Oh, one more work that is a must for anybody who reads philosophy:
Gulliver’s Travels, unabridged, of course. Swift was a friend of at least some of the great epistimologists, metaphysicians, and political philosophers of his day, and he presents their ideas in very informative inversion. In essence, it’s an antidote to prevent excess poisoning of the psyche by philosophy.
One problem with Ayn Rand, among others, is that she admittedly didn’t even read most of the philosophers she fulminated against. She detested Kant yet never seemed to muster up the ability to actually read him. Her epistemology is incomplete, and an unfortunately high proportion of her works are riddled with, well, problematic logic.
She appeals to moody, elitist teenagers. Her works can be a fun read as a counterpoint to more canonical works of the west, but I wouldn’t spend too much time with it.
Love the Consolation of Philosophy, by the way. It is one of my favorite books ever written.
I’d like to apologize for the tone of my previous post. During grad school I got a book of her essays from the library, hoping to get the gist of her thought without wasting time with all the plot of her novels. I was extremely dissapointed.
As an admitted neophyte, I thoroughly enjoyed A History Of Western Philosophy by Bertram Russell. Reading it’s chronological discussion of the contributions of leading thinkers, I felt like I’d become witness to the development of religion.
As always, my own favourite is left off all the lists. He’s a good antidote to Nietszche, Ayn Rand, Plato, and many of the others who are name-dropped on suggestion lists like this.
I’m of course talking about John Ralston Saul, the humanist philosopher who believes we made a slightly wrong turn at the Enlightenment and that we’re no veering wildly off course. He considers our society to be too-heavily dominated by reason – and argues, quite well I think, that many modern evils are rooted in turning reason into a religion. He suggests that reason has pushed our other qualities to the margin, and we need them back – namely ethics, common sense, intuition, (historical) memory, and imagination.
His first philosophical work is Voltaire’s Bastards: the Dictatorship of Reason in the West. He writes in plain English, and with a vicious sense of humour.
Well, if you’re looking to familiarize yourself with the Western philosophical canon and to be able to hold your own in conversations about philosophy, there’s really no need to force yourself through Rand. If you enjoyed her work that would be one thing, but if you don’t like her don’t bother because (in my experience, at least) no one other than her fans is ever going to want to discuss the subject.
In rereading this thread, I thought this was worth seconding. There are important philosophical works that are extremely boring to read. The ideas are often very interesting, but the writing may not be, and it can be difficult to figure out what the point is without help. I’d consider Kant and Heidegger the two best (worst) examples of this. I have a very high opinion of Spinoza as a thinker, but his writing style was often almost ridiculously dull. Locke can be pretty bad that way too.
IMHO, the philosophers who are the most enjoyable to read are Plato, Descartes, and Hume. Nietzsche is also fairly easy to read but much more difficult to interpret.
In addition to being tedious, Kant is also remarkably dogmatic. As a later commentator had to say regarding Kant’s categories of “analytic knowledge” and “synthetic knowledge”: “That Kant could not imagine a four-dimensional space does not mean such could not exist. It only means that Kant didn’t have much of an imagination.” or words to that effect.