How to start with studying philosophy?

Lainons, is there any "silver bullet" for getting into philosophy and studying basics of it ? I'm interested in philosophy and have goal to find out interesting for me philosophy fields and study it deeper, but afraid to start from "wrong" entry point because of the discipline visible complexity. Should I start with ancient philosophy and slowly walk through the most popular/significant work of each historical period ? Or start with something like B.Russel "A History of Western Philosophy" and try to pick some fields that will interest me more than other ? Thanks.

General introductions to philosophy are mostly terrible, especially the Bertrand Russel one. Just pick out any philosopher that interests you and start reading. If it goes over your head, then see if you can find some secondary literature aimed at beginners. You can start with the Ancient Greeks if you want to, but don't feel obliged to. >The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the repressors role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger, and so-and-so’s book about them? A formidable school of intimidation which manufactures specialists in thought – but which also makes those who stay outside conform all the more to this specialism which they despise. An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking. - Gilles Deleuze

>>6793 I would skip on Bertrand Russel as well. If you really want to read a primer first, W.T. Jones' History of Western Philosophy is possibly the best introduction into philosophy.

>>6793 >>6795 Thanks Also, in case you know, is big compilations/guides from 4chan's /lit/ worth attention or better try to find other sources of pre-made reading lists ? What in general can be considered an authority, that can tell you about book worth, when you start way in philosophy?

Start with the Greeks, more specifically start with Plato and then with Aristotle, read pic related. The reason why you should start with the Greeks is because they predate every major philosopher, they don't reference other philosophers and they don't use strange jargon which you might find in the works of Hegel for example. Don't bother with secondary literature, you're putting yourself at the mercy of the author who might or might not inject some of their personal biases and they might give you a skewed view of the philosophical works you're reading. If you skip the Greeks and dive right into Nietzsche (which I don't recommend) then you might want to get your hands on some secondary literature but I don't see why you'd do that, reading the ancients will give you a fuller picture of philosophy.

Only start with the greeks if you want to hate philosophy. Start with a subjector question that interests you, like theory of mind, and read excerpts from many authors on the subject. Check out Aldous huxley's a perrinial philosophy, also the paradox of god and the scie of omniscience is one of the best starter books I've come across.

>>6798 >Only start with the greeks if you want to hate philosophy. On what is your opinion based? This sounds controversial on the most "starter guides" and classical ways of learning I've seen.

https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1y8_RRaZW5X3xwztjZ4p0XeRplqebYwpmuNNpaN_TkgM/pub I'm not sure if you seen this, but /lit/ started a comprehensive guide awhile back which covers what to read up until the Continental-Analytic split (where it was left unfinished.) My guess is good as anybody's. The more you read, the more you will find what interests you. Don't get stuck too much in preparation, because I have a problem with reading too much secondary literature in preparation without ever getting around to the original text. My honest recommendation are philosophy dictionaries, so you have a grasp on terms as you read along a text.

>>6792 The Summa(s) Nicomachean Ethics Meditations City of God All you need for philosophy sans-soy

I can only recommend to start with the Nahuas (James Maffie, Aztec Philosophy) and the East Asian folk religions (Ask your mama). Western philosophy is very developed but don't think it's the only fish in the boat worthy of being eaten. Heraclitus is honorary though. >>6807 I think he's right. You should start with the subjects that interest you first instead of trying to bruteforce the knowledge of an entire generation/region into your head. In time you will learn about all the rest through natural curiosity.

Probably just start with an extremely vague and brief overcap of all major philospheries then start in chronological order to correct any errors made it should only act as a primer to give a brief idea what to roughly expect when you come across it and kinda have to start from beginning because many philosophers build off past philosophers or critique them. >>6795 Why have I not seen such a glorious image before? Pretty sure it's a reference to John C Lilly's experiments on communication with dolphins.

1. Check the author's past to see if they were terminally ill (usually the philosophy that comes from these people just makes you want to off yourself). 2. Memorize your logical fallacies. 3. Start with a book that's translated/written well so you don't throw it in frustration due to convoluted language.

Formal philosophy study is for fart-sniffing liberal arts professors and the manchildren who follow them around like puppies. Nothing wrong with wanting to learn it so you can understand what everybody else is talking about, but there's very little substance to most of it.

if you want to have an overview of the entire history of philosophy and be engaged in questions that have been happening since the beginning and continue to this day, starting with the Greeks -> Continental Rationalists -> British Empiricists -> Kant is a good route. it's also going to give you the best understanding of philosophy, because philosophy is nothing if not an extremely long series of conversations about various questions of the most general sort. but that's a level of seriousness that most casual self-learners aren't going to have, and that's fine. if you just have a passing interest in it, pick out a subject that interests you, or better yet a question. a couple examples of this would be something like "what is the meaning of life?" (look into Existentialism), "what does it mean to be conscious?" (look into Philosophy of Mind), "what does it mean to live a good life?" (look into ethics, specifically Virtue Ethics), "what sorts of things are there in the world?" (look into metaphysics), etc. there isn't any way around reading through all the various points throughout the history of philosophy though if you want to have a solid understanding of the entire field. you don't necessarily need to read every book cover-to-cover (hell I didn't and I studied it in uni), but you'll need to know what sections of each key work to read in order to understand how the various philosophical dialogues change and what arguments each philosophy makes that change the field. unironically looking up each philosopher on Wikipedia and the Stanford philosophy encyclopedia to get an overview of them and find the most important parts of each of their works will probably be helpful, but without a professor or mentor to guide your reading you're going to only be able to do so much to cut to the most important bits. working backwards: I will say as someone who has focused a lot on Kant to read the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals rather than the Critiques. the Critiques are extremely long and difficult and anyone who says they've read either cover to cover without being an academic and literally being paid to study dense German metaphysics is either lying or skimmed through them. Hume's work is essential to understanding Kant, but his most important work An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is quite short. Berkeley and Locke can mostly be ignored IMO unless you really care about getting the whole picture for the history of Empiricism. they're both rather boring to me personally but I'm not an Analytic dweeb. for the Rationalists, you can mostly ignore Leibniz unless you find his ideas interesting. Spinoza is great and I highly recommend reading the Ethics. it's tough but it's worth it. Descartes is hugely important to philosophy for pretty much revitalizing it after a slump during the Medieval era, and his Meditations is fairly short. now getting to the Greeks, you would probably want to read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the Categories, and the Metaphysics. remember that in his time and for hundreds of years afterwards, Aristotle was basically considered the smartest person who ever lived and wrote about basically everything. most of it is soykaf you can ignore unless you're interested in focusing on Aristotle. my memory of Plato is pretty hazy but he's like the most famous philosopher ever after Socrates so finding somewhere to start with him shouldn't be hard. the Hellenic philosophers aren't super important but once again read them if you find them interesting at a cursory glance on Wikipedia. I for one think the Stoics and the Cynics are fun. after Kant, philosophy starts to diverge into the Contintental and Analytic traditions. broadly, the Continentals treat philosophy as being something that is very creative and cross-disciplinary, so in addition to typical philosophy questions they are often also concerned with sociological and aesthetic questions and their work sacrifices clarity for expressiveness and creativity. the Analytics treat philosophy as basically being an inexact science that really only exists to talk about things that will eventually be solved by the hard sciences, and they use a lot of formal logic. I'm a Continental, so everything I'd recommend to read after Kant would be the other German Idealists, Phenomenology, Existentialism, Poststructuralism, and then probably Speculative Realism and anything related to that if you wanna read some contemporary stuff. if there's an Analytic here they could recommend you something along those lines, but beware that Analytic philosophy in my personal opinion is incredibly boring and will make you hate philosophy. >>6793 based Deleuzian anon. thread should have ended here

>>6793 based deleuze quote and advice >>6835 this anon gives good advice. Hume and Spinoza are both very good OP just read whatever interests you, find some lectures and listen to them. Also don't get memed into reading the Greeks unless they actually interest you

Can anyone recommend any more primitivist/anti-societal philosophy? I've currently read against Leviathan, against His-Story and le funny bomber man manifesto, most interesting works of literature I've ever read, I've read Leviathan 4 times in the past year and a half

>>6792 hegel. start with hegel

>>6869 Pentti Linkola might be your speed. Didn't read myself so can't discuss. >What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and only one lifeboat, with room for only ten people, has been launched? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides of the boat.

Buddhism is all one needs

The conceit of philosophy is that everyone believes themselves to be one of the ten in the lifeboat with access to the axe even though they're more likely to be one of the ninety sets of extra hands.

>Church of Euthanasia reports a Wall Street Journal-Europe interview in which Linkola expresses the view that World War III would be: "a happy occasion for the planet.... If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating, if it meant millions of people would die."

>>6835 >working backwards: I will say as someone who has focused a lot on Kant to read the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and the Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals rather than the Critiques. the Critiques are extremely long and difficult and anyone who says they've read either cover to cover without being an academic and literally being paid to study dense German metaphysics is either lying or skimmed through them It's not that hopeless. It took me a half-dozen tries to get through the first, but I made it through all three critiques. The first was mostly a slog, but I liked the second (and the Groundwork), and actually enjoyed the third. Metaphysics of Morals was much more tedious than his Critiques, frankly. Only payoff thus far for reading that has been someone else making an indirect joke about Kant's idea of phenomenal possession.

you will either get stucked in a philosophical bubble or realize everything is for nothing, but if you're that interested start with hegel

Philosophy that doesn't answer important (as in, actually influencing your life) questions is intellectual garbage fit to be in Fashionable Nonsense. Which is why antique philosophy competed with religion on the most important question of them all: how should one live his life. Try Stoicism (virtue is the only good; virtue being encompassed by wisdom, fortitude, justice, temperance) or cynicism (extreme hermit version of Stoicism) if you have the innate willpower and intelligence to host it, Epicureanism (gaining peace by stepping of the spiral of human desires) if you're normal, Buddhism if you want Epicureanism full of mysticism bullshit and an unreliable canon, Christianism/Islam if you're the bottom of the barrel. Read Nietzsche too, his way of writing is entertaining and his rants are fun; but he changed positions way too often to be considered reliable.

>>6835 An addendum to this is to start with Alcibiades when getting into Plato. Start with him and also the pre-socratics

>>7305 Also don't be afraid to reference materials Currently I'm studying the church fathers and I use New Advent and Biblehub for my research. There is a plethora of information and resources online.

>>6792 i literally just went to the library and picked up the first book i saw that had "Stoic" in the title. It's pretty simple. I recommend you read some Stoic literature, as well as the works of Nietszche

>>6875 probably a dumb question, but what actually does Hegel write about?

>>7318 In Phenomenology? Essentially, it's a progress from mere sensuousness to self-consciousness, and from there to sociality and from there to a view of actuality or the totality (knowledge of the absolute). H.S. Harris's massive commentary on the Phenomenology, Hegel's Ladder, is also an apt description of the nature of the work. It progresses using what later came to be known as immanent critique, and this method can be hard to follow, especially if you're not used to it, so most people give up quickly. I gave up the first time I read it, namely at "self-consciousness," when I realized I had no idea what I was reading. This is one aspect of the "aesthetic strategy" of the work; it's trying to make you think seriously, or to read more philosophy and try again, or else give up. You could call it intimidation, and it is in a way, but he is earnest in trying to make you think again. It also has a very good preface that's slightly funny. For philosophy at least, but you take what you can get. Anyway, it's supposed to be the preliminary work to his philosophical project as a whole, as represented in the Science of Logic and the three parts of his Encyclopedia. If you'd like an analogy to Western mysticism, the Science and Encyclopedia are the "esoteric" works, while the lectures are his "exoteric" works, with the Phenomenology functioning as his induction to the system. His other works are either pre-system (his early writing like the so-called Differenzschrift) and mixed in character, or mainly exoteric (Philosophy of Right). They're all worth reading in their own right, so don't be put off by my attempt at "fun" here in making these (largely pointless) distinctions. As a general rule, the "exoteric" works tend to be easier, and they cover territory not covered in his "esoteric" works, or not covered in as much detail. They also clarify points in those works that would otherwise be obscure. Hopefully that answers your question, or part of it. As for what Hegel writes about in general, though, he wrote about virtually every topic in philosophy at the time. Anything less, and he would have failed to embody one of his most well-known statements: "the truth is the whole."

>>7327 To clarify one point, though, the aesthetic strategy isn't "merely" aesthetic. For Hegel, or for Hegel especially, form and content are discursively related to one another, and such a logical relation between categories is for Hegel also an ontological relation. This is why Hegel is sometimes called a "panlogist." Regardless of Hegel's own views, the style is very much reflective of the nature of the critical work internal to the development of this phenomenology. Later writers following this tradition don't have an easier time writing it. If you find yourself writing it one day (God forbid), most people won't be able to read or understand you either.

philosophy is just that, to befriend wisdom. if you want to love wisdom you have to use it. you need hardship in your life and you need to keep important words in your mind to keep you alive and see what works and what doesn't. you need to be unbiased. welcome whatever comes to you especially if it rubs you the wrong way. don't be like the neckbeards who scoff at anything that contains the word god nor the religious who scoff at anything secular.

>>7318 Don't worry Lain, nobody's ever actually read Hegel. Just listen to some podcasts like the rest of us; "Philosophise This" is decent.

>>6792 start with the Greeks.

I'm not even being facetious, it worked for me.

don't do it. take it from a guy who dove in headfirst and devoured everything for about 10 years... you don't want to be on the other side of this, you don't want the truth. just enjoy your life, lain.

>>7372 Too bad, I have already "started" with the greeks and now my head is full of noumena and retardostotle, I'm having an existential crisis, and it doesn't look like I can turn back now. Sunk costs fallacy?

>>6792 Basically what this >>6835 lainon wrote, although I do not agree with him about Analytic tradition being boring. It is a matter of preference, after all. Along those lines, if you decide to read anything from analytical tradition, Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein are core philosophers and some of their texts are a must. After them read Quine, Kripke and Putnam because a lot of development in analytical tradition came from them. They give a basis that other authors, more or less, build upon their respective fields in analytical tradition. I would also advise to get really familiar with philosophy of language and logic because those two, alongside mathematics, are necessary to understand analytic philosophy. In any case, I would suggest the following readings: 1. Frege: (a) Function and Concept, (b) Sense and Reference 2. Russell: (a) On Denoting 3. Moore: (a) The Refutation of Idealism, (b) Philosophical Studies 4. Wittgenstein: (a) Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus, (b) Philosophical Investigations Then, if you are still interested, try this: 1. Quine: (a) Word and Object, (b) The Roots of Reference, (c) From a Logical Point of View 2. Kripke: (a) Naming and Necessity 3. Putnam: (a) Meaning and Reference I would also recommend reading A Contemporary Introduction to Philosophy of Language by Lycan. It will give you a great overview and many more reading recommendations. After that, go wherever you want. If you are interested in any other discipline within analytical tradition like Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics, Aesthetics, Ethics, Metaethics, Epistemology etc., just look on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. One last thing. Read Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Explaining the Differences by Levy. It will give you, in my humble opinion, a great explanation in how to draw a line between those two approaches to doing philosophy. Happy reading, lainon.

I strangely started with Kant and worked my way around to Aristotle, the Platonic dialogues, Machiavelli, Descartes, Spinoza, etc

>>7360 I've been always saying this - books with "complete idiot's guide" or "X for dummies" in the title are the biggest goldmine. I am not kidding, if you need a good kick start into a topic you know nothing about. It applies to programming, economy, humanistic topics and whatnot.

>>6792 Just read CCRU and Fanged Noumena and become a schizo magician. Philosophy is like kicking dead whales down the beach mega-ass unless you embrace the crazy Don't look up which philosophers signed a certain French petition in 1977 Hegel was a semantic black-sorcerer who implanted a memetic bomb into philosophy that reaches into the future and is meant to cause mass human sacrifice. If you read too much Hegel you will be ruined. Just trust me bro

>>7454 This is bad advice. If you want to actually understand the Ccru you should bare minimum have some familiarity with Deleuze, Kant, Nietzsche, and Marxist theory, lest you become another twitter memelord whose familiarity with the Ccru is entirely surface-level.

>>7455 Yes read super-boring Deleuze and Kant and (ugh) Marx, don't become an esoteric memelord. You must innoculate yourself against the powerful occult hyperstitions hidden in cyberculture with super boring German pedophiles instead of letting it sweep through you See this is why you need to avoid the credentialed philosophycels. Just dive in, who cares. Marx lol lmao

>>7456 I guarantee within a few months to a year you will have moved onto some other trendy niche theory bullshit. I've met literally dozens of people like you and it's always the same soykaf every time, because your interest in the Ccru is entirely superficial. t. someone who has written some accelerationist soykaf you've probably encountered

>>7457 Post your works I meet way more people who drone on about terrible commie writers and philosophers and soyface about comparing the length of lists of theory each other has read, demanding that there's some missing prerequisite book that the other guy must read before he's a "real" philosophy guy. Fuсk that. I do not want to know what a body without organs is Rando telegram accounts schizoposting are unironically better than that

>>6797 I did just that anon. Read beyond good and evil as my first proper philosophy book. Took me longer to get through than I’d like to admit but no regrets. Picked up the book originally because prolonged LSD use gave me an existential crisis that wouldn’t go away. Not to self insert too much but I’m under the impression I was in the exact state of mind Nietzsche predicted people of the future to be in when he was writing his books. I’ve got one of Kant’s works now seeing as Nietzsche couldn’t stop referencing him. >>6889 No attachment is for when you die lain. Enjoy life while it’s here. Regardless of how based the teachings of Buddhism might be about the cause of suffering I don’t see how they have any proof of life cycles or any of the extra-material claims they make.

If you read your philosophy books backwards it will be really raunchy sex stories. That's why they use so many gibberish words. The entire field is a front so nerds could get respect for being smart while also sharing and discussing their favorite erotic literature. This has been true ever since Socrates' time.

>>7459 >No attachment is for when you die lain. Enjoy life while it’s here. Regardless of how based the teachings of Buddhism might be about the cause of suffering I don’t see how they have any proof of life cycles or any of the extra-material claims they make. Life cycles are the logical result of consciousness continuing to exist after you die. The world is a thoughtform rendered by your mind, the source of existence itself is thought, and if the conscious mind is eternal then it will theoretically render every kind of thought imaginable and will continue to do so in a cycle until it is extinguished. You have and will again experience the greatest amount of suffering and euphoria consciously possible until you can give up your attachment and break this pointless illusion. This is what Buddhism teaches you to do. You can still enjoy life but in a way that wont sustain attachment to material pleasures since these are what keep you bound.

Thanks to all of you for answers

>>7458 I'm not gonna draw attention to myself but I posted it in the acc thread here if you care to find it and take a guess as to what it is

>>7457 >I guarantee within a few months to a year you will have moved onto some other trendy niche theory bullshit. I'd have to agree. I'm not an accelerationist, but you see this too often with "trendy" views, whether accelerationist, Marxist, or otherwise. It's not a matter of "theory e-peen" but the experience of struggling with prior texts and being aware of the resonances and implications of the arguments. Otherwise you only get a subcultural jargon, a style attached to a catechism; and this subculture is little different from every other idiotic subculture.

You should just read Wittgenstein and throw other philosophy books in the trash

>>7469 You sound like a friend of mine

Fast forward 8 months into the thread and I must say im surprised by the quantity of low-effort posts. Although I agree with >>6797 because you'll eventually end up there, so better to follow the timeline than reversing, since it has not gotten easier. We are living currently with up to like 40 commentaries on commentaries that originated with Aristotle mostly. Which practically died thanks to the new religion called "enlightenment" and everyone said lets rethink this soykaf, resulting in (as seen in this thread) pre-enlightenment neglect acting like suddenly just the enlightenment matters. Even suggesting all kinds of books while anyone at the very least who sat through a course of philosophy of science should have the idea that regular science is done through papers not books (Kuhn 1960 somewhere). Id also suggest if you don't want to wing it, to look up syllabi of universities offering bachelor philosophy field of study and follow the courses through the texts, philosophy is reading anyways; nothing you can do about that. You could also start with a journal on your favorite topic, it'll probably cost a penny but those are fun reads as well and its all fresh and new. You'll get familiar with what current day philosophers are bitching about within the field and you eventually get back to all the texts involved bc you know you cant do science without the bibliography.

yes. the silver bullet is just called "start reading now."

>>6792 If you are genuinely a seeker of Wisdom, then ignore the interminable sophism of the naturalistic and analytic 'philosophers', usually theoreticians at best and madmen at worst. Instead, pursue what philosophy was originally conceived to be: a Way of life to meet the Divine. Philosophy is not some arbitrary system of ideas conjured up to address a niche question or temporary circumstance. Learn the difference here. If you just want to read about an investigative Theory of Capital or Theory of Desire or Theory of Psychology or Theory of Analysis or Theory of Skepticism instead of Philosophy, pursue that instead. Collapse into Scientism and Naturalism, the antithesis to Philosophy. The silver bullet is examine yourself and ask the big questions. The secret is to not stop seeking until you find satisfactory answers. So who is the philosopher that I can recommend to you to start with that embodies that? Plato. You will find very little substance in other philosophers have you not taken serious attempt of Plato. I am speaking from experience. There is no reason to read Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, etc. without Plato. You will find islands instead of a Continent, as well as branches instead of a Tree. Many think that Plato "leads" to the rest of the so-called ""canon of philosophy"" where he is somewhere and somehow refuted or rendered obsolete. This is not true, and is a popular misconception due to an even more popular fallacy that we have somehow automatically surpassed the ancients in virtue of number and "progress". Many assume that we have more founded and complete answers to philosophical questions than before, as if things have objectively updated quality like iPhone 1 to iPhone 13. They think the ancients were ooga booga cavemen and were just a link in a narrative chain. Such is the history fallacy. How else can they justify the idea of 'intellectual' development? How else can they boast enlightenment? Because they think time is directly equal to ""progress"". The idea that we have already arrived with the best, the most refined, and most conclusive ""philosophy"" in our future-present is nothing but the blindness induced hubris of individuals who never actually took the ancients seriously, on their own "turf", so to speak. There is currently an widespread trend in academia that prefers misunderstanding and misappropriation of Plato and tries to box him as a Logician, a Fascist, an Artifact of his time... all idiotic modern corruptions that attempt to usurp his own work. If you can find the will to suspend this heavy-handed judgment, you might be ready. You'd be surprised at how much you can get out of reading just the Platonists. Proclus and Damascius are so heavily neglected but hold so much untapped potential. Its unimaginable what future could've taken place instead of the enforcement of Christianity by Political Leaders, which decimated the Platonic tradition.

>>6792 >Or start with something like B.Russel "A History of Western Philosophy" > Western Philosophy > Western Stopped reading there and ejected myself out of ther thread at the lightning speed.

nobody has recommended coplestons 11 volume history of philosophy yet. it’s a good one, except from the final volume on existentialism which is soykaf but who cares. very thorough and doesn’t sacrifice complexity, you are getting a full and unbiased view of every influential thinker. great series of books I couldn’t recommend enough. he’s also not an atheist so you don’t get embarrassing rants about how plato is a fascist like russell will give you and he doesn’t pretend anything vaguely spiritual like plotinus is irrelevant

>>7562 OP wants a "silver bullet" and you are surprised by low-effort posts? He wants a low effort-solution to gaining wisdom, what was anyone expecting?

>>7744 Who tf doesn't consider russia as part of western philosophy? Y'all make it harder to laugh at slava ukraini blue checks when you act like this.

>>7744 >>7789 Some prominent Russian philosophers? Prose and poetry don't count

This is an old thread but here's my advice anyway as someone who studies this stuff semi-professionally. The idea that there's a "wrong entryway" into philosophy is stupid and board culture gone overboard. There's no wrong way into it. There are ways that are more or less difficult and more or less fulfilling/related to what you're actually interested in, but at every instance there is an entrance. The only "wrong" way to get into philosophy is if you're not actually interested in it and only want whatever preconceived notions about x said back to you by some dead guy. The thing you really should figure out for yourself is why it is you want to read philosophy in the first place (this, as it turns out, is not a very simple or straightforward question). Are you interested in "truth"? Or interested in the baseline metaphysical or phenomenological categories that ground experience? Do you just want to be "smart"? Are you interested in articulating the world around you? If you can bullshit an even basic answer for any of those you'll already have been better off than your average /lit/ poster who starts with the greeks because someone told him to. That being said, there are some great books worth checking out, and if you dig, pursue the paths. This obviously isn't exhaustive; I tried to choose ones that covered decent ground of what western philosophy is about and are actually fun to read. >Plato, "The Death of Socrates" compilation >Aristotle, "Nicomachean Ethics" >Epictetus, "Discourses" >Lucretius, "On The Nature of Things" >Spinoza, "The Ethics" >Descartes, "Meditations" >Leibniz, "Monadology" >Rousseau, "Discourse on Inequality" >George Berkley, "Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous" >Kant, "Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals" >Kierkegaard, "Fear & Trembling" >Marx, The 1844 Manuscripts >Nietzsche, "Genealogy of Morals" >Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology & Other Essays" >Walter Benjamin, "One Way Street" >Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, "Dialectic of Enlightment" >Deleuze & Guattari, "Anti-Oedipus" >Foucault, "Discipline & Punish" >Baudrillard, "Passwords" >Derrida, "Margins of Philosophy" >CCRU, "Writings 1997-2003" Download the pdfs, flip through em, and if it catches your interest then keep reading. If it doesn't, then stop. If you don't plan on becoming an academic or serious philosopher then you really have no good reason to force yourself through whatever author or book; you'd only grow to resent philosophy.

>>7995 >The only "wrong" way to get into philosophy is if you're not actually interested in it and only want whatever preconceived notions about x said back to you by some dead guy. Sounds exactly like OP's "silver bullet" to me.

Same way you study anything: Grab a book on or within the subject, start reading, note down stuff you don't understand, and research them later. Don't let the fact that it's philosophy that you want to study get in your way. There is no 'right' way to do it, but there is a wrong way to do it, which is getting way too caught up in the semantics of studying rather than actually studying.

read all the dialogues of plato attentively, then get started in ANYTHING you are interested in, and try to understand it. In the process of trying to understand whats closer to you, you will no doubt start learning the essential concepts, since these are used along all the tradition. The tradition is, in fact, a constant development of these concepts. Once you feel you feel understand differents schools of thoughts/authors/eras of philosophy under the same "web" of concepts, and are able to understand one from the point of view or the other and viceversa, you are ready to delve chronologically into the most important texts of the tradition. Example: Plato, Aristotle... Plotinus, Proclus... Augustine, Aquinas... Descartes, Spinoza... Kant, Hegel... Marx, Freud... all of them, involve yourself with ALL the classics once you are there.

>>8032 "It is all one to me where I begin; for I shall come back again there."

>>6792 Pick up a book and start reading. If it reads like tosh, pack it up and begin another. And there is only one rule; never be the man who adopts wholecloth the last book he read as his manifesto. People like that change their mind every time they exchange their library books.

>>7792 >Some prominent Russian philosophers? Kropotkin and Bakunin, both anarchist ideologies. Thats as far as I got from the top of my head

I'd say it's better to go balls to the wall on single subject than to skim various things and be left with shallow and dubious understanding. I mean, you might just be fooling yourself. Personally, I want to be philosophically confident and know the limits of my way of thinking. Be aware that whatever you read will change how you see the world but it's just one of the many ways. Everything looks like some sort of Nietzschean struggle or dialectic battle or whatever. There is no theory of everything for philosophy that allows you to piece everything together coherently.

>>8056 >Can you imagine ten or fifty movements in fluid mechanic coexisting? Actually there are several competing theories of fluid mechanics, specifically turbulence because there is still no good model for it. In fact there are some philosophical differences even in the basic mechanics of point masses, which have persisted for centuries. Some people prefer Lagrangian formulations (motions are geodesics of an action) while some prefer Newtonian/Hamiltonian formulations (motions are solutions to a certain ODE), they're equivalent in most reasonable settings but their interpretations are quite different. I could go on about the different schools of thought in quantum mechanics and basic particle physics, but I'm not so familiar with them. More importantly Newtonian/Einsteinian physics rests on some basic philosophical assumptions about space, time, and motion which most physicists just take for granted. It's a model that works really well but that doesn't mean it's true. There are also some philosophical differences among mathematicians... some people really don't like the axiom of choice, other people really don't like the law of excluded middle. And there are of course all kinds of weird large cardinal axioms that you may or may not accept, and there are people who still think Mochizuki's ABC proof is true. >Philosophy, psychology, sociology and economy are opinions, nothing more. The difference between some blowhard's opinion and a work of philosophy/psychology/sociology/economics is that any serious scholarly work will, at the very least, be thought-provoking. Philosophy specifically is basically worthless if you don't have your own reaction/interpretation of what others have said and formulate an argument of your own. In fact that's what you should do while studying math and physics as well, but the style of argument in those cases is much more rigorous.

It's smart to extract only the key elements of information. People in mines dont typically keep the rocks and dirt that cover the gems.

>>8056 Get a load of this guy. Had you done your share of "listening to opinions" you would have exercised some self control instead of dumping this big worded load of soykaf here

>>8056 >Now, can you imagine a continental school of mathematics? >An Austrian school of chemistry? I got news for you, there ARE schools of thought in chemistry, mathematics, physics, etc. It just so happens that the concepts each of them hold and defend from one another are so high level that if you're outside of the loop, they seem the same to you. >Can you imagine scientists being convinced of which version is true, not by demonstration or experience but by who talk to them? Yeah... have you ever heard the saying "science advances one funeral at a time"? Old and accomplished people have a hold of much of the decisions made in the scientific enterprise, even if their reasons and/or results have already been proven outdated by the newer generations. > Can you imagine most of the ideas we used to hold true 50 years ago to be considered outdated or simply wrong today? 50 years ago it was thought that climate could be modeled through linearization of the differential equations describing the transport phenomena that ruled them. It turns out, they were wrong because chaos exists. So much of science is still opinions that haven't yet been proven wrong. As for the soft-sciences, just because something is a social construct doesn't mean it's not real and not worth being studied to gain insights. You might even realize that many ideas are actually applicable over hard- and soft-sciences.

I posted about it here (pdf included) >>9339 The Daily Stoic is a great way to ease into Stoicism and learn about different philosophers. From there you can dive deeper into a specific one. I recently ordered one of Seneca's texts because I found his quotes to be rather interesting to me.

>>6792 Just listen to the Caribbean rhythms podcast for the culinary advice and never under any circumstances read books. Everything is coal. Absolutely do not ever touch Deleuze or Foucault or any of those pilpul-slinging boy-diddlers. Hegel was a dark semantic sorcerer who set up the entire species for a harvest of soul energy through mass murder. Almost any attempt at philosophy will leave one more ignorant, more miserable, weaker, and poorer than before. Very rare is one who can actually gain anything from it, and those guys get called schizo or racist or whatever other weak libel to keep people from figuring out why they actually came out better than before whereas most students of the field are heroin-addicted sacks of soykaf who are the bane of their entire family. If you don't take my advice, read the Greeks and no secondary literature as previously suggested. Favor translations written PRIOR TO THE 1960s.

>>6797 Agreed, however Plato and Aristotle both reference the presocratics very extensively, basically in all of their works, so to say that they don't reference other philosophers is kind of wrong. If you don't want to read a book on them (e.g. the first philosophers by oxford, or a presocratics reader by hackett). Then I'd just watch a 45 minute highschool AP lecture on YouTube. In this case I recommend Bruce Gore.

How to read a book by mortimer adler is honestly the best intro I know, more about how to read well/hard books in general and gives a guide of stuff to read. Maybe for a specific plan >Read trial and death of socrates period by plato (ie, euthyphro, apology, crito, phaedo) for general intro. A good introductory volume is "Cdc reeves plato reader" >read how to read a book for how to read hard stuff >then read some classics, greeks, great books in general I love modern stuff as well but to really get at them having some foundation in greek stuff is pretty necessary, heidegger said at one point to study aristotle for a decade before diving into nietzche. I'd just focus on the greeks in general for a couple years at least including the literature/tragedies. There isn't actually that many all the main greek tragedies are like 5 or 6 fairly short volumes and the illiad/oddessy which is two longer books. That and a bunch of plato (atleast everything in the cdc reeves reader) and some of the main books from aristotle (nichomachean ethics, politics, physics, metaphysics, de anima). From then on i'd just read whatever catches your eye focusing on the actual writings. As a side note one issue I see w/ people getting in to philosophy is immediately jumping into the hardest/longest text by someone. Kant, hegel, heidegger, etc. all have shorter volumes and public lectures that are way more accessible. You won't get the harder stuff first so I'd recommend easing into people with the shorter/more clear writings before diving into their tomes. Lots of people try to start with kant's critiques or something and just give up because that's insane to start with.

>>9495 >heidegger said at one point to study aristotle for a decade before diving into nietzche This is the kind of hilariously egotistical worship that makes me have very little respect for philosophers and philosophy as a discipline.

>>6795 i like this image. a lot. i don't care about what you have to say.

Start with whatever subject that you find interesting. I think ancient greek/roman/eastern philosophy is a good starting point as they were more concerned with the practicality of their ideas. The dao, enchiridion, etc al were more like instructions - enchiridion literally translates to handbook - designed to help one live according to virtue rather than expound on abstract concepts. That's not to say there is no value in the latter...any philosopher is acutely aware of reality and its delicate brush strokes. Personally, I first started from an anarchist/marxist point so it was inextricably linked to the political sphere. I'm still very much a leftist, but I'm willing to read most anything. The last book I finished was Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm, and right now I'm mixing it up with some ethnic studies and Sartre. I didn't read the thread but I would say that classic cinema is a great way to supplement learning. Bergman was excellent in this regard as many of his films deal with philosophical themes. Kurosawa's Rashomon deals heavily with reality and the nature of truth. Godard and Alphaville...even The Matrix was heavily influenced by Baudrillard.

>>9497 Read aristotle and you'll be able to participate in that as well. The specific context for that was a side note in What is Called Thinking (a very good book), he's specifically talking about how people approach authors (specifically nietzche) in a very hap hazard way just trying to understand them from a single work. Why he brought up Aristotle is all of his works are very explicitly and obviously interconnected, you see how they all depend on each other and inform each other in a harmonious way no other author really has. Getting a foundation in approaching the clearer more explicit works like that (along with just the good stuff in aristotle) he considered a precondition for actually being able to fully grasp a writer like Nietzsche that basically invites misinterpretation intentionally. Reading hard stuff / good philosophy is hard and isn't something to do just randomly you have to put a ton of work in for the rest of your life. Frankly I do think any serious person who likes reading kind of owes it to themselves to at least go through some aristotle/plato it's like the foundation of all philosophy that everything after it is responding to in some way. Yes it's hard and it's a ton of work philosophy isn't for the masses it's for people with the time/disposition to put in the huge amounts of work required to grasp it. If someone isn't willing to put that work after trying for a couple years frankly they shouldn't stick with it, it's not for them and that's fine everyone shouldn't be expected to have the combination of environment and disposition to make it accessible, everyone should probably give it a go though as for those who vibe with it very little else comes close. >as a discipline I don't know any good philosophers who would consider it one lol, that's just academic taxonomers who waste time, not philosophy.

>>9502 >Read aristotle and you'll be able to participate in that as well. I actually have, the parts that interest me as a scientist (biology) and historian (politics of the ancient Mediterranean). This garbage is simply vanity and egotism. Philosophy isn't some especially unique transcendental discipline, every discipline has a history and is the accumulation of authors citing authors citing authors over centuries. But I didn't have to spend ten years studying Gregor Mendel to understand genetics. Ten years studying Copernicus to understand Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Ten years studying alchemy to understand Mendeleev's periodic table. If it takes ten years to, like, really understand an argument, man, that's a sign that you might have fallen into a rabbit hole of ultimately meaningless naval gazing. If the revelation were so profound and meaningful it would have been summarized succinctly at some point for laypersons to digest quickly and easily. The history of science (philosophy was once the word for it) is enriching and fascinating, but only someone who enjoys the smell of farts, attempting to justify their own existence as special appreciators of arcane knowledge, can say asinine things like that.

>>9503 You can't understand the Aristotle's biology apart from his physics and metaphysics it's a whole system. Science is just neurotic losers measuring and correlating things to try to control everything the disciplines you talk about are just part of that. It's not knowledge it's just slowly refining heuristics for our ability to do engineering and manipulate things, none of it's real. Philosophy is special, it's for the noble, the elite, those willing to leave the cave. When we return to cave we expect we will be hated, the lay person shouldn't be expected to do that. You're view just betrays a the idea reality can be conquered and reduced to useful parts, that everything can be made intelligible and accessible for the brain dead masses so the machine can absorb and manipulate it. Hierarchies exist, there are different qualities of people and not everyone is up to everything. That's fine, there are some downsides to the philosophical bent people but I would generally rank them higher the good ones at least being among the great artists, writers, and just excellent moral people. A book keeping autistic scientist on the other hand is basically less then dirt, who is just blindly reinforcing the power structures he inhabits and mass degradation of humanity because he wants to identify 500 more species of spiders. You've just replaced knowledge with pseudo-understanding that is useful for practical for ends, which cuts people off totally from reality and the moral life. Aristotle himself calls philosophy useless, it's a good we seek for it's own sake. Brainwashed technological slaves will never be interested in or have any capacity for understanding it.

>>9507 Aristotle's biology, physics and metaphysics are literally just stuff he made up with little to no justification. Why anyone cares about them is a mystery. >Philosophy is special, it's for the noble, the elite, those willing to leave the cave. All too often they "leave the cave" and in fact just sit there talking about how much better they are than everyone else because they can tell it's an illusion.

>>9507 I hope for the poster's own sake that this post was just trolling, because the buffoonish overconfidence couldn't have illustrated my point better.

>>9508 >Aristotle's biology, physics and metaphysics are literally just stuff he made up with little to no justification. That's what the books are he literally wrote the first overviews of logic/argument that were the standard for 2000 years after and people still view highly. He didn't know justify his views he is the first person to theoretically go into what justification is in itself, and what makes justification valid or not. I'm guessing you just didn't read them or tried and gave up because it's hard :(((. Aristotles writings and ideas literally are like the foundation of all western thought, science, etc. That's something we should be grateful for, it's crazy how much one person can do. >All too often they "leave the cave" and in fact just sit there talking about how much better they are than everyone else because they can tell it's an illusion. Don't be so insecure like there are higher and lower intellectual pursuits, philosophy is the highest. People who engage in it are at least better in that domain, that doesn't mean they are more valuable as people or that you don't excel them in other domains. Very often people can focus on philosophy but fail to be good people, fail the people around them, fail to organize their life properly, etc. Also another just unpleasant truth from Aristotle. If you have a fuarrrked up childhood, parents, are poor, are in very messed up political system/country you simply cannot pursue as high things as you could otherwise. That's what makes these things important, there are higher things humans can pursue that we can be degraded to the point where they no longer are options. Someone with a really bad childhood or is socially alienated (guessing this includes most people here including me) are just like fundamentally impaired in a way they can never fully overcome. Even then people can still make the best of their situation and excel in whatever domains they do participate in to the extent they can, be it music, trades, their job, their social relationships, philosophy etc. But yes there just is a way in which someone who has the capacity to engage in philosophy, and those who actually choose to do it. (ie. a high level of environmental stability and rather then using that to just pleasure yourself trying to understand reality to the best of your ability) is like the best possible pursuit you can do in that situation. They are just pursuing better things. If you haven't actually read the republic yet to get the cave reference I highly recommend it. People who are concerned with understanding the underlying quality of what's behind the shadows (that scientists just autistically try to measure) and see the underlying goodness/divinity responsible for everything around us and how people miss it are just more in contact with reality and by that pursuing higher and more noble ends. >>9509 sorry scientists are evil, those with eyes to see know it. Go take your stolen tax dollars to fund your spider counting and social engineering research, you'll figure out why the shadows move like they do eventually if you just keep trying to measure them : ).

>>6889 one doesn't read philosophy because he "needs" anything

>>6869 baedan, lies journal. honestly just looking up anti-civ on the anarchist library always has something interesting https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/baedan http://www.liesjournal.net/

>>9513 Maybe if Aristotle was so good at logic he wouldn't have created a system so ridiculous. Certainly, mathematicians at the time weren't slouching. It's not like Euclid's proofs need to be interpreted "in the context of his time". Or that you have to say that he was the First (he wasn't) to make his writings seem worth reading. Plato certainly seemed to respect geometry more than sophistry, despite his works of sophistry ironically being more respected in the modern day.

everyone usually starts with plato because it's approachable. so do that first i guess, go through a plato phase, like 10 books. next read copleston's books summarizing the whole history of philosophy, that's like another 10 books. then pick whatever interests you and zero in on it. i would suggest following that up with more detailed summaries of aristotle and the pre-socratics and then read Aristotle and the pre-socratics, the fragments and things. Finally, once you've done a pretty thorough study of greek philosophy and the general history of philosophy you are generally more educated than most people in philosophy but not an expert in anything really. If you want to be an expert you will have to do a deep dive into a particular area of philosophy that resonates with you. Some people study philosophy to try to understand the truth through logic, others through ontology, some through meditation or other means, some choose to focus on trying to figure out what one ought to do and the study of values, axiology, some are just studying philosophy to appear more educated than they really are, there's a lot of reasons to study philosophy. It's really up to you to decide what you are trying to get out of philosophy and to choose which thinker resonates with you and helps to guide you to whatever it is you are looking for. This is why I recommend the typical intro, plato and the greeks alongside a sampler plate of most philosophies throughout history in the copleston books. Philosophy is an incredibly useless study though, I must warn you, and even if you master it you will probably not really be able to have a conversation about any of it. People are usually totally ignorant of it and just look at you like you are from another planet when you talk about it or they treat it as some intellectual dick measuring contest or are just incredibly annoying. I had a friend once who, when I was reading Kant kept screeching to me that I have to read Schopenhauer that I don't know anything because I haven't read Schopenhauer, every day I was reading Kant and he would make petty remarks that Schopenhauer was smarter and better, incredibly annoying. So I followed his advice after reading Kant and read Schopenhauer and the entire time I was reading that he kept screeching that I should read Nietzsche, Nietzsche was the king of philosophy, so when I finished reading my Schopenhauer books I read everything by Nietzsche and he started saying "Philosophy is meaningless! stop reading so much, just think for yourself". In a sense he did have a point but the entire time he was screeching to me about all this he never brought any book into class and never mentioned having read any of it. He also didn't understand any of it when I talked about it so it's obvious he never read any of it and was just reading wikipedia and looking up the next guy in line in a chain of philosophers to discourage me from reading by making me feel like I was always far behind or doing something wrong. My point is that you will just run into A LOT of people who are incredibly annoying and don't expect to be able to discuss this stuff with anyone, either it's over their head, or they larp that they are way above everything, 99% of the time it will end up just being an intellectual dick measuring contest or a discussion about philosophers, like they are baseball cards you need to collect, rather than actually philosophizing, it's incredibly rare that you can just talk about the subject. I started studying philosophy about 20 years ago and I can not say that I have had even one single productive conversation with anyone about philosophy irl. And it's also a mostly useless study, there is no financial value in it and it will take A LOT of your time, hours stacked upon hours of book studies. I am happy that I studied it because I uncovered all of the answers I was looking for and it straightened out my grasp of the world which was riddled with error, but it's the kind of thing you should be studying for personal internal advancement, probably not a study you will get anything out of otherwise. Then again, that's just my experience. Maybe you will have a completely different experience than I had. Good luck.

>>6835 >>7382 I don't agree with the 'relativism' between analytic and 'continental' philosophy. Good philosophy is good philosophy, and some philosophers are just terrible, like Hegel, Derrida, Lane Craig, and so on. There's an amusing quote from JS Mill: >I found by actual experience of Hegel that conversancy with him tends to deprave one’s intellect. The attempt to unwind an apparently infinite series of self–contradictions, >not disguised but openly faced & coined into science by being stamped with a set of big abstract terms, really if persisted in impairs the acquired delicacy of perception of >false reasoning & false thinking which has been gained by years of careful mental discipline with terms of real meaning. For some time after I had finished the book all such >words as reflexion, development, evolution, &c., gave me a sort of sickening feeling which I have not yet entirely got rid of. This seems to exemplify the problem: real thinking gets replaced with a sort of linguistic illusion. People tend to talk about philosophy as though it is a body of knowledge. Actually, philosophy is a kind of activity. The only way to learn philosophy is to actually do it -- books and papers should be a sort of inspiration. Some accessible (modern) books I would recommend to beginners: - AJ Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic - Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind - Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained 'Studying' particular named philosophers is far less important than you would be led to believe. More important is to do philosophy! Think through other philosophers' arguments, come up with responses, even come up with your own arguments. Real philosophy is hard, which is why Derrida and Baudrillard are popular but Carnap and Quine aren't.

>>6792 Platos Republic and Aristotle's metaphysics with good commentaries I recommend the Bloom edition of Plato and Reeve edition of Aristotle I would then get Medieval Political Philosophy by Parents and MacFarland, then jump to Rousseau and Hume, followed by Kant and Wittgenstein (they are modern enough to not need essays) That gives you a pretty good grounding to branch out into any era of the Western canon that interests you

>>6792 Pick up a bunch of short intro books from all over philosophical history: >Cicero - De Officiis >Plato - Alcibiades I (start of the Anonymous Curriculum which is how the late Roman Platonists read Plato) >Eric Perl - Thinking Being (really good for Parmenides, Plato and Plotinus) >Epictetus - Enchiridion >St. Augustine - Cassiciacum Dialogues >Jacques Maritain - Introduction to Philosophy (St. Thomas's essays on Being and Essence, First Principles of Nature will be easy after this) >Cullen - Bonaventure (St. Bonaventure's Disputed qs. and De Reductione are very accessible. The itinerarium which comes with Fr. Philotheus' commentary is extremely useful for general philosophical purposes) >Ingham & Dreyer - Philosophical Vision of Duns Scotus (you could easily pick up Philosophical Writings from Hack with no issue after this) >Suarez - On the Various Kinds of Distinctions (I cannot stress how useful this little treatise is) >Descartes - Meditations >Kant - Prolegomena >Hegel - Lectures on Aesthetics >Schopenhauer - Essays >Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols >Husserl - Cartesian Meditations >Spengler - Man and Techne >Heidegger - Question Concerning Technology Every single one of these is short and generally quite easy to read. Nothing too daunting and I'll point you in the direction of other fun things to read. Burn through them and then go explore with the knowledge you've gained. Unfortunately, I don't know my Analytics well enough to comment on what to read as entry points for them. For video content, Hound of Heaven for scholastic stuff and John David Eberts' old lecture series stuff is great for beginners. Also this list doesn't have any necessary chronology. But it would be easiest if you started with Maritain, Alcibiades I and Cicero.

>>11199 >Unfortunately, I don't know my Analytics well enough to comment on what to read as entry points for them. Do you own a dog house?

>>7455 This. >>7454 has clearly already been ruined, and understood nothing. The style doesn't equate the philosopher or the theory. Yes, is is idiosyncratic to say the least, but that is not the lesson. What can be stated without intention? Is CCRU without a clear motive. Of course not! It may be obscured, but that is due to your own unfamiliarity with the philosopher.

>>11199 Very Angloid, very lit-esque ... but not entirely wrong. Hegel's lectures on aesthetics, if you had read them, sharply contrast the other text you have posted. Why would you follow the Prolegomena with his Lectures on Aesthetics (a substantial work), and then follow that with Schopenhauer's Essays? And why on Earth would you recommend Götzendämmerung by Nietzsche only to follow up on that with the Cartesian Meditations. Spengler is entirely wrong for any introduction to philosophy and especially so since you put him after Husserl, but before Heidegger. It seems like you have some very general introductions. You then got swayed into the scholastic, tradcath larp and followed it with some relevant philosophy, after putting way too much of a focus on medieval philosophy and all that is Latin. The texts you read were interesting and digestible to you, but resulted in a frayed corpus of works which give an overview of a philosophy, maybe an insight into Philosophy, but leave you grasping at straws, lacking any deeper insight.

>>11240 NTA but I myself started with Aristotle and Kant mainly.

>>6792 Start with the Greeks. These texts are all very short and for Plato only the first five I list are mandatory. For Aristotle everything is useful, but especially Metaphysics is mandatory. Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Phaedrus, Republic, Symposium; Gorgias, Ion, Sophist Aristotle: Metaphysics, Categories, Nicomachean Ethics, Poetics Any overview over Medieval philosophy to understand why Descartes came to write what he wrote: Descartes: Meditations Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Kant: Prolegomena, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment Any Introduction to Kant's Critiques Kant: First Critique And after that you're free. Read anything you like. You need to start with the Greeks, you need to bridge the Greeks, you need to start European philosophy, read Descartes, bridge to Kant, understand Kant. The cornerstones of Philosophy (or rather the disease known as the History of Philosophy) are Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant. If you don't have any understanding of these, you will not get the point of any following Philosophy, although you may read it and understand it in isolation, you will work with this knowledge as if it's a kind of fiction. After that you can give into any rabbit hole.

I was like you until last month, Lainon. I read the B.Russel book just to get an overview of topics and philosophers of note. I'm currently reading the complete works of plato (cooper ed.) and the iliad (found it fitting to read at the same time). I'm finding the ideas showcased to be quite unique or universally relevant. I always sperg out on translated works, works translated to my native language (Portuguese) often are translated to the Brazilian dialect or I can't find information on the best translated version. I just found the best English version and started that. How do you find good translations, Lainons? Do you even care?

Hello lainons semi-related question I have I want to start translating some foreign philosophy into my native language. Where would I post it? it's underground so I shouldn't have copyright problems, but I want a good webste to host it. I'd go with AO3 if they accepted non-fiction works

I liked Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (Diogenes Laertius) even though it kind of like soykafpost. It's basically overview of teachings of ancient philosophers that's written in ancient Greece. It also contains stories, "urban legends" and anecdotes that aren't probably true. But it's also entertaining because of that. >>11464 Start NeoCities website?