Philosophy Primer

I know how much you all love philosophy, so what are your favorites? What can you can recommend to people? What totally sucks and should be avoided always?
I love David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (still plowing through it, but GOD ITS SO GOOD MY EYES ARE BLEEDING ARRG), so everyone needs to read it immediately. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is also very good.

I had to read a philosophy text for school once, and it was "bullcwap". yo.

I'm not really a big philosophy fan, to tell the truth. But I'm curious what those of you who are think of Jostein Gaarder. I read part of Sophies World, and although it wasn't to my taste it was interesting nonetheless. Is this a good beginning point for the novice philosopher or is it popularist nonsense (for want of a better expression)?

Unfortunately, my brush with philo is also with Gaardner and his Sophie's World. I found the whole premise of the story quite freaky (tapes from a stranger but addressed to me specifically?), but the subject matter was interesting.


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Why don't you just go to a college bookstore and get the Intro Phil course text? I had a great one. It was a green and white, dense paperback with excerpts from EVERYONE, Aristototle, Sophocles, Plato, Hume, Kant, Mill, Kierkegard. . . I use it still. But my brother put it under his jacket last time he was here and stole into the night--and he's a classics scholar who speaks some Greek and Latin.



Don't mess around with secondhand accounts of these texts. Read the real thing and think about it. That's what philosophy is . . . thinking.

novella,
I'll go along with your suggestion to read the originals and not the commentaries. Recently I've been listening to a discussion of Kant and thought I might have a go at his Critique of Pure Reason. Both the Critique and a discussion of it were on the shelf at the bookstore and the discussion was harder to understand than the Critique itself (at least the first paragraph's worth.) Plato is certainly very approachable, as I recall from way back, and thinking shakes the rust off the brain cells.

Bertrand Russel's History of Western Philosophy

The summer before I left home for the first time for college, I experienced such severe cramps that the doctor sent me for a G.I. series of x-rays, which required that I take an industrial strength laxative. (I am not joking, this is a totally true story.) It turned out that all my problems were stress related because of my anxiety that I would fail at college.

I took a copy of Bertrand Russel's History of Wester Philosophy with me to the bathroom. The action of the laxative caused me to be in there for so many hours that I was able to read almost half the book.

It is really an excellent book to read if you desire an introduction and overview of philosophy.

My high school teacher made a face when I mentioned the book to him and said "Well, it is something of a pot-boiler."

But recently, I saw someone make a comment that it was fashionable for people to turn up their noses at Russel's History, or the writings of Will and Ariel Durant, but such critics most likely never gave the books a fair chance.

A different option is to visit

http://writersandreaders.com/

and pick out one or two of their comic book synopses of philosophers.

I read their book on Sartre and learned quite a lot. I showed it to one scholar and he remarked that the author of the comic book, Donald Palmer, is a respected scholar.

Just now, in an effort to search for details on Donald Palmer, I found this page, for a course which uses Donald Palmer's textbook on Philsophy (1995)

http://philosophy.tamu.edu/~sdaniel/251sy00c.html

After hunting for ages for a good quality introduction to philosophy I had Philosophy: The Basics by Nigel Warburton recommended to me & I can't recommend it highly enough. In addition to this, Warburton has also written a book called [font=verdana, helvetica, arial]Philosophy: The Classics[/font][font=verdana, helvetica, arial], in which he gives an overview of his 24 favourite philosophical texts.
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bobbyburns said:

I had to read a philosophy text for school once, and it was "bullcwap". yo.

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My favorite is- Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre. Personally, I find DOstoevsky to be a bit dull, but Sartre is a great read, not to mention Camus. To me, this philosphy most closely resembles the human condition and has the bestexplanation for it.