/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3399708]

What is the general reading order of philosophy?

[Anonymous No.3399716]

Left to right in the west. In the east you have right to left, some up to down, etc.

Protip: skip the table of contents and technical information about the edition and get to where the blocks of text are.

[Anonymous No.3399724]

>>3399716
Har har

Historical Order

[Anonymous No.3399727]

Philosophy is not a thing like that... To compare here, your question sounds like "what is the general listening order of music?"

It depends on what you want to know, what intrigues you and so on. What raised your interest towards philosophy? Someone's work? Some concept you heard that caught your attention?

Maybe from there we can point to a basic place to start.

[Anonymous No.3399737]

>>3399724
Plato and Aristotle and then upwards.

If you bother with any other Greeks, you're gonna get wedgies in recess.

[Anonymous No.3399740]

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/zt.htm

Have fun.

[Anonymous No.3399742]

>>3399727
I thought it was about the greeks first? Then they built ideas upon each other.

I'm interested to getting to at least existentialism and maybe also political theory like Marx.

[Anonymous No.3399746]

>>3399737
Plato and Aristotle are the worst Greeks.

[Anonymous No.3399749]

>>3399708
They started us off with descartes in university. General progression seemed to be directed towards an end in Heidegger since he resolved the mess descartes created.

[Anonymous No.3399778]

Thales > Pythagoras > Plato > Epicurus > Cicero > Aurelius > Augustine > Boethius > Anselm > Lombard > Aquinas > Machiavelli > Montaigne > Bacon > Galileo > Hobbes > Descartes > Arnauld > Spinoza > Leibniz > Berkeley > Hume > Rousseau > Wollstonecraft > Kant > Laplace > Hegel > Schopenhauer > Emerson > Kierkegaard > Sojourner > Marx > Engels > Bakunin > Sidgwick > Caird > Nietzsche > Moore > Freud > Jung > Dewey > Lenin > Trotsky > Heidegger > Popper > Sartre > Camus > Hayek > Austin > Bergmann > Foucault > Deleuze > Hofstadter

You can trust me, I'm a philosophy major.

[Anonymous No.3399782]

Start listening to The Partially Examined Life and follow it by reading the texts assigned. We get this question so many times and it's pretty much impossible to pick out what to read without following some kind of course. Just start off with the freaking Republic, it's better than it sounds. Depending on your aim, you can go loads of routes from there, but reading a bit of everything, even stuff from philosophers that have long been forgotten in formal study, can be very illuminating. Just make sure to wear yor historical critique hat.

[Anonymous No.3399784]

Der Feldweg.

[Anonymous No.3399785]

>>3399778
>being a canon whore

[Anonymous No.3399787]

>>3399778

[Anonymous No.3399792]

>>3399778
>mfw I'm actually ok with this

[Anonymous No.3399793]

>>3399778
No Aristotle in there. Also quite clearly a continental selection. Where the fuck is Quine at? Or Carnap?

[Anonymous No.3399795]

None, it's a useless. Read a book on cooking or something, at least they have a clue.

[Anonymous No.3399796]

>>3399782
>Start listening to The Partially Examined Life

Karl pilkington's philosophy podcast is the best. It's like the average /lit/ post:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaU992VDOyc

[Anonymous No.3399797]

>>3399782
Also, since when in fuck did we allow Freud back into the clubhouse?

[Anonymous No.3399799]

>>3399793
>Aristotle

Shit, I knew I forgot someone. Quine and Carnap can fuck right off.

[Anonymous No.3399800]

>>3399778
>no Husserl
>no Russell
>no Wittgenstein

6/10

[Anonymous No.3399802]

>>3399778
Wittgenstein. Popper. Any of this ringing a bell mister major?

[Anonymous No.3399809]

>>3399778
>Freud
>Jung
>no Lacan

Anywho, aren't half of those pretty much non-essential? You'd obviously gain something from it, but if you're out for a quick trip to Marx and existentialism then you don't need all that shit.

[Anonymous No.3399813]

>>3399799
Yeah, 'cause we still want our semantic frames and dogma's of empiricism. Oh, wait, never mind Freud is on your list and Jung... Lenin? Really? Trotsky? Are you kidding? I suppose I should be glad there is no Lacan or Zizek on there.

[Anonymous No.3399814]

>>3399802
I'm sure there's going to be plenty of butthurt to go around for not including various people's favorite philosophers. It's not like OP wouldn't eventually come across Wittgenstein and Russel on his/her own while adhering to that list.

[Anonymous No.3399824]

>>3399813
Someone's a little buttfrustrated.

>Lacan
Damn, another name I forgot. Derrida too.

Zizek isn't worthy of any sort of list, unless it's a list of annoying ugly people with cocaine addictions.

[Anonymous No.3399827]

>>3399814
That list has a bunch of superfluous assholes.

I mean, Emerson? Really?

[Anonymous No.3399828]

You start with a fucking introduction book.

[Anonymous No.3399835]

>>3399824
Oh, what a surprise, the post-structuralist psychoanalyst finds the fault lies at anal retentive disorder.

[Anonymous No.3399843]

>>3399827
>Emerson
Well, yeah, as a good introduction to 19th century optimism. Why you so mad tho?

[Anonymous No.3399849]

>>3399835
Just calling 'em like I see 'em, champ.

[Anonymous No.3399863]

>>3399849

[Anonymous No.3399865]

>>3399843
All I've heard out of you in this thread is constant claim that anyone who defies you is "buttfrustrated" or mad.

It's pathetic.

[Anonymous No.3399868]

Start with Plato.

[Anonymous No.3399873]

>>3399843
Implying anything of Emerson is worth reading.

[Anonymous No.3399877]

read wittgenstein
give up
go on youtube
tapety-tap "wittgenstein explained"

that's all you need, I'm doing you a favour here

[Anonymous No.3399903]

Alright OP, get pic related. It will be your bible.

Forget reading the so-called "classics". Unclear language, wrong wrong wrong worldviews. After Russell you can read the positivists and study up on your symbolic logic. For ethics, read modern consequentialism journals. Forget about metaphysics. You are going to need to understand reductionism, physicalism, determinism, and phi of math thoroughly if you truly want to learn about philosophy. Don't listen to plebeians who tell you that there's some "reading order" to follow starting in the B.C.'s.

do the opposite of this

[Anonymous No.3399910]

>>3399877

lol

[Anonymous No.3399919]

>>3399903
pic related?

[Anonymous No.3399922]

>>3399919

[Anonymous No.3399924]

>>3399778
>Hofstadter

hahahahah oh wow. no

GEB isn't in line with most of these guys

[Anonymous No.3399929]

>>3399910
epic memes brah!
fukken saved amirite lol

[Anonymous No.3399937]

>>3399778
Awful.

It's pitiful that you jumped from Thales to Pythagoras whilst skipping Anaxagoras, Parmenides, Heraclitus and Zeno. No Aristotle and Plotinus. No Fichte and Schelling. No Mill. Emerson? Might as well mentioned Thoreau with him. No Nietzsche and Husserl.

>>3399782
>Start listening to The Partially Examined Life
Don't. Start reading instead.

[Anonymous No.3399941]

>>3399796
Not the Anon you recomendet it to, but another now excited Soul.

Thank you for sharing.

[Anonymous No.3399945]

>>3399749
>Heidegger resolved the mess descartes created

Wow, just wow. You must have gone to a terrible university.

[Anonymous No.3399949]

>>3399778
This is a terrible list. Lots of useless fluff, random deviations, and half of the most important philosophers are missing.

[Anonymous No.3399955]

>>3399903
>>3399922
Ignore him. Avoid the autistic, analytical and biased crap of Russell's and get Copleston's 9 volume set instead.

[Anonymous No.3399958]

>>3399949
>half of the most important philosophers are missing.

name them

[Anonymous No.3399969]

>>3399958
Wittgenstein.
We've now arrived to the half-way point, achievementwise. Want me to keep going?

[Anonymous No.3399970]

>>3399865
And all I've seen from my detractors are typical reactions that come from a place of feeling threatened by intellect.

Don't make me psychoanalyze you too, son.

[Anonymous No.3399974]

>>3399708
I'd start with an introduction book into the field you're most interested in. For example, Chalmer's "What's this thing called science" is a great point of entry if you'd like to get inot philosophy of science.

[Anonymous No.3399978]

>>3399945
I don't know. It's a simplistic way of putting it, but one quite valid way of looking at Heidegger (or Bergson, or Deleuze, etc.) is that he reorients philosophy from identity to difference (or from Plato to Heraclitus), whereas Descartes is a towering figure of "identity theory" in the philosophical canon.

[Anonymous No.3399984]

>>3399778
>>3399785
>>3399787
>>3399792
>>3399793
>>3399800
>>3399802
>>3399809
>>3399924
>>3399937
>>3399949

Only on 4chan can someone post a valid response to a someone's question and at the same time completely derail the thread.

So much aspergers.

[Anonymous No.3399986]

>>3399970

[Anonymous No.3399987]

>>3399984
>valid

[Anonymous No.3399993]

>>3399987
Why is it invalid? Because your favorite philosopher isn't included in that list? Because a philosopher you don't like is included?

Grow up, fuck off, etc etc etc.

[Anonymous No.3400005]

>>3399993
Because it is not the "general reading order of philosophy." Not even if there is such a thing. It certainly isn't the list you came up with. Too much missing. Too much unnecessary mouths.

[Anonymous No.3400021]

>>3399814
>Emerson
>Caird
Who dat?
>Jung
>Lenin
>Trotsky
>Camus
>Hayek
>Bergmann
Who?
>Hofstadter
>no Frege
>no Husserl
>no Wittgenstein
>no Quine
>no Kripke
Nope.

>muh analytics

>>3399910
>>mofucka pioneers linguistic turn "philosophy is a language game" complete with a broken picture-based epistemology
Nope.

[Anonymous No.3400023]

>>3400005
And that's just it. You hit the nail on the head. There is no general reading order. Instead I typed out a canonized list of ~50 Western philosophers. Are plenty missing? Absolutely. Will OP discover them on his own while reading the work of the individuals I listed? Almost categorically.

Now, please proceed with fucking off.

[Anonymous No.3400028]

>>3400021
You don't know who Caird and Bergmann are and I'm supposed to hold your opinion as anything other than that of a high schooler?

You can also fuck off.

[Anonymous No.3400029]

>>3400023
Great excuse. But no. There is a somewhat general reading order. It involves a whole lot less names than you've given, and a whole lot more names you were apparently given .

[Anonymous No.3400030]

>>3400023
>fuck off, fuk u, pis ov m8
The state of /lit/ circa 2013.

[Anonymous No.3400031]

>>3399958
Off the top of my head
>Anaxagoras, Parmenides, ARISTOTLE, Zeno, Epictetus, Plotinus, Porphyry, Albertus Magnus, Eckhart, Occam, (I have to admit my medieval is hazy), LOCKE, Berkeley, Fichte, Schelling, Feuerbach, Stirner, Frege, Whitehead, Russell, Ramsey, WITTGENSTEIN -

And onwards onto the Continental/Analytic divide, where one side will always disagree with the other's picks, because they have never actually studied them.

[Anonymous No.3400032]

>>3400028
now who "buttfrustrated"?

[Anonymous No.3400035]

>>3399814
>Emerson
>Caird
>Jung
>Lenin
>Trotsky
>Camus
>Hayek
>Bergmann
>Hofstadter
>no Frege
>no Husserl
>no Wittgenstein
>no Quine
>no Kripke
Nope.
>what is analytic philosophy?

>>3399910
>>mofucka pioneers linguistic turn "philosophy is a language game" complete with a broken picture-based epistemology
Nope.

[Anonymous No.3400036]

>>3399984
>derailing the thread

Uh, no. People are commenting (relevantly) to a relevant reply.

[Anonymous No.3400040]

>>3400031
That said, at least he did get
>Austin
right, even if he is completely buttdevestated about Wittgenstein for some reason.

[Anonymous No.3400041]

>>3400030
How meta.

Fuck off too.

[Anonymous No.3400044]

>>3400041
You are the most immature person ever.

[Anonymous No.3400045]

>>3400031
Is Occam actually worth reading? I agree with almost every other person on your list, but I've always had a weird aversion to Occam.

[Anonymous No.3400046]

ITT: trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls

Never change /lit/

[Anonymous No.3400052]

>>3400044

[Anonymous No.3400055]

>>3400045
No, just read Boethius.

[Anonymous No.3400056]

>>3400045
If you are actually going through reading the medieval, he is definitely worth it, just for the turn of his thought. You won't necessarily mine anything useful out of him, but he is one of the best illustrations of the turning point that was happening in medieval thought at the time, and you can get a feel for that. Never try and read a medieval philosopher's full works though.

[Anonymous No.3400060]

>>3400045
all you really need from him is parsimony

[Anonymous No.3400063]

>>3400035
>2013
>deleting your post

[Anonymous No.3400071]

>>3400063
>tfw it's still on fuuka

[Anonymous No.3400081]

>>3400060
>>3400056
>>3400055
>Niggas don't know about about my nominalism

[Anonymous No.3400090]

>>3400071
>tfw you deleted the part where you admit to not knowing who Bergmann and Caird are because you're still in high school

[Anonymous No.3400091]

OP here, after looking at the huge shitstorm of posts I decided to maybe set more criteria as to exactly what types of philosophy I'm interested in.

So to rephrase the question, what is the general reading order of philosophy for a person who wants to get into Ethics, Social Philosophy and Political Philosophy?

[Anonymous No.3400106]

>>3400091
General order sort of depends I guess. But to start off with Plato's Republic shouldn't hurt.

Eventually you should walk along with Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hobbes, Mill, Kant, Rawls, Marx, Nietzsche

(and others as well, but these are quite essential IMHO)

[Anonymous No.3400114]

>>3400091

Republic and Nicomachean Ethics are a good place to start my man.

A good starting place for the later deontological vs. consequentialist throwdown would be Mill's Utilitarianism and Kant's Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals.

Another popular political standoff is Locke vs. Hobbes.

Some fun reads for ethics and self-cultivation are the Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus.

Cheers

[Anonymous No.3400136]

>>3400028
I googled "Edward Caird" and got less than 24,000 results. His Wikipedia page is 139 words long, and he has no entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Bergmann is even less prominent. And you're seriously going to use my confession of non-omniscience as an opportunity to dismiss my opinion as "that of a high schooler"? Wow, you're clearly interested first of all in waving your impossibly enormous philosophy dick on 4chan. How transparent.

[Anonymous No.3400135]

>>3400091
Start with Plato's Apology, Phaedo, and the Republic.

[Anonymous No.3400141]

>>3400091
You'll want to read a metric fuck-tonne of Plato, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and Politics, then a run through the Stoics and Epicureans, passing through Cicero on your way to the neoplatonics, and then getting to Boethius through Augustine. You can probably skip to Aquinas from there (read a collection), and arguably straight onto Machiavelli. From then the most important philosopher for you is Hobbes, then Locke, followed by Rousseu and some Hume. Kant follows, then you probably want to tackle the utilitarians, Bentham and Mill, making sure to get a really good grounding in Marx (which will require some background reading in Hegel, and the Hegelians).

Then we get the 2deep4u strain of feels, with Schopenhaur, Kierkegaard, and Nietzche vital.

The 20th Century sucks for ethics, someone else can do it.

[Anonymous No.3400149]

>>3400141
20th century Ethics: Sartre

[Anonymous No.3400153]

>>3400141

>seconded

[Anonymous No.3400154]

>>3400106
I vote strongly for this post. I recommend Schmitt and Agamben, too, not because they're epochal but because they're importantly trendy right now. Maybe Locke as well?

[Anonymous No.3400155]

>>3400136
Bergmann's important for the history of philosophy, particularly in analytic circles. I'm surprised he seems less prominent. Neither, though, is particularly well known outside a handful of specific interests/circles. Guy's just being a prick.

[Anonymous No.3400161]

>>3400136
Bergmann was one of the members Vienna Circle members, I think. That person didn't even put Carnap in, which is surprising. I think he is just listing the philosophers that he has read in his philosophy major.

[Anonymous No.3400162]

>>3400149
There's a lot more to it than Sartre. The Stanford site has some good articles, but 20th C ethics gives me a headache, so look it up yourself.

[Anonymous No.3400164]

>>3400149
lol no

[Anonymous No.3400167]

>>3400136
I have no idea who Edward Caird is either.

[Anonymous No.3400170]

>>3400154
Locke is probably in the top two or three most important political philosophers of all time. So yeah, I think he is worth going through.

[Anonymous No.3400171]

>>3400162
>>3400164

I know he's obv. not the whole deal, but he's a good starting point.

[Anonymous No.3400175]

>>3400167
Wrote a lot on Kant, it's mostly through Kant anyone hears of him.

[Anonymous No.3400181]

>>3400175
He sounds way more important than Wittgenstein or John Locke.

[Anonymous No.3400183]

>>3400181
Are you fucking trolling me?

10/10

[Anonymous No.3400185]

>>3400181
And Aristotle.

I do like how there's Epicurus in that list for no apparent reason too.

[Anonymous No.3400191]

>>3400170
Well, he's obviously worth getting to, but it's a matter of putting him on the level of the philosophers listed. Personally I find Locke to be less philosophically compelling than most of those on the list, though he certainly is historically crucial to any account of political philosophy. So is Shakespeare, for that matter, but he doesn't deserve a spot in the pantheon of political philosophers.

[Anonymous No.3400192]

>>3400185
It's like remembered there was something Greek that happened after Plato, but he couldn't quite remember what

[Anonymous No.3400201]

>>3400136
he wrote the evolution of theology in the greek philosophers, I've read bits of it. I didn't really care for it since he spent too much time giving us his opinion. Like with plotinus, he spends a whole chapter talking about how mysticism is bad.

[Anonymous No.3400203]

>>3400191
He's more important than anyone other Plato and Marx, probably. And a pretty damn good writer as well. Read the Second Treatise on Government. It was the tract that laid the foundations for the American and and French Revolutions, by popularising the notion of natural, inalienable rights 0 including the right to revolution against a tyrannical king. I think its the declaration of independence that paraphrases him.

Locke is also probably the most important Metaphysician in the modern period after Descartes, and invented modern philosophy of language.

[Anonymous No.3400210]

>>3400192
I dunno, do you think we're being too CYNICal?

[Anonymous No.3400214]

>>3400203
Hume's at least as important as Locke broski.

[Anonymous No.3400221]

>>3400214
Hume's metaphysics is basically just Locke's, but refined. His moral philosophy, again, is just working from Locke. Hume's so-called scepticism is mostly novel (but not actually scepticism in the way it is normally thought to be).

I vastly prefer Hume over Locke, but Hume's ideas didn't exactly change the world, in the way that Locke's unquestionably did.

[Anonymous No.3400260]

>>3400221
>Hume's metaphysics is basically just Locke's, but refined.
I don't agree, Hume's fallibilism is markedly different to Locke's epistemology in particular.

[Anonymous No.3400289]

>>3400260
>fallibilism
That's epistemology, bro, not metaphysics. They do differ there, but not nearly as much as people think.

[Anonymous No.3400292]

>>3400183
I think he was being sarcastic.

>>3399727
You're right. And so is >>3399978 (and >>3399987 to some extent).

But since I think discussion and disputation are good and since the guy who posted >>3399778 seems unsurprisingly to be out to rustle serious jimmies, maybe we could try and make a list which better approached consensus.

I think we should add in Aristotle, then some pre-Socratics of which I nominate Parmenides, and some analytics of which I nominate Frege.

>>3400031
>>3399937
Oh yeah add in Locke like several people said. And Zeno.
Who should be culled from the list?

[Anonymous No.3400300]

>>3400292
I second Frege. Also, Brentano.

[Anonymous No.3400302]

>>3400181
>>3400185
>still mad an hour later at an obvious troll list

Wow. Just wow. The spergs is strong with you.

[Anonymous No.3400307]

>>3400302
>obvious troll list

Let me guess, you're the one who made the list and are now trying to save face from your mediocrity.

Thicker skin, son. Thicker skin.

[Anonymous No.3400308]

>>3400292
It's pretty obvious that I rustled many jimmies in this thread. Too fucking funny. I thought the whole "You can trust me, I'm a philosophy major" thing would have been a dead giveaway.

You fucks are too easy and too predictable. I almost purposely left Nietzsche off that list just to REALLY get the buttfrustration juices flowing.

[Anonymous No.3400312]

>>3400307
Thicker skin? Kid, I'm laughing my balls off over here. Thank you for making my night.

[Anonymous No.3400313]

>>3400292
We have a list of "all philosophy." It's pretty decent, it's in the sticky.

If you combine >>3400106 and >>3400154, you'll be in pretty good shape for ethics and political philosophy, though.

[Anonymous No.3400315]

>>3400313
Oh, maybe with Levinas and Derrida ("The Politics of Friendship") added.

[Anonymous No.3400322]

>>3400315
Derrida wasn't a philosopher. We need to draw the line somewhere.

[Anonymous No.3400365]

>>3400300
>Brentatno

my nigger

[Anonymous No.3400367]

>>3400322
Derrida is important reading for any philosopher. Whether he was a philosopher or not is a more nebulous question.

[Anonymous No.3400391]

>>3400141
>Hobbes, Locke; mentions NO Berkeley
>some Hume, LOL.
>Bentham? really?

[Anonymous No.3400396]

>>3400391
He asked for moral and political philosophy.

[Anonymous No.3400398]

>>3400391
also forgot to add to stay away from the cancerous analytic

read some; but just some of it.

[Anonymous No.3400402]

>>3400396
oh ok. ignore me then

[Anonymous No.3400408]

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. – Aristotle

[Anonymous No.3400438]

>>3400402
Ok, but have a counter-sage for your troubles.

[Anonymous No.3401268]

Start with Heidegger's Der Feldweg (The Pathway). It is short (four pages or something) and it can be read as the result of the distillation of his philosophical method into a relatively comprehensible example.