The Republic
The Prince by Machiavelli
Two Treatises of Government by John Locke
Discourse on the Method by Descartes
If you wanna get adventurous, there’s always Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations
That was the worst book I have ever read that I finished. I would recommend What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy by Tom Nagel for starters. Before reading Plato’s Republic.
Thudlow Boink writes:
> There’s a whole series of books, called Popular Culture and Philosophy . . .
There are actually two series of books called Popular Culture and Philosophy, one from Open Court and one from Blackwell. William Irwin started the one at Open Court and then moved to Blackwell. Open Court continues its series under a different editor.
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=mlhxjx9y84d00ct2jxthph91zm9dcdtz
Then you need to get ahold of anything by David Chalmers, including The Conscious Mind.
I agree with Student Driver that Sartre and the existentialists might be your cup of tea. You could start by reading parts of Being and Nothingness, which discusses consciousness, free will and of course, being. Don’t go in without a good glossary and probably a good, clearly written guide though. I started reading it off the bat for a subject on existentialism last semester and I had absolutely no idea what I was in for :smack: . The language was hard to parse and made familiar concepts obtuse, and it only got better after a close reading of the glossary and several patient re-reads.
Oh and** Gfactor**, thanks for the podcast links. Maybe this will help me finally conquer the Brothers Karamazov. I’ve been waging war on those three for years on end now.
I think it’s helpful to have a firm grounding in essentialism before tackling existentialism, since the former is more intuitive, in my opinion, than the latter. The notion that a thing can exist without essence (“that which it was to be” — to ti en einai, Aristotle) is hard to grasp without understanding how many prior philosophical principles must be contradicted to accomodate it. Existentialism is basically the negation of essentialism, and as such it can seem to be a rambling and pointless ontological exercise. How does one, for example, even conceive a thing without essence, since even the term “thing” tags it with at least an identity property? I think existentialism is so complicated that people sometimes prefer to trivialize it than deal with it, speaking of it in Zen-like terms about the Tao. In frustration, Sartre is summarized as believing that nothing can be known and hell is other people. I don’t think Sartre’s “thing in itself” can be understood in a proper context without first understanding Kant’s “thing in itself” (the noumenal).
Marx or Engels might be nice if you lean that way.
Spot-on advice. (I once spent a summer on a few paragraphs of Aquinas.)
This thread is already full of better advice than I can give, but I can tell you how I discovered philosophy and learned to read it. It was through a book that has been widely attacked, and that, years later, I often disagree with myself: Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. When I read it in college (I was an English major, ignorant of philosophy), it opened my world and rocked my eyes: there is this thing called philosophy, here’s what it’s meant for, here’s how to read it and integrate it into your life. If you can ignore (or chuckle at) the parts of the book where Bloom waxes indignant about that rock music the kidz are listening to, then the parts about Socrates, Aristotle, Kant & co. are marvelous.
I ended up with a doctoral minor in philosophy and it was by far the best part of my education, and one of the highlights of my life.
You may want to look into some Eastern philosophies – Zen, Taoism, some of the more mystical branches of Hinduism. They’re all about the nature of consciousness, identity, and man’s relation to the universe, and they generally go in a very different direction from Western philosophies. They also tend to be somewhat less about convincing you logically than about laying out a world-view that either rings true or doesn’t. In a manner of speaking – it’s rather difficult to put into words.
Alan Watts does a good job of translating Eastern thought for a Western audience. I’d suggest starting there, if you’re interested. In particular, I like The Wisdom of Insecurity (dealing primarily with Zen), and The Book (first two chapters here), which draws on vedanta, a Hindu philosophy.
Sidahartha by Herman Hesse is pretty good for some eastern philosophy/religion in an entertaining read
And if you want a nice simple eminently readable introduction I, a previous non-philosophy reader, started with:
Alain de Botton’s The Consolations Of Philosophy which is both a book and a TV series about what Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have to say that relates to issues of modern life.
Mark Rowlands’s Everything I Know I Learned From Television subtitled Philosophy Explained Through Our Favourite TV Shows. Rowlands is the Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy at the University of Miami and it is interesting to read how *Tony Soprano * can be used to explain Plato’s theories.
I recommend Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult.
A History of Western Philosophy …Bertan Russel. It will give a synopsis and critique of philosophies. Then you can go deeper into the ones that interest you.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence-Persig
Philosophy critique wrapped up in a good story.
Is that like the Idiot’s Guide to Pilosophy? 
j/k
The more I read philisophy, the more I realize I’ve thought of most of the same stuff as a kid.
A great wealth of advise here, and I’m going to take it all to heart. I think I’m going to make 2008 the ‘Year of Philosophy’. I’ve spent so much time boning up on science and whatnot, that it’s time to make the shift to the other side for a change.
I’ll especially heed Liberal’s advice about reading slowly and thoroughly. But I will start with a few of the books about the books mentioned… just to warm up and try and get a taste of everything (including eastern and western). Then, on to some of the original works from there.