read entirely I’ve mostly already listed. So you should resign yourself that you will not read the full Critique of Pure Reason, but would try to read the preface, introduction, and par. 15-27 in the A and B version, accompanied by commentary such as the Solomon book I listed.
Furthermore it is easier not to read completely at random, but try to have some historical and/or thematic coherence. Reading Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Rousseau will show you a similar looking argument treated in different ways.
In a way, philosophy is not what you read, but more of a certain attitude in debates. You learn to distinguish different meanings of the same word (which may clear up lots of confusion, but also give rise to debat, think of the ‘What is a right’ debate in GD right now), and should be more willing to distance yourself from any preconceived notions if only for the duration of an argument. Plato discusses this in the Phaedo. Finally, philosophy may help you find others’ and your own preconceptions. You need this flexibility to properly read those primary works.
When reading the work you can choose to follow the drift of the argument, but if you really want to understand what is going on and learn something from it, you will need to try sometimes to map the argument: what does the writer state, and how does he think he proves it?
Other than that, just try to have some fun. Don’t force yourself to read something if you really don’t like it, it will only spoil your appetite. Rather switch to another book, and try again later.
Additional recommended reading
Given what you mentioned in your last post, I would recommend to read primary works together with a secondary work by the side (or to switch books when you get bored with one). The primary works I’ve already mentioned would get you a long way. I would add the following.
After having read through this list of primary works (but skip whichever you don’t want to read), you’d have experienced most of the great philosophers first hand. For Aristotle I recommend a secondary work with lots of original quotes: J. Ackrill, Aristotle the philosopher. After that you could try his primary works.
Some other great works that are among the classics, but which I would consider to be too hard are:
If you feel up to it, do go ahead and leaf through them, just to see what they are like. Parts of those are readable on its own, but you have to know which parts. Generally they are best approached with a basic general knowledge, a good commentary, and lots of patience.
If you’ve read all of the above you may still lack some knowledge for reading modern philosophy. Secondary works for specific subjects may fill a gap. The following need some time to properly absorb, so you may not want that. OTOH they do introduce all the common jargon of the specific subject.
W. Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy does an excellent job of lucidly reconstructing the argument of most modern philosophy. Unfortunately the second print is significantly and discouragingly thicker than the first print. He discusses Rawls, Dworkin, Nozick and others.
Ethics: J.L. Mackie, Ethics gives a short introduction. You can also try James Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy.
Philosophy of language is probably too specialized given your stated objectives. Blackburn has written a book on the subject, though.
Philosophy of science: Ian Hacking, Representing and intervening is a good introduction.
Metaphysics. A highly specialized subject which may be too abstract to your liking (do you like to think about solipsism? the nature of existence? whether things are primarily form or matter?) but you should understand at least what it involves, and know the jargon. Furthermore it deals with some of the classic philosophical questions (do things exist if they are not perceived? etc.) The history by D.W. Hamlyn I mentioned covers some of it. He’s written a book Metaphysics, but that is tough reading.
I don’t have a good book on the history of political philosophy handy. Reading Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill should give you a lot of the background, though. Classical (i.e. Greek) political philosophy is too specialized for your purposes; Alisdair Macintyre does explain bits of it, though.
If you’ve finished the list of primary works, and read some of the secondary works, you should know roughly what most of these philosophers are up to, and be able to read contemporary philosophy.
Again, happy reading!
Read these two first.
Then read eveyone else’s suggestions.
Then re-read these two.
Word, panache45.
First of all, I think it is only fair to tell you that by simply reading philosophical works you will probably miss out on a lot. You may not be interested in a formal study of philosophy, but I think discussing your response to and interpretations of the things you read is an important part of learning about philosophy so you may want to at least find a likeminded buddy to join you in your project.
Okay, now let me paw through my old textbooks here and see what works I can recommend to you as both culturally significant and relatively accessable. This should by no means be considered a sufficient starter list, just a few things I think are worth throwing onto the pile along with others already suggested.
Plato - The Republic and Phaedrus. Heck, read everything by Plato if you can.
Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil.
Sartre - you might as well start off with No Exit and his other plays.
Since I’ve never read Ayn Rand, I can not personally comment on the intrinsic value of her books. I should still give the warning (given the OP’s stated objectives) that it is not considered part of the Western philosophical canon in the usual sense of the word. From what I’ve heard second-hand, her approach to philosophy is… rather original? so it would not directly help you to get an understanding of what Western philosophy is about. Her terminology seems to be at odds with what is current in the normal philosophical debate.
To be fair, this used to be the opinion on Nietzsche too, around 1900. So maybe it’s just prejudice of all those darned academic philosophers.
I hope I haven’t slighted any Rand devotees; I’m just reporting the current opinion within academia.
Philosophy Who Needs It attempts to establish a rational basis (Objectivism) for the examination of other classical and neo-classical philosophies. While one might not be inclined to include it among the original philosophical works of the Western World, it can be extremely helpful in identifying some of the incredible absurdities that crop up in a lot of philosophy, be it ancient or modern.
Wittgenstein I recommend highly, specificaly Wittgenstein II. (He scrapped his entire philosophical outlook and thus his works are referred to sometimes as being either Wittgenstein I and Wittgenstein II).
Regarding “Objectivism”–from my experience with it, I would be hard-pressed to assign any sort of “rational basis” at all to it. It seems to lie upon repetition of dogmatic assertions and little else–at least as it is practiced by Objectivists. It makes a big deal over “rational thought” but requires that one swallow a lot of premises as to what can be permitted to be considered “rational”.
It is a philosophy, but it is nowhere near any sort of “key to history”.
Again, primary sources, I would start at the beginning. Greek philosophy.
Start with Plato’s Apology. It’s a really easy read and is a good intro to what’s going on with the Greeks. From there, I would go on to read Plato’s Republic and then go on to Aristotle’s Ethics (aka Nicomachean Ethics). If you really want a challenge, move on to Aristotle’s Metaphysics. That’s optional, though, and good luck slogging through it. I think I tried slitting my wrists a few times during the course of that one.
I would then move on and give Augustine’s Confessions a read through. It’s interesting and not too hard. Then give Aquinas’ Summa Theologica a shot. That should give you a nice overview of what is going on up through the Middle Ages in Western philosophical thought.
Next, read Descartes’ Discourse on Method. Sort of starts the whole modern philosophy deal. Now, we start to branch out into modern political thought, I would go with Hobbes’ Leviathan, Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, and Rousseau’s Social Contract. Incidentally, I enjoy Rousseau the most of any of them as he has a great writing style. I don’t agree with him, though. Mills’ On Liberty is another good read.
You may want to check out Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. You should be able to get through that in a day or two.
OK, those are the most important ones so far. If I were you, I would stop here out of fear. Some people will disagree and try to get you to read Kant or Nietzche. Horribly influential thinkers and you probably should read them. If you do venture into these two, prepare for torment.
I think that’s a nice, well-rounded list. I don’t know many eastern thinkers, so you may want to check them out, too. But they haven’t had quite the impact on Western thought as these guys.
Oh wait! I can’t believe I left off Hegel and Marx. Two very, very influential folks. For Marx, I would just read the Communist Manifesto. Get something with some commentary.
For Hegel, I would get a secondary source that compiles a lot of his writings like Philosophy of History, Phenomonology of Spirit, etc. It’s just easier that way since there’s a lot to Hegel. I didn’t particularly find him difficult to read, though. Just a lot to read.
I have. Don’t bother.
While it is not a “philosophy” work strictly speaking, I also recommend Milgram’s On Authority. It’s the recounting of his now-famous experiment on human response to authority figures. Given that this is a very important matter to consider in the philosophical fields of ethics and politics, it’s worth reading. I realize that many modern academic philosophers would cringe at the idea of sullying philosophy with actual observation, but I found it useful.