Philosophy major booklist

The Learned Joined: Aug 14, 2006 Posts: 123

I'm a rookie to philosophy looking for fellow philosophy majors/graduates/nerds to learn with. So far I've only taken three intro courses: critical thinking, ethics, and knowledge and reality. I've read half of Russell's history of western philosophy, some Nietzsche, some Sartre, some logic, and a lot of atheist literature. My professor also gave me three large books. One on thinking which I have read, another a philosophy of religion text, and the other one is called Questioning Matters, which is basically an intro to philosophy text on certain subjects.

I don't start classes again until September so what I've been doing in the meantime is just exposing myself to as much as I possibly can and reading as much as I can for my own personal sake. I'm not worried about making it through school at all. I'm sure I will learn everything I need to know as I start taking classes and read the required texts, but I really want to start learning more now so that it is not such an uphill battle for me. I have a piss poor understanding of everything and am not familiar with very much... I've been spending a lot of time at bookstores and the library just browsing the philosophy shelves to introduce myself to new ideas.

If anyone of you on here would like to can you type me up a giant list of reading material? Everything that I will need to prepare myself and introduce myself to now, and also books that would be helpful to me in the future.

Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 12:47 am

That all depends on what you're interested in.

To get oriented in philosophy as a whole, I highly recommend Classics of Philosophy edited by Louis Pojman. It's a very good anthology. A casual read-through of some of the articles will help focus your interests.

I'm interested in logic, ethics, and the philosophy of science mostly. Metaphysics is pretty much a waste of time, and epistemology seems to be a field that should be interesting, but winds up not being so.

The Learned Joined: Aug 14, 2006 Posts: 123

I forgot to say thanks...

I also picked up one of those "introducing" books on philosophy. It's sort of like a comic and it was very helpful for a basic and simple understanding of the main ideas in philosophy and history.

Posted: Sat Aug 30, 2008 6:43 am

Hrmmmm. Off the top of my head:

(1) Philosophical Explanations, by Robert Nozick. If I remember right, this book isn't very expensive, and yet it is one of the best philosophy books I've ever read. Nozick has a writing style and sense of humour that makes reading the book relatively fun and entertaining, and he's a popular subject for discussion nowadays, so if you can tackle this book, you might get a lot of benefit from it.

(2) Modern Epistemology, by Nicholas Everitt and Alec Fisher. An extremely easy-to-read introduction to the theory of knowledge. The two authors also have a writing style that helps you to flow through the book without falling asleep every ten pages. Pretty thorough and up-to-date.

(3) Read as many of Plato's dialogues as your brain can handle, and read Hume's Enquiry and Dialogues . Since you're inevitably going to have to read the classics, you might as well start with the more enjoyable or more understandable ones to kick you off to a good start, and give you a feel for reading their foreign styles of writing. I don't know if everyone would agree with me that Hume and Plato deserve that nomination, but they were the two authors that first helped me become comfortable reading ancient or classic philosophy texts.


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