This is difficult to answer without knowing one's background. A fun introduction that's sometimes used in Intro to Philosophy courses is Coffee Meets Philosophy by Bruce Waller [0]. It tries to give the reader context in introducing philosophical problems (frankly the most difficult part of understanding philosophy) alongside primary texts. But it is a little weird!
If you prefer to dive into the deep end a bit, the Contemporary Debates series is excellent. For a given area such as epistemology [1], the books contain original essays for and against various positions. These books will give you a good idea what's going on in an area but can be a little dated.
I, regretfully, have to consul against putting too much faith in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's one professors pet project, and unusably biased on many topics, extra especially Frege, which is his specialty
The SEP covers vast amounts of philosophy and most of the articles are high quality and written by people who are knowledgeable about the particular topic. Is it perfect? No. But it's a good starting point.
It's all controlled by a single professor who is quite a ways outside of the mainstream, and consistently presents his small, and very nonstandard school of thought as accepted truth. Frequently without so much as mention of the actual standard interpretation. It's not a good place to send a beginner, and frankly not even that useful as a reference for an expert unless they are particularly studying that one small school of thought.
The SEP was a land-grab in the early days of the internet.
Once while looking for ‘On the consolation of Philosophy’, by Boethius I came across the near title ‘The Consolations of Philosophy’ by Alain de Botton.
After having self studied philosophy for over a decade, Botton’s dash review of great thinkers is accessible and refreshing. Boethius is not for the newb.
Find personalities, or eras, or thought topics which appeal to you and read everything you can of that vein.
The old stuff seems cringe today, though many great thinkers speak in a timeless language. Some tellings and narratives mar these often reclusive legends. One must struggle to find authentic and revealing accounts where their original language is not available to you.
Audiobooks and long drives (or workouts) are a worthy competitor of books.
Nigel Warburton's A Little History of Philosophy.
Cathcart and Klein's Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar.
Both are easy-going and fit the description of an overview.
Further reading can be segued to Oxford University Press A Very Short Introduction Series.
Concise but in-depth reads written by modern philosophers.
Life of Montaigne (Bakewell) is an interesting look at another person’s attempt to study and write about philosophy. I found the book to be inspiring.
I think the magic of philosophical study is the probing and testing of your own thoughts and answers to important questions, and then comparing/contrasting those to other philosophical writers.
I often just pick a topic, like truth, and start writing. It’s always amazing to see how my prose will reveal my mind and my dilemmas. And then I have a direction for more study.
There are no wrong answers. Just jump in and see where it takes you.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/) is not a gentle introduction but is, honestly, one of the best things on the Internet
Sole criticism is that it's perspective is too "western-centered"? Though I agree it's eastern resources are sine qua non. One could conceive an entire Digital Library devoted exclusively to Ancient Indian Philosophy & Music and it would encompass 10x the scale ;)
You can't go wrong starting with Plato. I suggest buying a volume of the dialogues. They're incredibly easy to read and there's a certain charm to them I enjoy very much.
I also have them on audiobook and will sometimes dip in and listen to a particular dialogue I like.
Ah, the two (supplementary) I would have recommended are both on his list: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is great for either randomly browsing topics of potential interest or clarifying things that might be hard to understand in primary sources.
The podcast History of Philosophy without any Gaps is hilariously detailed and quite great. One of the most ambitious projects within contemporary philosophy. While it says "western philosophy" in the description, it has expanded well beyond that at this point and includes many episodes on Asia and Africa as well.
I, regretfully, have to consul against putting too much faith in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's one professors pet project, and unusably biased on many topics, extra especially Frege, which is his specialty
Adding on to this question: a lot of the (really excellent) recommendations here are quite focused on the Western cannon. Are there similar suggestions for reading other schools of thought?
One of my few genuine regrets is not attending St. John's College when I was fairly aggressively courted as a high school applicant. (I may nevertheless attend one day, and be the weird old guy reading the Great Books curriculum with my new friends: several teenagers confounded and dismayed by my presence.)
The reading list for their Masters program in Eastern Classics [https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/graduate/masters-easte...] —while not exclusively focused on "philosophy" per se— presents a great deal of material and a framework for approaching the texts that anyone, Johnnie or not, may find valuable.
I would not recommend Wendy Doniger's works for the beginner.
She has more of a interpretive approach (which is not clearly spelled out) rather than a direct translation and hence highly controversial. Her works seriously suffer from The Danger of a Single Story syndrome (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg) towards the culture they purport to explain.
I agree wholeheartedly with this caveat. Her works are really great as a non-standard (and admittedly very controversial) perspective, but can be really misleading if they are the first thing you read. I should have included something along these lines in my original recommendation, thanks!
I started with "The Story of Philosophy" by Will Durant. It introduced me to the high-level strands and terms in philosophy by studying the works of eminent philosophers.
Understand What Philosophy Is: Philosophy is the study of fundamental questions about existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It involves critical thinking, argumentation, and reflection on complex topics.
Read Introductory Books: Start with beginner-friendly books on philosophy. Some recommended titles include "Sophie's World" by Jostein Gaarder, "The Philosophy Book" by DK, and "The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained" by DK.
Explore Philosophical Topics: Philosophy covers a wide range of subjects such as ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, aesthetics, and more. Read short articles or watch videos online to discover which areas interest you the most.
Even you can watch YouTube videos of more tutorial, btw you can try YouTube ReVanced to watch without Ads https://revancedapk.org/
I would recommend jumping in the deep end and start reading primary sources from the east and west and all the places inbetween. Once you start reading and searching - perhaps university library catalogs, you will find many more. Guttenberg and other free ebook sources are great because most of the greats are well out of copyright.
Kant "Metaphysics of Morals"
Singer "Animal Liberation"
Plato "Repulic"
Einstein "Philosophical Works"
Hobbes "Leviathan"
Rousseau "Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men"
I have a degree in Philosophy and it is the best thing ever.
Since this is HN, you might be interested in language, logic, and similar topics. If this is the case, you will likely enjoy analytic philosophy, especially Quine, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Popper.
However, if you are coming at philosophy cold, I really don't recommend the academic analytic path. It's too easy to get lost in the weeds and decide that all this stuff is just too obscure and abstruse to be useful.
If that's the case, I suggest a very brief reading list to shake up your default preconceptions of how the world works. The goal here is to make you question your basic assumptions, which is when philosophy is at its best.
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and On the Shortness of Life by Seneca. Classic Stoic works. Very accessible entry points to classical philosophy and Stoicism.
- Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche. If you read this and understand it, your entire conception of ethics, values, and how we use labels like "good" or "evil" will be shaken up.
- Republic by Plato. If you live in a Western country, you probably think that democracy is the highest and best form of government. Plato thinks otherwise and it's worth understanding why.
- A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics by Donald Richie. This is a fairly recent book but it serves as an excellent introduction to East Asian and Japanese thought via art and aesthetics.
- I Ching. The Chinese classic is super easy to read and is diametrically opposite to the static, eternal universal Platonic model much of Western thought it built upon.
- You should also probably read something from India, the Islamic world, and Russia, but I wanted to keep my list fairly short. Some recommendations here are The Bhagavad Gita, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, and anything by Dostoyevsky.
For reference: I have a bachelor's in philosophy from a program in the US which is almost exclusively analytic in nature.
Great recommendations! I'd pick The Genealogy of Morality as a better intro to Nietzsche, tho my favorite is far and away The Gay Science.
I wouldn't pick Meditations as being a intro classical philosophy tho, the Stoics were very much their own school of thought, and not the primary one that carried forward into later eras. It's a fascinating school of thought, but more also a diversion in getting up to speed (another great side-path from the same era is Pyrrhonian Skepticism!). Aurelius is also really late chronologically (and frankly not a philosopher at all... The modern equivalent would be a celebrity publishing a self-help book, still an extremely fascinating historical document tho).
I'm a huge fan of the Alan Bloom version of Plato's Republic. But if we're getting specifically into Plato, I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention the Euthyphro too.
There is also a _lot_ to be said in favor of reading the history of philosophy in rough order. It's a conversation through the millennia, and you can't truly understand what an author is saying unless you understand the context they are replying to. Eg. Kant is frankly unintelligible (and subject to wild misinterpretation) unless he is read as a rebuttal to Hume's continuation of Descartes's protect (as Kant himself says in the intro to the first critique).
Re analytic philosophy: In the words of my thesis advisor "breaking philosophy down into the categories of analytic and continental is like breaking down cars into the categories of those-with-four-wheel-drive and those-made-in-Europe".
I find that philosophy becomes dry and irrelevant when only treated as a field of study as opposed to a way of living.
My suggestion is to find a school of thought that you find useful enough that it can actually guide you in your everyday life.
For example, many people on HN find Stoicism easy to understand and fairly applicable - but maybe not always easy to apply - to their daily lives. I can recommend "The Daily Stoic" by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman [0] as a good introduction to stoicism with modern commentary.
Philosophy: A Complete Introduction By Sharon M. Kaye [0] is a wonderful book that introduces different philosophers and their main ideas.
Each chapter starts with a thought experiment about a given idea and then it gets into more details.
I liked that the book was written in simple language and gave a good overview of many philosophers. Later you can decide to dig deeper into whatever grabbed you the most.
You might want to start with Everyday Examples. An Introduction to Philosophy by David Cunning.
That said, the ancient texts give you the best view of practical philosophy. Hinduism, Buddhism, Greek (and Roman) texts are where you can find the greatest breadth of thought.
A "Philosophy for Dummies" - type book would probably serve as an adequate introduction, as well as the online resources already mentioned.
I'm a big fan of Socratic philosophy, and there's two main sources for this, Xenophon and Plato.
Xenophon's main Socratic work is traditionally titled The Memorabilia and there are two older translations available online, The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates (Henry Morley) and The Memorabilia (H.G. Dakyns). The latter has footnotes and is probably the better translation but the former might be a little easier to read, but they're both pretty old. A good modern option is Conversations of Socrates (Hugh Tredennick/ Robin Waterfield) which includes all of Xenophon's Socratic works (and useful footnotes). My advice is to try and not take the somewhat moralistic tone of Xenophon too seriously.
All of Plato's dialogues that are generally agreed to be authentic are available for free online, per the old but very readable translations of Benjamin Jowett. Everything attributed to Plato is contained in Plato Complete Works (John M. Cooper). Plato Collected Dialogues (Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns) has all of the authentic dialogues plus a few others. The Last Days of Socrates (Hugh Tredennick, I think revised by Robin Waterfield) has the four relevant Platonic dialogues (including Apology {"Socrates' Defense"} which might be the best record of things Socrates actually said.)
The Republic is available on the Perseus Tufts website with lots of good footnotes. I happened to have read Allan Bloom's translation and it has lots of good footnotes and interesting observations too, though I think his opinions may have been somewhat outside those of mainstream scholarship.
Also the third century AD/CE Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (Diogenes Laertius) is interesting and quite readable (though I haven't read all of it) and could serve as a (dated) introduction to ancient Greek philosophy itself.
My degree is in philosophy, from one of the top handful of schools in that field. Learning by reading is more or less essential in philosophy, however I'm going to recommend against any of the books with a high level overview, or really any tertiary sources. Frankly, they are all either quite bad, or grinding the author's political axe (political in the sense of academic politics).
If you learn by reading, read primary sources: Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel (the Science of Logic in particular), in that order, are basically what you need to get caught up to modernity in philosophy. After that, you should have a strong enough background to truly engage with whatever sub topic you want.
For contemporary English speaking philosophy, the path after the above would be Frege, Russel, Wittgenstein (Tractatus then philosophical investigation), Quine, Davidson, Sellars, McDowell .
If you want to get into extremely contemporary stuff, find professors webpages at top institutions and read the PDFs of their papers they post there, they nearly all make them freely available, but they absolutely are not written for lay audiences: read the background stuff above first.
Secondary sources are also great, when done right: read the primary sources first. Eg "The 25 years of philosophy" is a great trip, but make sure you read Kant and Hegel first! (Fichte and Schelling are optional.)
Some translation are really bad... The Cambridge series is mostly modern improved translations, but do some research on each particular book first. Except Kant, just use the Kemp Smith translation.
If you learn by reading, read primary sources: Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel (the Science of Logic in particular), in that order, are basically what you need to get caught up to modernity in philosophy.
What would be a primary source for Protagoras? It appears none of his works are extant.
Sadly not whole works, but there are surviving fragments. I had forgetten how hard they are track down... Here's probably your best bet: https://archive.org/details/oldersophists0000unse/page/n6/mo... (there's another book too, in a strange binding (thin and large) that I liked a bit better on him, but my copy is in a storage unit due to its strange size, I'll update if I can recall its name or translator)
Really, I threw him in there both because relativism has become popular in recent centuries (and really hasn't been for most of the history of philosophy), and because Plato/Socrates's idea of the Forms sounds absolutely bonkers unless it's understood as a response to/way to avoid the conclusions of Protagoras and other sophists in his school.
“I don't know how much I would give to effect retroactively the strict disciplining, the real scholarly education of so great and splendid a nature, with its spiritual and intellectual wealth. As it is, we have lost a philosopher in Emerson.” ---Nietzsche on Emerson
43 comments
[ 31.3 ms ] story [ 596 ms ] threadIf you prefer to dive into the deep end a bit, the Contemporary Debates series is excellent. For a given area such as epistemology [1], the books contain original essays for and against various positions. These books will give you a good idea what's going on in an area but can be a little dated.
[0] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Coffee_and_Philosophy/b... [1] https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Contemporary+Debates+in+Epistemo...
The SEP was a land-grab in the early days of the internet.
After having self studied philosophy for over a decade, Botton’s dash review of great thinkers is accessible and refreshing. Boethius is not for the newb.
Find personalities, or eras, or thought topics which appeal to you and read everything you can of that vein.
The old stuff seems cringe today, though many great thinkers speak in a timeless language. Some tellings and narratives mar these often reclusive legends. One must struggle to find authentic and revealing accounts where their original language is not available to you.
Audiobooks and long drives (or workouts) are a worthy competitor of books.
I think the magic of philosophical study is the probing and testing of your own thoughts and answers to important questions, and then comparing/contrasting those to other philosophical writers.
I often just pick a topic, like truth, and start writing. It’s always amazing to see how my prose will reveal my mind and my dilemmas. And then I have a direction for more study.
There are no wrong answers. Just jump in and see where it takes you.
Mind (Heart-Mind) in Chinese Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-mind/
I also have them on audiobook and will sometimes dip in and listen to a particular dialogue I like.
[0]: https://existentialcomics.com/blog
The podcast History of Philosophy without any Gaps is hilariously detailed and quite great. One of the most ambitious projects within contemporary philosophy. While it says "western philosophy" in the description, it has expanded well beyond that at this point and includes many episodes on Asia and Africa as well.
The reading list for their Masters program in Eastern Classics [https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/graduate/masters-easte...] —while not exclusively focused on "philosophy" per se— presents a great deal of material and a framework for approaching the texts that anyone, Johnnie or not, may find valuable.
She has more of a interpretive approach (which is not clearly spelled out) rather than a direct translation and hence highly controversial. Her works seriously suffer from The Danger of a Single Story syndrome (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg) towards the culture they purport to explain.
Read Introductory Books: Start with beginner-friendly books on philosophy. Some recommended titles include "Sophie's World" by Jostein Gaarder, "The Philosophy Book" by DK, and "The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained" by DK.
Explore Philosophical Topics: Philosophy covers a wide range of subjects such as ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, aesthetics, and more. Read short articles or watch videos online to discover which areas interest you the most.
Even you can watch YouTube videos of more tutorial, btw you can try YouTube ReVanced to watch without Ads https://revancedapk.org/
Kant "Metaphysics of Morals"
Singer "Animal Liberation"
Plato "Repulic"
Einstein "Philosophical Works"
Hobbes "Leviathan"
Rousseau "Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men"
I have a degree in Philosophy and it is the best thing ever.
Podcast episodes were later turned into books, sans the interviews. You can get started with those. They are really nice.
If you ask me for one recommendation, then that's it.
I also liked Past, Present, Future podcast episodes on Philosophers.
Most people only read Western Philosophy all their lives, but, I suggest that you read Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Philosophy, too.
Since this is HN, you might be interested in language, logic, and similar topics. If this is the case, you will likely enjoy analytic philosophy, especially Quine, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Popper.
However, if you are coming at philosophy cold, I really don't recommend the academic analytic path. It's too easy to get lost in the weeds and decide that all this stuff is just too obscure and abstruse to be useful.
If that's the case, I suggest a very brief reading list to shake up your default preconceptions of how the world works. The goal here is to make you question your basic assumptions, which is when philosophy is at its best.
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and On the Shortness of Life by Seneca. Classic Stoic works. Very accessible entry points to classical philosophy and Stoicism.
- Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche. If you read this and understand it, your entire conception of ethics, values, and how we use labels like "good" or "evil" will be shaken up.
- Republic by Plato. If you live in a Western country, you probably think that democracy is the highest and best form of government. Plato thinks otherwise and it's worth understanding why.
- A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics by Donald Richie. This is a fairly recent book but it serves as an excellent introduction to East Asian and Japanese thought via art and aesthetics.
- I Ching. The Chinese classic is super easy to read and is diametrically opposite to the static, eternal universal Platonic model much of Western thought it built upon.
- You should also probably read something from India, the Islamic world, and Russia, but I wanted to keep my list fairly short. Some recommendations here are The Bhagavad Gita, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, and anything by Dostoyevsky. For reference: I have a bachelor's in philosophy from a program in the US which is almost exclusively analytic in nature.
I wouldn't pick Meditations as being a intro classical philosophy tho, the Stoics were very much their own school of thought, and not the primary one that carried forward into later eras. It's a fascinating school of thought, but more also a diversion in getting up to speed (another great side-path from the same era is Pyrrhonian Skepticism!). Aurelius is also really late chronologically (and frankly not a philosopher at all... The modern equivalent would be a celebrity publishing a self-help book, still an extremely fascinating historical document tho).
I'm a huge fan of the Alan Bloom version of Plato's Republic. But if we're getting specifically into Plato, I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention the Euthyphro too.
There is also a _lot_ to be said in favor of reading the history of philosophy in rough order. It's a conversation through the millennia, and you can't truly understand what an author is saying unless you understand the context they are replying to. Eg. Kant is frankly unintelligible (and subject to wild misinterpretation) unless he is read as a rebuttal to Hume's continuation of Descartes's protect (as Kant himself says in the intro to the first critique).
Re analytic philosophy: In the words of my thesis advisor "breaking philosophy down into the categories of analytic and continental is like breaking down cars into the categories of those-with-four-wheel-drive and those-made-in-Europe".
My suggestion is to find a school of thought that you find useful enough that it can actually guide you in your everyday life.
For example, many people on HN find Stoicism easy to understand and fairly applicable - but maybe not always easy to apply - to their daily lives. I can recommend "The Daily Stoic" by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman [0] as a good introduction to stoicism with modern commentary.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Stoic-Meditations-Wisdom-Persev...
Each chapter starts with a thought experiment about a given idea and then it gets into more details.
I liked that the book was written in simple language and gave a good overview of many philosophers. Later you can decide to dig deeper into whatever grabbed you the most.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18265274
That said, the ancient texts give you the best view of practical philosophy. Hinduism, Buddhism, Greek (and Roman) texts are where you can find the greatest breadth of thought.
I'm a big fan of Socratic philosophy, and there's two main sources for this, Xenophon and Plato.
Xenophon's main Socratic work is traditionally titled The Memorabilia and there are two older translations available online, The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates (Henry Morley) and The Memorabilia (H.G. Dakyns). The latter has footnotes and is probably the better translation but the former might be a little easier to read, but they're both pretty old. A good modern option is Conversations of Socrates (Hugh Tredennick/ Robin Waterfield) which includes all of Xenophon's Socratic works (and useful footnotes). My advice is to try and not take the somewhat moralistic tone of Xenophon too seriously.
All of Plato's dialogues that are generally agreed to be authentic are available for free online, per the old but very readable translations of Benjamin Jowett. Everything attributed to Plato is contained in Plato Complete Works (John M. Cooper). Plato Collected Dialogues (Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns) has all of the authentic dialogues plus a few others. The Last Days of Socrates (Hugh Tredennick, I think revised by Robin Waterfield) has the four relevant Platonic dialogues (including Apology {"Socrates' Defense"} which might be the best record of things Socrates actually said.)
The Republic is available on the Perseus Tufts website with lots of good footnotes. I happened to have read Allan Bloom's translation and it has lots of good footnotes and interesting observations too, though I think his opinions may have been somewhat outside those of mainstream scholarship.
Also the third century AD/CE Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (Diogenes Laertius) is interesting and quite readable (though I haven't read all of it) and could serve as a (dated) introduction to ancient Greek philosophy itself.
It's also amazing and my favorite edition of the republic (just don't take his intro and footnotes as accepted truth).
If you learn by reading, read primary sources: Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel (the Science of Logic in particular), in that order, are basically what you need to get caught up to modernity in philosophy. After that, you should have a strong enough background to truly engage with whatever sub topic you want.
For contemporary English speaking philosophy, the path after the above would be Frege, Russel, Wittgenstein (Tractatus then philosophical investigation), Quine, Davidson, Sellars, McDowell .
If you want to get into extremely contemporary stuff, find professors webpages at top institutions and read the PDFs of their papers they post there, they nearly all make them freely available, but they absolutely are not written for lay audiences: read the background stuff above first.
Secondary sources are also great, when done right: read the primary sources first. Eg "The 25 years of philosophy" is a great trip, but make sure you read Kant and Hegel first! (Fichte and Schelling are optional.)
Some translation are really bad... The Cambridge series is mostly modern improved translations, but do some research on each particular book first. Except Kant, just use the Kemp Smith translation.
What would be a primary source for Protagoras? It appears none of his works are extant.
Really, I threw him in there both because relativism has become popular in recent centuries (and really hasn't been for most of the history of philosophy), and because Plato/Socrates's idea of the Forms sounds absolutely bonkers unless it's understood as a response to/way to avoid the conclusions of Protagoras and other sophists in his school.
Don't follow anyone's specific path, follow your own. Everyone remembers their first philosopher and the rest is history.