Subterraneus, given your understanding of Nietzsche, would you agree with the below? Excerpts from a review by the late conservative Catholic intellectual John J. Reilly (I’d link to the whole thing, but his website went dark after he died) of Fascism: A History, by Roger Eatwell:
Hm. Well, come to think of it, the exercise of the will is all the meaning that life can ever have. Not that that necessarily implies fascism; it is probably compatible with existentialism, or with Objectivism.
Note to reader: my credentials are I’ve taken a couple of introductory courses in philosophy and have done a little reading: in other words I have not credentials at all.
I didn’t know that Russell advocated logical positivism, and I thought that school petered out during the 1920s, while Russell still had philosophic cache during the 1950s. Also that the idea of verifiability was supplanted by Popper. I frankly don’t recall any of that discussion from Russell’s History.
A Fine Whine
It’s $1350! It’s $250 used for an old edition! Admittedly someone I know has it in .pdf (thanku internet), but I don’t like reading such things onscreen. It’s also 8-10 volumes long (as well as a very nice read, at least the parts I’ve dipped into).
Oh crap! Years ago, I had a new set . . . and gave it away.
Ayn Rand explains a lot about our modern times.
Obscure, but Pyrrho of Elis and his unique brand of skepticism (as described and developed by his followers, such as Sextus Empiricus) speaks to me in a way that no other philosophy has to date. Adrian Kuzminski gives a good account of it.
Yes, habitually.
Tell you what- name me some of the texts written by the Buddha.
I’ll wait…
Ok, I’ll bite. How would we better understand our post modern world by reading Nietzsche (or any other philosopher)? I understand some people like to talk about stuff, but the OP was about relevance. And I’ll ask again with as little snark as I can muster up, what is relevant about what any philosopher has ever said to life in “our times?”
Perhaps understanding the evolution of thought allows us to better understand where are today, and where we will be tomorrow.
How so?
If you don’t believe it so, than what could I say to convince you?
I for one do not allow my ego to proscribe willful ignorance.
As it happens, a number of Buddhist texts quote the Buddha directly. In college I studied Buddhism in Translation which gives some of the original source material.
I was speaking loosely though. Given rising Asian power it wouldn’t hurt budding philosophers to familiarize themselves with the concepts of samsara, nirvana, dukkha, the 4 noble truths and the like.
This wouldn’t be a bad place to start for those interested: http://www.religioustolerance.org/buddhism.htm
I always find The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy interesting or at least diverting: Search (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
If you want to understand the scientific method, it is useful to distinguish between falsifiability and verifiability. Karl Popper pointed this out. If you want to understand how scientists actually operate, you should have a sense of how overaching frameworks (or paradigms) tend to replace one another: they do not simply collapse due to new factual evidence. Thomas Kuhn pointed this out. If you want to grasp current understanding of consciousness, you must read some philosophical treatments. Those who like to conceptualize the role of government at an abstract level (I don’t) need to understand Hobbes, Locke and Rawls. If I were interested in the legitimacy of animal rights (I’m mostly not) Peter Singer is the go-to guy.
That said, I have the sense that most working philosophers understand all too well that theirs is a niche field. But that’s a product of success. We don’t speak anymore of natural philosophers, ever since they branched off, specialized and called themselves scientists. Likewise I doubt whether philosophers will have much to say about consciousness in 400 years.
My best guess is that he(?) was aiming at the fact that the Buddha didn’t write anything himself. The Pali suttas were memorized and only written down a couple of centuries later.
As for me, I don’t take the Pali suttas as being historical documents. I suspect that they were mostly based on historical events that the Buddha formalized after the fact into a memorizable form. I’ve collected the entire Pali canon in hard copy, but you can get good online translations of many suttas at www.accesstoinsight.org for free.
I would also add A Short history of Phliosophy by Solomon and Higgins to this list. It is short, for one thing. It’s also very readable and accessible. Most importantly it addresses its subjects sympathetically and tries to explain what each of them were trying to do, rather than denounce them for not being Bertrand Russel.
Russel is a good writer, but he is ridiculously tendentious. He should not be read as an introduction to philosophy and its history. He’s worth reading though, once you know when to roll your eyes.
Another good book is Roger Scruton’s Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey. Scruton is an English Tory who often rails against rock and roll (Those damn kids!) and defends fox hunting (A Heritage of Tradition) which might make him anathema to a lot of people on this board. However he is a really good writer, knowledgeable about a lot of things, and a good teacher. His book analyzes a lot of post-Cartesian controversies in a friendly accessible way.
Thanks Larry Borgia. It looks like Roger Scruton’s book is well worth reading. I’m always interested in philosophy books that try to keep philosophy relevant. I liked Will Durant’s history of philosophy too, though the prose is a bit dated.
davidmich
No one mentioned Voltaire yet?
Not sure what the OP is looking for, but here goes nothing.
Anything and everything can be found at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for free. It’s the largest and most used source of ***academic ***philosophy on line.
A very, very short list follows:
For ontology, read “On What There Is” by W.V.O. Quine and “On Denoting” by Bertrand Russell. These two dominate modern discussions on ontology.
For philosophy of language, read Wittgenstein. Then read him again. ( 
) For current philosophy of language, read Robert Brandom. (Brandom was recently awarded a $1.5 million dollar grant to stop teaching and just “think.” He’s *that *important.)
For metaphysics, read debates between Peter van Inwagen and Peter Unger over “vagueness.”
For philosophy of science, read Hilary Putnam and Daniel Dennett. (Also see Dennett for free will and philosophy of mind).
For philosophy of religion and the ongoing debate over the problem of evil, read Alvin Plantinga and William Rowe. (Plantinga’s Christian: Rowe’s atheistic). Plantinga and Rowe are the two most influential voices left on this issue, and their disagreement couldn’t be starker.
For ethics, read Russ Shafer-Landau and G. E. Moore for moral realism, Gilbert Harman for moral relativism, R. M. Hare for noncognitivism, and J. L. Mackie for moral skepticism. (If you only read two of those, read Mackie and Moore… not because they’re right, but because ALL ongoing debates in ethics are over their work.)
For epistemology, read Harman and Plantinga again.
For political philosophy, read Rawls, Nozick, and Sandel.
That’s my list. Feel free to take shots at it for its many omissions of equally important philosophers.
His victory was so complete that he has become irrelevant. Who wants to read books inveighing against things that no longer exist?
I’m pretty Jews still exist, despite what was likely his strong preference to the contrary.