Beginner-Friendly Philosophy Books

for anybody who wants to start reading philosophy the common question is just going to be what books should you start with and previously when I've tried to answer that question what I've done is just come up with like seven books or five books and say regardless of what you're interested in just read these five books and then I'll get a lot of comments that say well what if I'm interested in something else you know you talked about ancient philosophy and maybe a little bit of decart but what if I'm interested in existentialism or different kinds of modern philosophy the problem really is that there are so many topics and eras and figures in philosophy that coming up with just one list is never going to be enough so what I decided to do was come up with a much more comprehensive list of beginner-friendly philosophy books that walk you through different eras of philosophical history so we're going to start with the Greeks and we're going to go all the way up to the early 20th century obviously this still can't be fully comprehensive because there's just too much history to condense into a single video but we can make an honor effort at it and I figure if you spot any gaps in my recommendations you can just go down in the comments and make suggestions or ask for recommendations from the community the very first thing that you might want to do is look for a kind of General overview of the history of philosophy this is not always my recommendation I think diving into primary text is actually the best way to learn however I know enough people want these sorts of resources that I might as well point out some quality recommendations perhaps the best modern resource for anyone who has learned learning about the history of philosophy right now is this series that's put out by Peter Adamson and it's called a history of philosophy without any gaps this is the first volume in the series on classical philosophy currently there are six volumes but I believe more are forthcoming Adamson is a professor at London and Munich but he's actually also been a podcaster for a very long time producing a podcast the same name a history of philosophy without any gaps and his idea is to give a comprehensive history of philosophy for a popular audience and I want to say first that I commend him for this kind of work that he's doing it is not easy to be as thorough as he is being and I think he's doing a tremendous service both to the profession of philosophy and also to the public by bringing this knowledge and making it more accessible as I said before there are six volumes in this series so far starting with classical philosophy moving into helenistic philosophy there are also volumes on Islamic and Arabic philosophy and Indian philosophy Byzantine Renaissance philosophy and just a whole lot more one of the things that I like about a multiv volume series like this is that for some of you you just want to start at the beginning and the story that we tell ourselves about the history of philosophy is that it begins in the classical world with the ancient Greeks so if that's for you just go and get volume one but you don't have to read this series in order you might particularly be interested in learning about Islamic or Arabic philosophy and in that case you're going to want to just go ahead and get this volume the advantages of Adams's series are that that it's comprehensive and it's also very conversational it is clearly written for a wide audience and especially if you're a beginner that can be a really nice thing for some people myself included honestly it's not the tone that I want when I'm reading the history of philosophy but I think for the Right audience it could be a really good thing whether or not you decide to treat the tonal thing as a pro or a con I will say that it is kind of expensive hardbacks are like $35 um since you have to buy multiple volumes if you buy hardbacks it's going to cost a lot of money paperbacks will save you some money but still it's not going to be cheap a more comprehensive and complete series would be Frederick kon's a history of philosophy which is now currently published at 11 volumes ceston was a Jesuit priest who wanted to write a thorough overview of the history of philosophy to help his students but I've also heard to help his colleagues who maybe talked a lot about philosophy but actually didn't know much about it so he wrote 11 books to try to help them out like with adamson's I believe that you could just pick up the volumes that you wanted you don't have to buy all 11 at once however you will face one major challenge with ceston which is that the series is currently out of print I still think it's worth bringing up because you can find used copies if you just keep a lookout for them if you go to Half Price fookus are you're looking online maybe you're going to be able to find the volumes that interest you you can also find whole sets on like eBay and they're not too expensive considering that you're getting 11 books it doesn't cover nearly as much nonwestern philosophy as Adamson does that just reflects sort of the focus of the time in which it was written but if if you're mostly just interested in Western philosophy then it's going to be a pretty good series and it will start you in the classical Greek world and work all the way through the early 20th century I haven't read a lot of them I've looked through them before but I remember talking to professors who I respected who were giving me advice and when they were preparing for their comprehensive exams these exams that you take as you're preparing to become a PhD candidate many of them said that they actually read the copson volumes as a way to refresh themselves and prepare for these pretty intense exams a weird kind of feature of it is actually has a volume about Russian philosophy which is just an area of philosophy that is almost never covered in these kind of surveys and that's just kind of strange considering how productive and interesting Russian philosophy has been in the past the last overview that I want to talk about though is bur and Russell's history of Western philosophy I don't love this volume I have often heard the criticism of Russell that he is not a careful exog of those with whom he's predisposed to disagree for instance with the idealists and so I've often heard the criticism leveled against this book that you actually will learn more about Russell than you will about someone like Hegel if you read the Hegel chapter it's just a warning that I like to give to anybody who might be interested in this book eventually if you really want to know what Hegel said you need to just go and read Hegel this book just like the adome series or the Cobblestone series should be treated kind of like an appetizer that's getting you ready for the main course but you should you know try a couple appetizers before you decide what you really want to dig into but of course the biggest Advantage is that it's one volume it's under $30 so if you're looking for just that one big overview of the history of Western philosophy this is the book for you so next we're going to start walking through through the history of philosophy and I'm going to start recommending primary sources and some anthologies that I think are accessible to beginners so you can just pick the areas of philosophy that you want to dive into and maybe start with some of these books before we get into talking about the Greeks I want to ask you to consider supporting me on my substack that's Jared henderson. substack docomo I recently have dedicated myself full time to making videos and writing and because of that I'm much more active on substack now and I think a lot of good content is going to be coming out in the very near future I want to be creating a lot more indepth content about Philosophy for a wide audience and I want to make it available to the public by sticking it on YouTube supporting me on substack helps me on that mission so when we start with the ancient Greeks I think we find that most of the ancient Greeks are pretty accessible to read sure you're not going to fully understand them on your first read as a beginner that is totally natural but I think that classical Greek philosophy along with some Roman philosophy just is very natural to read especially when it's been translated well Plato Aristotle epicus I think they just have a clearer Pros style than later writers like K or Hegel or I think even sometimes like Hume the the very best book that you can read if you want to start learning about ancient Greek philosophy is this little volume published by hacket these five dialogues of Plato these these five dialogues include the youth ofro which is often in the first platonic dialogue taught in introduction to philosophy classes especially in the US it also includes the story of socrates's trial and his eventual execution uh which is told throughout a series of other dialogues hacket is a wonderful publisher they often they publish reputable translations and really affordable volumes so this five dialogues is pretty cheap if you wanted to swing it you could go and by the complete works of Plato um but right for right now just starting with that packet five dialogues collection I think would be worth your time if you read the five dialogues and like them the next step is to go and read the Republic I ran a little reading group on the Republic in my Discord server there's a link to that down below too and I found that lots of people who didn't have much interest in philosophy still found the Republic easy enough to read even if they had to put a little bit more work to it and they found it really rewarding to work through the number one recommendation of where to start with Greek philosophy and really possibly philosophy in general are those five dialogues by Plato and Then followed up by the Republic of course the second Big Greek philosopher that you probably know a little bit about is Aristotle I am a particular fan of Aristotle's nikak and ethics I think it's just a wonderful book it's one of my favorite books of all time and I think it's one of the most insightful works of moral philosophy that has ever been written you might not want to read all the niik Maran ethics even though I do think it's fairly accessible for beginners except that you have to understand that Aristotle often likes to write very long sentences that involve a lot of subjunctives or conditionals which can make it a little bit difficult to parse at first but once you get used to it and you take your time and you just start parsing those sentences I think he becomes much clearer but if you just want to dip your toes in Aristotle and not just see what he wrote about ethics but see what he wrote about the poetic see what he wrote in the Poetics or in the metaphysics or in his biology then you should pick up this little Aristotle reader from the modern Library uh I I don't have a copy of this volume but I flipped through it enough to sort of know that I think it's fairly good selections and again the point of a list like this and what you're doing right now as a total beginner to philosophy is just to become more familiar with things rather than to dive deep yet you can start diving deep into a text a little bit later in your philosophical career if you want to know about the philosophers who are outside of Plato and Aristotle because there were many other schools of philosophy in ancient Greece then there's this volume called helenistic philosophy and it was translated by Gerson and Inwood it's again published by hacket that is the volume to get I think it is an anthology of introductory readings where you can read from the stoics or from the Skeptics or from the epicurian and learning that Greek philosophy goes beyond just Plato and Aristotle I think is essential I find particularly that stoicism is a school of philosophy that many beginners to philosophy can resonate with quickly because it is so focused on the Practical now the stoics had met metaphysics and logic but they often would come back to those practical themes which I think sort of grounds it for beginners after we have the Greeks we can go on to the Romans now two of the first writings that I'm going to mention were actually written in Greek but that was fairly normal in Roman philosophy in the Roman World Greek was still treated as a language of learning so I'm first going to recommend some works by some stoics or people who were influenced by the stoics and then one work of neoplatonism okay so if I'm talking about the stoic The Works the books that I'm recommending are epicus complete works the meditations by Marcus Aurelius and then a couple of volumes from CA in particular I would say you want his moral letters which are sometimes translated as letters to a stoic or letters from A stoic and then a volume that's sometimes called hardship and happiness uh and we'll talk about why you want those two volumes in just a second this is the volume of epicus that you want this is the collected works of epicus it involves his in idian which is basically a handbook for life and it has his discourses when I've talked to some prominent sort of popular stoics in the world they tell me almost universally that epicus is actually their favorite stoic and many of them like the discourses I like the inidian more but many of them like the discourses so it's probably worth reading this is highly accessible if you know this idea of stoicism in part teaches you to accept what you can't control which is some is called the dichotomy of control that is straight from epicus so if if you're looking for that kind of straightforward practical philosophical advice in your life epicus is the one to read but a lot of people find themselves also inspired by The Works of Marcus Aurelius this is the edition of the meditations that I recommend like that edition of epicus it's translated by Robin Waterfield I think Waterfield is just doing a great job with a lot of annotated translations of the stoics and other Greek philosophers the meditations is written more like a journal some people say that it was written as if Mark celus knew knew that no one would ever read it um I don't think that's true at all Marcus aelius was an emperor he he expected probably that his writings would be preserved but it is remarkable that we have the raw honest reflections of a Roman Emperor who is also clearly a philosopher and is influenced by stoicism I don't think this is your best introduction to stoicism again I think if you're interested in stoicism you should read the epicus stuff however um a lot of people find this book really inspiring and since it is accessible to beginners and I've recommended it before to beginners I want to highlight it and then finally let's talk a little bit about cica now cica actually wrote in Latin so even so he's one of the first Romans that were mentioning that actually wrote in the language of the Roman Empire you want his book that's called the moral letters in in part because they are these short digestible pieces of stoic philosophy if you're going to buy the moral letters though you need to buy the Edition from the University of Chicago do not buy the penguin Edition and that is because or any other Edition really and that's because to my knowledge the University of Chicago Edition is the only one that doesn't take some of the letters out a bunch of Publishers have decided to remove parts of the book I hate that you deserve to read all of the letters that you thought you were buying so buy the one from the University of Chicago press even though it's slightly more expensive another Edition that is published by the University of Chicago press is hardship and happiness and this includes a letter that we kind of read as an essay called on the shortness of life now I've been going through some hard stuff lately that was the subject of a previous video and will probably be at least the subject of one more future video and when I thought about any philosophical writing that helped me the most it was probably on the shortness of life I think that this is mandatory reading for just about anyone even if they tell you that they're not interested in philosophy at all it is just a fantastic piece of writing that is going to make you evaluate your own life and think deeply and carefully about them which is in my opinion one of the best things about studying philosophy the Roman world was not only made up of stoics I I don't even think stoicism was even the majority philosophy of most intellectuals at any time one major school of thought would be neoplatonism neoplatonists are obviously inspired by Plato um but they do make some important changes and um neoplatonism eventually becomes hugely influential in the development of early Christianity a work by a Christian neoplatonist that I recommend from the Roman era is bois's constellation of philosophy this is this is the book that will convince you that worrying about deep metaphysical issues about contemplating the one or the Divine or the good can also be a consolation in times of distress well atheist writes this as a dialogue while he's in prison and he's visited by an image of Lady philosophy and Lady philosophy is consoling him through arguments actually uh consoling him uh by reasoning with him and it's the force of reason to show you that maybe you're not actually suffering as much as you thought you were or maybe actually there's more that you can do than you might have originally thought when it comes to that Edition the penguin Classics Edition I think is pretty good it's the one that I read it's the one that I have uh beat up and marked up and love very very much all right so it's a little unfair of me to only have one section about Eastern philosophy but I do want to include it in this video I'm just noting that I'm not doing this subject Justice I tried to find videos that would make me be similar guides to Eastern philosophy and I have yet to find them I've been looking for like two years and I have yet to find anyone who will make this sort of video about Eastern philosophy uh if they did I would have linked it if I ever find one I'll edit this description and add it there um but I still haven't found a solid list of introductory readings so I tried my best based on my limited experience just know that this one's a little more provisional um I'm trying to I'm trying to include Eastern philosophy because I think it's important and worthwhile but I just it's just not my area of specialization or expertise so when I asked people who actually knew what they were talking about it was the works of Brian W van nor Gord that were recommended the most he has two books one of them is an anthology which is readings in classical Chinese philosophy and then a textbook which is just an introduction to classical Chinese philosophy if you don't want a guide of any kind and you just want to go out on your own and try it then I do recommend this edition of the four Chinese Classics this has the ding theza analex and mes um this is going to be this is going to give you some exposure to at least Chinese philosophy enough for you to realize that Chinese philosophy is not a monolith just as there are many schools of thought in Greek philosophy that disagree with one another in Chinese philosophy it's the same now I'm even more out of my element when I talk about Indian philosophy um but I'm on a mission to sort of learn more about it U over time uh I don't know exactly how this is going to work out but I am on this Mission and when I try to learn something new what I look for is something like this book this is classical Indian philosophy a reader and it's edited by deepo Sarma my thought when picking out this is that I just want an overview I want to dip my toes into a couple of different sources I don't want to start learning about something totally new by only reading from One Source because I might overly generalize about the field so picking up a reader like this is probably the solid way to go now there are many other different types of nonwestern philosophy we could talk about not all of it even would be called Eastern philosophy we could talk about Buddhist philosophy which would probably be called Eastern but for instance I've looked for resources on learning about like African philosophy and I just I'm just struggling to find good ones I struggling to find ones that are accessible that I can understand uh again that's a place where if someone knows a little bit about that recommending that stuff down in the comments would be really greatly appreciated so we're returning to the Western World and we've moved on from the Greeks and the Romans and now we have medieval philosophy now one problem with talking about medieval philosophy is that the medieval period is about a thousand years long depending on how you reckon it if we start with Augustine St Augustine and we go to Thomas aquinus that's about a th000 years and you should expect that there will be a lot of diversity and disagreement and evolution over a thousand years of thought two resources that I think um you should look for if you want those overviews of medieval philosophy one of them is just called medieval philosophy essential readings with commentary I actually use this text when I was taking a medieval philosophy class in my undergraduate days and I did find the commentary helpful and what CLE actually does is he puts the text into conversation with one another by sorting by topic rather than by thinkers so you can see many different medieval perspectives on a couple of different issues another book to look for is metaphysical themes by Robert pasnau this is a secondary text it is not an anthology of any kind but it is kind of a large overview of mostly medieval metaphysics which is very unlike how we think about metaphysics usually um at least the popular sort of conception and definitely the stuff that most philosophers in the academy are talking about metaphysics today it's very different so Pas now has done a great service by trying to write this book to help explain evil metaphysics to a modern audience but if you want to just dive into primary text the person you start out with is St Augustin um St Augustine's work in particular you should read the confessions which clearly has strong neoplatonist influences so if you read it after boethus you're going to see a lot of similarities especially in those later chapters not the which are less autobiographical and then if you want to read perhaps his sort of magnumopus you would read city of God know though that when we talk about medieval philosophy much of it tied to religion for me that's fine I'm not just okay with reading Medi philosophy that's tied to Christianity because you're also going to find a lot of medieval philosophy is tied to the other abrahamic faiths to a secular audience though it just feels weird to read so if you're part of that audience then you're going to need to prepare yourself just know what you're getting into however even if religion isn't your thing it doesn't mean you should ignore a thousand years of philosophical history The Towering figure of Jewish philosophy in the Medieval era is myodes arguably you should just start with a reader which was edited by Isidor torski the book I would recommend if you're interested in Arabic or Islamic philosophy is classical Arabic philosophy an anology of sources and this is edited by mcginness and rean one of the things that's so interesting is that Aristotle is really eventually becomes the dominant figure in Western medieval philosophy and one of the reasons though that Aristotle becomes so dominant is because Aristotle was integrated and preserved in Arabic philosophy and then later reimported to the West so it's not as if there's been a continuous line of history with Aristotle in the west so even though he does become the Towering figure of medieval philosophy it takes a little while because Aristotle's texts take a little detour through the arabic speaking peoples and then make their way into Europe especially into Western Europe eventually typically when we talk about modern philosophy we actually break it up into early modern and late modern with late modern really being the 19th century plus a few decades on either side so the majority of the modern period is early modern and then you have this shorter but very intellectually stimulating late modern period something very interesting happens in the west around this time which is that Aristotle stops being the key figure in Western philosophy science and theology you have to understand that at some point Aristotle was so important that he was referred to Simply as the philosopher and around the 15th century Aristotle's influence begins to recede this is in part due to a kind of rediscovery and a restudying of other classical sources one of the interesting things about the Renaissance and humanism is about how much of it was driven by a return to classical sources from both the Greek and Roman world and so you would see this Resurgence in interest in neoplan ISM in stoicism and epicureanism and even in the Skeptics so really the Renaissance is a very fruitful time in the history of philosophy though if I talk to like sort of my Catholic toist friends this is like where it all went wrong if you're looking for Renaissance Era or early modern text you need to know about a website that's called early modern text this is a fantastic resource there are free editions available as PDFs that look pretty nice too of tons of important works of early modern philosophy so if you wanted to you could read a huge chunk of the sort of most important figures of the time without spending any money now a key a key figure in early modern philosophy who is not taught in philosophy classes very often would be arasmus of reran arasmus was arguably the most famous writer and philosopher in Europe during his life and I want to recommend one of his Works which is called In Praise of folly which he dedicates to his friend Thomas Moore um In Praise of folly is interesting and insightful but most of all it's very funny and it just shows you that old books can just be really fun to read and if you just want to see what the sort of spirit of European humanism was at the time I think in Praise of folly is going to get you there now if you're taking a typical class in early modern philosophy we break it up into three modules the empiricist the rationalist and K so the empiricist are philosophers who believe that all knowledge comes from experience through the senses and the key figures we would teach in a class like this are lock Barkley and Hugh the rationalists believe that all knowledge is actually a product of the mind it's innate ideas and the key figures that we would teach in that class would be deart Spinosa and libnet and then for k k is an idealist which is a topic that we're not going to explore very much in this video for a couple of reasons uh and when you would learn about K in the class I guess the key figure is K there's an anthology of early modern philosophy that is published by Blackwell which is the same publisher that puts out that medieval philosophy Anthology that I recommended before it's really solid if you're just looking for that kind of overview of early modern philosophy it is pricey though it's about $50 um so I've now given you a free option and I've given you a very expensive option Choose Wisely if you're looking for philosophically important writers who maybe don't get put in anthologies of philosophers though there's this little volume called the Renaissance reader which is going to introduce you to some poets or some SAS like Montaine also scientists like Galileo and religious figures like Martin Luther because obviously one of the things that happens in the early modern period is the Protestant Reformation boundaries between science philosophy and theology have never been sharply demarcated and while the boundaries became a little more precise in the early modern period there was still a tremendous amount of overlap of ideas and so it does make sense to me that if you were interested in early modern philosophy you should also know a little about early modern science and theology as well but if you really just want to do primary sources of those three main schools the empiricist the rationalist and K then what I would really suggest is to start with day cart's meditations or his discourse on method dayart is just the most accessible of the rationalist then I would read John Lock's an essay concerning human understanding I recommend lock for the same reason that I recommend Dart he is the most accessible of the empiricist even though I think the greatest of the empiricist is by far David Hume and then for K I would probably start with kant's groundwork of the metaphysics of morals this is a shorter introductory text it's going to introduce you to contian ethics more so than Conan metaphysics or epistemology this is certainly a better book for you to read as a beginner than the critique of pure reason so as we get into the end of the 18th century really around the time of Kant or just after we are now in the late modern period one thing that we see in the late modern period is the domination of Conan philosop and idealism especially in Germany but it was also the case in the anglophone world for a long time however I'm not going to talk much about further idealists like Hegel or fcta or shelling or the British idealist because if we're talking about beginner-friendly books I don't think there are any if I'm wrong point it out down in the comments but like I I like you guys I like you people and I'm not going to tell you that you need to go and read hegel's phenomenology of spirit as a beginner uh that's just that's just advice aside from idealism though you also see the rise of logic that becomes the practice of mathematical logic which lays the foundation for 20th century analytic philosophy that's all in the late modern period and you're going to see the rise of political philosophies like Marxism you also see some of the clearest expressions of the political philosophy of liberalism which has been hugely influential in world history too along with Marxism and fascism it's sort of the three great political ideologies of the 19th and 20th Century so you might have noticed that there is a lack of women on a lot of the this list while it is true that women were always doing Philosophy by and large the stuff that was published and has become hugely influential uh was stuff that was published by men but around the 19th century we started to see some really simal works published by women that I need to recommend and and so I want to recommend Mary Wilson crafts a Vindication of the rights of woman this is an early work in feminist philosophy it's still a gripping embracing read to this day so it's definitely worth checking out along with Mary Walston craft you would want to read a little bit of the works of John Stewart Mill and if you focus on utilitarianism and on Liberty which are both very short books then you have not left the realm of beginner friendly books Mill wrote a lot and I wouldn't say all of it is beginner friendly and a lot of it is honestly forgotten and there's probably a good reason for some of that but um on Liberty which is one of the key text in 19th century political philosophy and then utilitarianism which was which is sort of treated as like the definitive early statement of utilitarianism even though there were earlier utilitarians like benem um but really those works by Mill are key they're very easy to follow um and the arguments aren't too sophisticated in the sense that they require tons of nuance I think that you would just be able to understand them if you were a careful reader but you also I think need to reckon with the fact that in the 19th century we see the most powerful challenge to Conventional morality that has ever entered the world stage and that is Friedrich maa's work and two books I think are really great by Friedrich mea that are still very beginner friendly and those are Beyond Good and Evil and the gay science the gay science being my personal favorite n n is the critic of morality he believes especially that Western morality is based on the desiccated corpse of Christianity and if that corpse continues to R away there will be nothing left to sustain morality and so we need to move Beyond these outmoded moral Concepts it is thrilling it is a terrifying read it's gripping it's bracing it's beautiful and I love reading n as someone even who I'm still a virtue theorist uh I'm I'm still a virtue theorist I'm a theist I've got all of these philosophical commitments and yet I find reading n to be some of the most fun I ever have while reading philosophy interpreting n is actually difficult work even though reading him and getting a sense for him isn't he's a very provocative and interesting and engaging writer that I find beginners do well with but systematizing n is hard even for experts I would recommend the additions of n that are published by Cambridge by the way I I've got quite a few on my shelf just right over my shoulder there n the translation of n's Works has been a matter of heated debate within n's scholarship and so just keep in mind that you're going to see an active debate about whether or not certain prominent or popular SC um you're just going to see a debate about whether or not certain prominent or popular translations are actually be good um so I would just spend the extra few dollars to get the the Cambridge ones because I do think they're pretty well regarded and they're being translated by some really great modern Scholars if you're interested in proto existentialism reading the works of Sor kirkgard might be up your alley uh in particular fear and trembling is probably the book that gets recommended the most um we're going to talk a little bit about existentialism in the next section on 20th century philosophy so I won't say too much about kirkgard there but I think you'd be able to read fear and trembling get a sense of it and feel um okay uh even as a beginner in philosophy but one person that you do need to read eventually in your philosophical Journey if you're interested in 19th century or 20th century philosophy is probably KL Marx Carl Marx is for many reasons a jarring and controversial figure but understanding Marx's thought is probably important for understanding much of what happened in the 20th century both politically and intellectually the book you probably just want to go ahead and buy if you're going to read a little bit of Marx is the Marx Les reader by Robert Tucker it is the floppiest book I have ever owned that's because the pages are super thin because even though it's pretty slender it's 750 Pages here this includes the Communist Manifesto which is like the typical recommendation for getting started with Marx even though it is not a philosophically sophisticated piece it's a piece of political propaganda but you can read a little bit about Marxist theory of value you can read some excerpts from Capital without having to read all three volumes of what is frankly kind of a boring book um you can read a little bit of the the German ideology you can skim through it and you can start to understand Marx I actually don't think Marx is an obscure writer and so beginners could flip through this and maybe start learning a little bit there but I'm not an expert in Marxism uh for many reasons I just have never dedicated a lot of time to reading marks um but I do think you have to flag it if you're talking about 19th century philosophy I've once heard it said that there are three great minds from the 19th century and they are uh n Darwin and Marx two of those are philosophers so I feel like I need to mention them the last work of 19th century philosophy though that I'll mention is William James's pragmatism pragmatism as talked about with cs purse and with William James and eventually John Dewey is possibly the United States great contribution to philosophy and William James's pragmatism I think is the clearest of the bunch CS Pur wrote a ton and I just think and he also was very interested in the field of semiotics the study of signs and symbols and I just think that if you want to learn even a little bit about pragmatism just reading James is going to be the best thing that you can do okay so now we are in the 20th century and this is the area of philosophy that I know the best in part because I was educated as a philosopher in the early 21st century so obviously the people I was being taught were 20th century philosophers or had been taught by 20th century philosophers but we're not going to go too in depth because you go too into too much detail then it's just no longer good for beginners so I'm going to recommend just five books the first book I want to talk about is the second sex by Simone deir the one of the reasons that you need to read Simone deir is that feminism as a political force is incredibly powerful throughout the 20th century and if you're going to understand those sort of important early feminist text the second sex after a indication of the rights of woman is one of the most important it's also I think before feminism got really engaged in later Continental philosophy or Theory you know you could read Judith Butler in 20th century philosophy but Judith Butler is way harder to understand than Simone dvir and so if you're just dipping your toes into that sort of early feminist Theory from the 20th century de buir is the one I think that you'd want to go to it's also helpful because I know a lot of you are interested in existentialism and debir just has a deep connection with existentialist philosophy the other the other piece of existentialist writing that I recommend is existentialism is a human ISM by Jean paulart I'm going to link down to a video about this exact lecture in this little book um by Ellie Anderson who is over at the overthink podcast who is a who is also a Phil who is a philosophy professor she knows sart better than I ever will and I think that if you wanted a brief understanding of existentialism as a humanism you'd be better off just looking at her stuff than you would it mine this is a great little introduction to existentialism and it's written primarily as a kind of Defense of existentialism from common objections and that's one great way to learn about a view is to see how it defends itself from its detractors the next book I want to talk about is something that I've mentioned in my beginner friendly videos before and that is the problems of Philosophy by Berard Russell this was written for as a popular introduction to Philosophy by ber and Russell however like with everything ber and Russell wrote it really just explains ber and Russell's views of things rather than being some kind of Broad and neutral introduction to the subject but it is a really great read and I've actually taught in in directory class where we just read this book first well I had to explain to people that a lot of the views that Russell holds never really got picked up by a lot of other thinkers Russell's method of analysis definitely did especially in analytic philosophy and his emphasis on blending the analysis of language with logic and Mathematics I think was um really it's really powerful it's a great example of it it also has the best last chapter of any book I think that I've ever read at least philosophical books furthering this kind of emphasis on The Logical analysis of language would be AJ A's book language truth and logic AJ a is known as one who kind of oversimplified the views of other analytic philosophers from the Vienna Circle and I have more respect overall for the work of the other writers in the Vienna Circle but they didn't write the accessible book that could be picked up by English language readers or even college undergrads and understood just like that AJ a did that this is a version of logical positivism which held that the only language that was meaningful was that which could be verified by basically by science or by experience so kind of a radical empiricism about meaning itself um I don't know anyone who actually holds this view I don't know anyone aside from a maybe a few others who took it really seriously but seeing where a philosopher can go by taking a radical idea and then just running with it and dealing with all the consequences is a powerful exercise especially to see early on in your philosophical career and the last book that I would recommend in 20th century philosophy and again there are a lot more that you might want to talk about but the last one I would recommend is JL Austin's how to do things with words the reason that I've focused when I've talked about analytic philosophy so much on philosophy of language is in part because it's my own interest it's where kind of my heart is in philosophy or at least was for a long time but also in the 20th century we underwent something called the linguistic turn where almost all methods of inquiry in uh the humanities and the social sciences took a strong emphasis more on linguistic analysis rather than conceptual analysis or analysis of like the things themselves and the idea was that by understanding our language we can solve or dissolve philosophical problems or even problems in other fields you even see this I think in jurist Prudence stuff that came up when people wanted to talk about originalism or textualism those kinds of very prominent uh Juris credential theories I think they're kind of products eventually of the linguistic turn where law becomes a matter of close reading and Analysis of the text J Austin though is not doing logical analysis he's not doing the kind of formal analysis that someone like a or Russell would do instead he's really focused on how we use words and he is help and he helps to develop something called Speech act Theory speech act theory is both influential in philosophy but also became very influential in other disciplines that wanted to use a little bit of philosophy for themselves talking about speech acts and the field known as PR matics which is more about the use of language rather than its formal properties J Austin also is just a really enjoyable writer all right I hope that you get something out of this I hope some of these books are useful if you've read any of them and you think that they're good for beginners let me know if you think they're not good for beginners let me know too or try to fill in the gaps in those recommendations down below all right I look forward to hearing from you and I'll talk to you soon

for anybody who wants to start reading philosophy the common question is just going to be what books should you start with and previously when I&#39;ve tried to answer that question what I&#39;ve done is just come up with like seven books or five books and say regardless of what you&#39;re interested in just read these five books and then I&#39;ll get a lot of comments that say well what if I&#39;m interested in something else you know you talked about ancient philosophy and maybe a little bit of decart but what if I&#39;m interested in existentialism or different kinds of modern philosophy the problem really is that there are so many topics and eras and figures in philosophy that coming up with just one list is never going to be enough so what I decided to do was come up with a much more comprehensive list of beginner-friendly philosophy books that walk you through different eras of philosophical history so we&#39;re going to start with the Greeks and we&#39;re going to go all the way up to the early 20th century obviously this still can&#39;t be fully comprehensive because there&#39;s just too much history to condense into a single video but we can make an honor effort at it and I figure if you spot any gaps in my recommendations you can just go down in the comments and make suggestions or ask for recommendations from the community the very first thing that you might want to do is look for a kind of General overview of the history of philosophy this is not always my recommendation I think diving into primary text is actually the best way to learn however I know enough people want these sorts of resources that I might as well point out some quality recommendations perhaps the best modern resource for anyone who has learned learning about the history of philosophy right now is this series that&#39;s put out by Peter Adamson and it&#39;s called a history of philosophy without any gaps this is the first volume in the series on classical philosophy currently there are six volumes but I believe more are forthcoming Adamson is a professor at London and Munich but he&#39;s actually also been a podcaster for a very long time producing a podcast the same name a history of philosophy without any gaps and his idea is to give a comprehensive history of philosophy for a popular audience and I want to say first that I commend him for this kind of work that he&#39;s doing it is not easy to be as thorough as he is being and I think he&#39;s doing a tremendous service both to the profession of philosophy and also to the public by bringing this knowledge and making it more accessible as I said before there are six volumes in this series so far starting with classical philosophy moving into helenistic philosophy there are also volumes on Islamic and Arabic philosophy and Indian philosophy Byzantine Renaissance philosophy and just a whole lot more one of the things that I like about a multiv volume series like this is that for some of you you just want to start at the beginning and the story that we tell ourselves about the history of philosophy is that it begins in the classical world with the ancient Greeks so if that&#39;s for you just go and get volume one but you don&#39;t have to read this series in order you might particularly be interested in learning about Islamic or Arabic philosophy and in that case you&#39;re going to want to just go ahead and get this volume the advantages of Adams&#39;s series are that that it&#39;s comprehensive and it&#39;s also very conversational it is clearly written for a wide audience and especially if you&#39;re a beginner that can be a really nice thing for some people myself included honestly it&#39;s not the tone that I want when I&#39;m reading the history of philosophy but I think for the Right audience it could be a really good thing whether or not you decide to treat the tonal thing as a pro or a con I will say that it is kind of expensive hardbacks are like $35 um since you have to buy multiple volumes if you buy hardbacks it&#39;s going to cost a lot of money paperbacks will save you some money but still it&#39;s not going to be cheap a more comprehensive and complete series would be Frederick kon&#39;s a history of philosophy which is now currently published at 11 volumes ceston was a Jesuit priest who wanted to write a thorough overview of the history of philosophy to help his students but I&#39;ve also heard to help his colleagues who maybe talked a lot about philosophy but actually didn&#39;t know much about it so he wrote 11 books to try to help them out like with adamson&#39;s I believe that you could just pick up the volumes that you wanted you don&#39;t have to buy all 11 at once however you will face one major challenge with ceston which is that the series is currently out of print I still think it&#39;s worth bringing up because you can find used copies if you just keep a lookout for them if you go to Half Price fookus are you&#39;re looking online maybe you&#39;re going to be able to find the volumes that interest you you can also find whole sets on like eBay and they&#39;re not too expensive considering that you&#39;re getting 11 books it doesn&#39;t cover nearly as much nonwestern philosophy as Adamson does that just reflects sort of the focus of the time in which it was written but if if you&#39;re mostly just interested in Western philosophy then it&#39;s going to be a pretty good series and it will start you in the classical Greek world and work all the way through the early 20th century I haven&#39;t read a lot of them I&#39;ve looked through them before but I remember talking to professors who I respected who were giving me advice and when they were preparing for their comprehensive exams these exams that you take as you&#39;re preparing to become a PhD candidate many of them said that they actually read the copson volumes as a way to refresh themselves and prepare for these pretty intense exams a weird kind of feature of it is actually has a volume about Russian philosophy which is just an area of philosophy that is almost never covered in these kind of surveys and that&#39;s just kind of strange considering how productive and interesting Russian philosophy has been in the past the last overview that I want to talk about though is bur and Russell&#39;s history of Western philosophy I don&#39;t love this volume I have often heard the criticism of Russell that he is not a careful exog of those with whom he&#39;s predisposed to disagree for instance with the idealists and so I&#39;ve often heard the criticism leveled against this book that you actually will learn more about Russell than you will about someone like Hegel if you read the Hegel chapter it&#39;s just a warning that I like to give to anybody who might be interested in this book eventually if you really want to know what Hegel said you need to just go and read Hegel this book just like the adome series or the Cobblestone series should be treated kind of like an appetizer that&#39;s getting you ready for the main course but you should you know try a couple appetizers before you decide what you really want to dig into but of course the biggest Advantage is that it&#39;s one volume it&#39;s under $30 so if you&#39;re looking for just that one big overview of the history of Western philosophy this is the book for you so next we&#39;re going to start walking through through the history of philosophy and I&#39;m going to start recommending primary sources and some anthologies that I think are accessible to beginners so you can just pick the areas of philosophy that you want to dive into and maybe start with some of these books before we get into talking about the Greeks I want to ask you to consider supporting me on my substack that&#39;s Jared henderson. substack docomo I recently have dedicated myself full time to making videos and writing and because of that I&#39;m much more active on substack now and I think a lot of good content is going to be coming out in the very near future I want to be creating a lot more indepth content about Philosophy for a wide audience and I want to make it available to the public by sticking it on YouTube supporting me on substack helps me on that mission so when we start with the ancient Greeks I think we find that most of the ancient Greeks are pretty accessible to read sure you&#39;re not going to fully understand them on your first read as a beginner that is totally natural but I think that classical Greek philosophy along with some Roman philosophy just is very natural to read especially when it&#39;s been translated well Plato Aristotle epicus I think they just have a clearer Pros style than later writers like K or Hegel or I think even sometimes like Hume the the very best book that you can read if you want to start learning about ancient Greek philosophy is this little volume published by hacket these five dialogues of Plato these these five dialogues include the youth ofro which is often in the first platonic dialogue taught in introduction to philosophy classes especially in the US it also includes the story of socrates&#39;s trial and his eventual execution uh which is told throughout a series of other dialogues hacket is a wonderful publisher they often they publish reputable translations and really affordable volumes so this five dialogues is pretty cheap if you wanted to swing it you could go and by the complete works of Plato um but right for right now just starting with that packet five dialogues collection I think would be worth your time if you read the five dialogues and like them the next step is to go and read the Republic I ran a little reading group on the Republic in my Discord server there&#39;s a link to that down below too and I found that lots of people who didn&#39;t have much interest in philosophy still found the Republic easy enough to read even if they had to put a little bit more work to it and they found it really rewarding to work through the number one recommendation of where to start with Greek philosophy and really possibly philosophy in general are those five dialogues by Plato and Then followed up by the Republic of course the second Big Greek philosopher that you probably know a little bit about is Aristotle I am a particular fan of Aristotle&#39;s nikak and ethics I think it&#39;s just a wonderful book it&#39;s one of my favorite books of all time and I think it&#39;s one of the most insightful works of moral philosophy that has ever been written you might not want to read all the niik Maran ethics even though I do think it&#39;s fairly accessible for beginners except that you have to understand that Aristotle often likes to write very long sentences that involve a lot of subjunctives or conditionals which can make it a little bit difficult to parse at first but once you get used to it and you take your time and you just start parsing those sentences I think he becomes much clearer but if you just want to dip your toes in Aristotle and not just see what he wrote about ethics but see what he wrote about the poetic see what he wrote in the Poetics or in the metaphysics or in his biology then you should pick up this little Aristotle reader from the modern Library uh I I don&#39;t have a copy of this volume but I flipped through it enough to sort of know that I think it&#39;s fairly good selections and again the point of a list like this and what you&#39;re doing right now as a total beginner to philosophy is just to become more familiar with things rather than to dive deep yet you can start diving deep into a text a little bit later in your philosophical career if you want to know about the philosophers who are outside of Plato and Aristotle because there were many other schools of philosophy in ancient Greece then there&#39;s this volume called helenistic philosophy and it was translated by Gerson and Inwood it&#39;s again published by hacket that is the volume to get I think it is an anthology of introductory readings where you can read from the stoics or from the Skeptics or from the epicurian and learning that Greek philosophy goes beyond just Plato and Aristotle I think is essential I find particularly that stoicism is a school of philosophy that many beginners to philosophy can resonate with quickly because it is so focused on the Practical now the stoics had met metaphysics and logic but they often would come back to those practical themes which I think sort of grounds it for beginners after we have the Greeks we can go on to the Romans now two of the first writings that I&#39;m going to mention were actually written in Greek but that was fairly normal in Roman philosophy in the Roman World Greek was still treated as a language of learning so I&#39;m first going to recommend some works by some stoics or people who were influenced by the stoics and then one work of neoplatonism okay so if I&#39;m talking about the stoic The Works the books that I&#39;m recommending are epicus complete works the meditations by Marcus Aurelius and then a couple of volumes from CA in particular I would say you want his moral letters which are sometimes translated as letters to a stoic or letters from A stoic and then a volume that&#39;s sometimes called hardship and happiness uh and we&#39;ll talk about why you want those two volumes in just a second this is the volume of epicus that you want this is the collected works of epicus it involves his in idian which is basically a handbook for life and it has his discourses when I&#39;ve talked to some prominent sort of popular stoics in the world they tell me almost universally that epicus is actually their favorite stoic and many of them like the discourses I like the inidian more but many of them like the discourses so it&#39;s probably worth reading this is highly accessible if you know this idea of stoicism in part teaches you to accept what you can&#39;t control which is some is called the dichotomy of control that is straight from epicus so if if you&#39;re looking for that kind of straightforward practical philosophical advice in your life epicus is the one to read but a lot of people find themselves also inspired by The Works of Marcus Aurelius this is the edition of the meditations that I recommend like that edition of epicus it&#39;s translated by Robin Waterfield I think Waterfield is just doing a great job with a lot of annotated translations of the stoics and other Greek philosophers the meditations is written more like a journal some people say that it was written as if Mark celus knew knew that no one would ever read it um I don&#39;t think that&#39;s true at all Marcus aelius was an emperor he he expected probably that his writings would be preserved but it is remarkable that we have the raw honest reflections of a Roman Emperor who is also clearly a philosopher and is influenced by stoicism I don&#39;t think this is your best introduction to stoicism again I think if you&#39;re interested in stoicism you should read the epicus stuff however um a lot of people find this book really inspiring and since it is accessible to beginners and I&#39;ve recommended it before to beginners I want to highlight it and then finally let&#39;s talk a little bit about cica now cica actually wrote in Latin so even so he&#39;s one of the first Romans that were mentioning that actually wrote in the language of the Roman Empire you want his book that&#39;s called the moral letters in in part because they are these short digestible pieces of stoic philosophy if you&#39;re going to buy the moral letters though you need to buy the Edition from the University of Chicago do not buy the penguin Edition and that is because or any other Edition really and that&#39;s because to my knowledge the University of Chicago Edition is the only one that doesn&#39;t take some of the letters out a bunch of Publishers have decided to remove parts of the book I hate that you deserve to read all of the letters that you thought you were buying so buy the one from the University of Chicago press even though it&#39;s slightly more expensive another Edition that is published by the University of Chicago press is hardship and happiness and this includes a letter that we kind of read as an essay called on the shortness of life now I&#39;ve been going through some hard stuff lately that was the subject of a previous video and will probably be at least the subject of one more future video and when I thought about any philosophical writing that helped me the most it was probably on the shortness of life I think that this is mandatory reading for just about anyone even if they tell you that they&#39;re not interested in philosophy at all it is just a fantastic piece of writing that is going to make you evaluate your own life and think deeply and carefully about them which is in my opinion one of the best things about studying philosophy the Roman world was not only made up of stoics I I don&#39;t even think stoicism was even the majority philosophy of most intellectuals at any time one major school of thought would be neoplatonism neoplatonists are obviously inspired by Plato um but they do make some important changes and um neoplatonism eventually becomes hugely influential in the development of early Christianity a work by a Christian neoplatonist that I recommend from the Roman era is bois&#39;s constellation of philosophy this is this is the book that will convince you that worrying about deep metaphysical issues about contemplating the one or the Divine or the good can also be a consolation in times of distress well atheist writes this as a dialogue while he&#39;s in prison and he&#39;s visited by an image of Lady philosophy and Lady philosophy is consoling him through arguments actually uh consoling him uh by reasoning with him and it&#39;s the force of reason to show you that maybe you&#39;re not actually suffering as much as you thought you were or maybe actually there&#39;s more that you can do than you might have originally thought when it comes to that Edition the penguin Classics Edition I think is pretty good it&#39;s the one that I read it&#39;s the one that I have uh beat up and marked up and love very very much all right so it&#39;s a little unfair of me to only have one section about Eastern philosophy but I do want to include it in this video I&#39;m just noting that I&#39;m not doing this subject Justice I tried to find videos that would make me be similar guides to Eastern philosophy and I have yet to find them I&#39;ve been looking for like two years and I have yet to find anyone who will make this sort of video about Eastern philosophy uh if they did I would have linked it if I ever find one I&#39;ll edit this description and add it there um but I still haven&#39;t found a solid list of introductory readings so I tried my best based on my limited experience just know that this one&#39;s a little more provisional um I&#39;m trying to I&#39;m trying to include Eastern philosophy because I think it&#39;s important and worthwhile but I just it&#39;s just not my area of specialization or expertise so when I asked people who actually knew what they were talking about it was the works of Brian W van nor Gord that were recommended the most he has two books one of them is an anthology which is readings in classical Chinese philosophy and then a textbook which is just an introduction to classical Chinese philosophy if you don&#39;t want a guide of any kind and you just want to go out on your own and try it then I do recommend this edition of the four Chinese Classics this has the ding theza analex and mes um this is going to be this is going to give you some exposure to at least Chinese philosophy enough for you to realize that Chinese philosophy is not a monolith just as there are many schools of thought in Greek philosophy that disagree with one another in Chinese philosophy it&#39;s the same now I&#39;m even more out of my element when I talk about Indian philosophy um but I&#39;m on a mission to sort of learn more about it U over time uh I don&#39;t know exactly how this is going to work out but I am on this Mission and when I try to learn something new what I look for is something like this book this is classical Indian philosophy a reader and it&#39;s edited by deepo Sarma my thought when picking out this is that I just want an overview I want to dip my toes into a couple of different sources I don&#39;t want to start learning about something totally new by only reading from One Source because I might overly generalize about the field so picking up a reader like this is probably the solid way to go now there are many other different types of nonwestern philosophy we could talk about not all of it even would be called Eastern philosophy we could talk about Buddhist philosophy which would probably be called Eastern but for instance I&#39;ve looked for resources on learning about like African philosophy and I just I&#39;m just struggling to find good ones I struggling to find ones that are accessible that I can understand uh again that&#39;s a place where if someone knows a little bit about that recommending that stuff down in the comments would be really greatly appreciated so we&#39;re returning to the Western World and we&#39;ve moved on from the Greeks and the Romans and now we have medieval philosophy now one problem with talking about medieval philosophy is that the medieval period is about a thousand years long depending on how you reckon it if we start with Augustine St Augustine and we go to Thomas aquinus that&#39;s about a th000 years and you should expect that there will be a lot of diversity and disagreement and evolution over a thousand years of thought two resources that I think um you should look for if you want those overviews of medieval philosophy one of them is just called medieval philosophy essential readings with commentary I actually use this text when I was taking a medieval philosophy class in my undergraduate days and I did find the commentary helpful and what CLE actually does is he puts the text into conversation with one another by sorting by topic rather than by thinkers so you can see many different medieval perspectives on a couple of different issues another book to look for is metaphysical themes by Robert pasnau this is a secondary text it is not an anthology of any kind but it is kind of a large overview of mostly medieval metaphysics which is very unlike how we think about metaphysics usually um at least the popular sort of conception and definitely the stuff that most philosophers in the academy are talking about metaphysics today it&#39;s very different so Pas now has done a great service by trying to write this book to help explain evil metaphysics to a modern audience but if you want to just dive into primary text the person you start out with is St Augustin um St Augustine&#39;s work in particular you should read the confessions which clearly has strong neoplatonist influences so if you read it after boethus you&#39;re going to see a lot of similarities especially in those later chapters not the which are less autobiographical and then if you want to read perhaps his sort of magnumopus you would read city of God know though that when we talk about medieval philosophy much of it tied to religion for me that&#39;s fine I&#39;m not just okay with reading Medi philosophy that&#39;s tied to Christianity because you&#39;re also going to find a lot of medieval philosophy is tied to the other abrahamic faiths to a secular audience though it just feels weird to read so if you&#39;re part of that audience then you&#39;re going to need to prepare yourself just know what you&#39;re getting into however even if religion isn&#39;t your thing it doesn&#39;t mean you should ignore a thousand years of philosophical history The Towering figure of Jewish philosophy in the Medieval era is myodes arguably you should just start with a reader which was edited by Isidor torski the book I would recommend if you&#39;re interested in Arabic or Islamic philosophy is classical Arabic philosophy an anology of sources and this is edited by mcginness and rean one of the things that&#39;s so interesting is that Aristotle is really eventually becomes the dominant figure in Western medieval philosophy and one of the reasons though that Aristotle becomes so dominant is because Aristotle was integrated and preserved in Arabic philosophy and then later reimported to the West so it&#39;s not as if there&#39;s been a continuous line of history with Aristotle in the west so even though he does become the Towering figure of medieval philosophy it takes a little while because Aristotle&#39;s texts take a little detour through the arabic speaking peoples and then make their way into Europe especially into Western Europe eventually typically when we talk about modern philosophy we actually break it up into early modern and late modern with late modern really being the 19th century plus a few decades on either side so the majority of the modern period is early modern and then you have this shorter but very intellectually stimulating late modern period something very interesting happens in the west around this time which is that Aristotle stops being the key figure in Western philosophy science and theology you have to understand that at some point Aristotle was so important that he was referred to Simply as the philosopher and around the 15th century Aristotle&#39;s influence begins to recede this is in part due to a kind of rediscovery and a restudying of other classical sources one of the interesting things about the Renaissance and humanism is about how much of it was driven by a return to classical sources from both the Greek and Roman world and so you would see this Resurgence in interest in neoplan ISM in stoicism and epicureanism and even in the Skeptics so really the Renaissance is a very fruitful time in the history of philosophy though if I talk to like sort of my Catholic toist friends this is like where it all went wrong if you&#39;re looking for Renaissance Era or early modern text you need to know about a website that&#39;s called early modern text this is a fantastic resource there are free editions available as PDFs that look pretty nice too of tons of important works of early modern philosophy so if you wanted to you could read a huge chunk of the sort of most important figures of the time without spending any money now a key a key figure in early modern philosophy who is not taught in philosophy classes very often would be arasmus of reran arasmus was arguably the most famous writer and philosopher in Europe during his life and I want to recommend one of his Works which is called In Praise of folly which he dedicates to his friend Thomas Moore um In Praise of folly is interesting and insightful but most of all it&#39;s very funny and it just shows you that old books can just be really fun to read and if you just want to see what the sort of spirit of European humanism was at the time I think in Praise of folly is going to get you there now if you&#39;re taking a typical class in early modern philosophy we break it up into three modules the empiricist the rationalist and K so the empiricist are philosophers who believe that all knowledge comes from experience through the senses and the key figures we would teach in a class like this are lock Barkley and Hugh the rationalists believe that all knowledge is actually a product of the mind it&#39;s innate ideas and the key figures that we would teach in that class would be deart Spinosa and libnet and then for k k is an idealist which is a topic that we&#39;re not going to explore very much in this video for a couple of reasons uh and when you would learn about K in the class I guess the key figure is K there&#39;s an anthology of early modern philosophy that is published by Blackwell which is the same publisher that puts out that medieval philosophy Anthology that I recommended before it&#39;s really solid if you&#39;re just looking for that kind of overview of early modern philosophy it is pricey though it&#39;s about $50 um so I&#39;ve now given you a free option and I&#39;ve given you a very expensive option Choose Wisely if you&#39;re looking for philosophically important writers who maybe don&#39;t get put in anthologies of philosophers though there&#39;s this little volume called the Renaissance reader which is going to introduce you to some poets or some SAS like Montaine also scientists like Galileo and religious figures like Martin Luther because obviously one of the things that happens in the early modern period is the Protestant Reformation boundaries between science philosophy and theology have never been sharply demarcated and while the boundaries became a little more precise in the early modern period there was still a tremendous amount of overlap of ideas and so it does make sense to me that if you were interested in early modern philosophy you should also know a little about early modern science and theology as well but if you really just want to do primary sources of those three main schools the empiricist the rationalist and K then what I would really suggest is to start with day cart&#39;s meditations or his discourse on method dayart is just the most accessible of the rationalist then I would read John Lock&#39;s an essay concerning human understanding I recommend lock for the same reason that I recommend Dart he is the most accessible of the empiricist even though I think the greatest of the empiricist is by far David Hume and then for K I would probably start with kant&#39;s groundwork of the metaphysics of morals this is a shorter introductory text it&#39;s going to introduce you to contian ethics more so than Conan metaphysics or epistemology this is certainly a better book for you to read as a beginner than the critique of pure reason so as we get into the end of the 18th century really around the time of Kant or just after we are now in the late modern period one thing that we see in the late modern period is the domination of Conan philosop and idealism especially in Germany but it was also the case in the anglophone world for a long time however I&#39;m not going to talk much about further idealists like Hegel or fcta or shelling or the British idealist because if we&#39;re talking about beginner-friendly books I don&#39;t think there are any if I&#39;m wrong point it out down in the comments but like I I like you guys I like you people and I&#39;m not going to tell you that you need to go and read hegel&#39;s phenomenology of spirit as a beginner uh that&#39;s just that&#39;s just advice aside from idealism though you also see the rise of logic that becomes the practice of mathematical logic which lays the foundation for 20th century analytic philosophy that&#39;s all in the late modern period and you&#39;re going to see the rise of political philosophies like Marxism you also see some of the clearest expressions of the political philosophy of liberalism which has been hugely influential in world history too along with Marxism and fascism it&#39;s sort of the three great political ideologies of the 19th and 20th Century so you might have noticed that there is a lack of women on a lot of the this list while it is true that women were always doing Philosophy by and large the stuff that was published and has become hugely influential uh was stuff that was published by men but around the 19th century we started to see some really simal works published by women that I need to recommend and and so I want to recommend Mary Wilson crafts a Vindication of the rights of woman this is an early work in feminist philosophy it&#39;s still a gripping embracing read to this day so it&#39;s definitely worth checking out along with Mary Walston craft you would want to read a little bit of the works of John Stewart Mill and if you focus on utilitarianism and on Liberty which are both very short books then you have not left the realm of beginner friendly books Mill wrote a lot and I wouldn&#39;t say all of it is beginner friendly and a lot of it is honestly forgotten and there&#39;s probably a good reason for some of that but um on Liberty which is one of the key text in 19th century political philosophy and then utilitarianism which was which is sort of treated as like the definitive early statement of utilitarianism even though there were earlier utilitarians like benem um but really those works by Mill are key they&#39;re very easy to follow um and the arguments aren&#39;t too sophisticated in the sense that they require tons of nuance I think that you would just be able to understand them if you were a careful reader but you also I think need to reckon with the fact that in the 19th century we see the most powerful challenge to Conventional morality that has ever entered the world stage and that is Friedrich maa&#39;s work and two books I think are really great by Friedrich mea that are still very beginner friendly and those are Beyond Good and Evil and the gay science the gay science being my personal favorite n n is the critic of morality he believes especially that Western morality is based on the desiccated corpse of Christianity and if that corpse continues to R away there will be nothing left to sustain morality and so we need to move Beyond these outmoded moral Concepts it is thrilling it is a terrifying read it&#39;s gripping it&#39;s bracing it&#39;s beautiful and I love reading n as someone even who I&#39;m still a virtue theorist uh I&#39;m I&#39;m still a virtue theorist I&#39;m a theist I&#39;ve got all of these philosophical commitments and yet I find reading n to be some of the most fun I ever have while reading philosophy interpreting n is actually difficult work even though reading him and getting a sense for him isn&#39;t he&#39;s a very provocative and interesting and engaging writer that I find beginners do well with but systematizing n is hard even for experts I would recommend the additions of n that are published by Cambridge by the way I I&#39;ve got quite a few on my shelf just right over my shoulder there n the translation of n&#39;s Works has been a matter of heated debate within n&#39;s scholarship and so just keep in mind that you&#39;re going to see an active debate about whether or not certain prominent or popular SC um you&#39;re just going to see a debate about whether or not certain prominent or popular translations are actually be good um so I would just spend the extra few dollars to get the the Cambridge ones because I do think they&#39;re pretty well regarded and they&#39;re being translated by some really great modern Scholars if you&#39;re interested in proto existentialism reading the works of Sor kirkgard might be up your alley uh in particular fear and trembling is probably the book that gets recommended the most um we&#39;re going to talk a little bit about existentialism in the next section on 20th century philosophy so I won&#39;t say too much about kirkgard there but I think you&#39;d be able to read fear and trembling get a sense of it and feel um okay uh even as a beginner in philosophy but one person that you do need to read eventually in your philosophical Journey if you&#39;re interested in 19th century or 20th century philosophy is probably KL Marx Carl Marx is for many reasons a jarring and controversial figure but understanding Marx&#39;s thought is probably important for understanding much of what happened in the 20th century both politically and intellectually the book you probably just want to go ahead and buy if you&#39;re going to read a little bit of Marx is the Marx Les reader by Robert Tucker it is the floppiest book I have ever owned that&#39;s because the pages are super thin because even though it&#39;s pretty slender it&#39;s 750 Pages here this includes the Communist Manifesto which is like the typical recommendation for getting started with Marx even though it is not a philosophically sophisticated piece it&#39;s a piece of political propaganda but you can read a little bit about Marxist theory of value you can read some excerpts from Capital without having to read all three volumes of what is frankly kind of a boring book um you can read a little bit of the the German ideology you can skim through it and you can start to understand Marx I actually don&#39;t think Marx is an obscure writer and so beginners could flip through this and maybe start learning a little bit there but I&#39;m not an expert in Marxism uh for many reasons I just have never dedicated a lot of time to reading marks um but I do think you have to flag it if you&#39;re talking about 19th century philosophy I&#39;ve once heard it said that there are three great minds from the 19th century and they are uh n Darwin and Marx two of those are philosophers so I feel like I need to mention them the last work of 19th century philosophy though that I&#39;ll mention is William James&#39;s pragmatism pragmatism as talked about with cs purse and with William James and eventually John Dewey is possibly the United States great contribution to philosophy and William James&#39;s pragmatism I think is the clearest of the bunch CS Pur wrote a ton and I just think and he also was very interested in the field of semiotics the study of signs and symbols and I just think that if you want to learn even a little bit about pragmatism just reading James is going to be the best thing that you can do okay so now we are in the 20th century and this is the area of philosophy that I know the best in part because I was educated as a philosopher in the early 21st century so obviously the people I was being taught were 20th century philosophers or had been taught by 20th century philosophers but we&#39;re not going to go too in depth because you go too into too much detail then it&#39;s just no longer good for beginners so I&#39;m going to recommend just five books the first book I want to talk about is the second sex by Simone deir the one of the reasons that you need to read Simone deir is that feminism as a political force is incredibly powerful throughout the 20th century and if you&#39;re going to understand those sort of important early feminist text the second sex after a indication of the rights of woman is one of the most important it&#39;s also I think before feminism got really engaged in later Continental philosophy or Theory you know you could read Judith Butler in 20th century philosophy but Judith Butler is way harder to understand than Simone dvir and so if you&#39;re just dipping your toes into that sort of early feminist Theory from the 20th century de buir is the one I think that you&#39;d want to go to it&#39;s also helpful because I know a lot of you are interested in existentialism and debir just has a deep connection with existentialist philosophy the other the other piece of existentialist writing that I recommend is existentialism is a human ISM by Jean paulart I&#39;m going to link down to a video about this exact lecture in this little book um by Ellie Anderson who is over at the overthink podcast who is a who is also a Phil who is a philosophy professor she knows sart better than I ever will and I think that if you wanted a brief understanding of existentialism as a humanism you&#39;d be better off just looking at her stuff than you would it mine this is a great little introduction to existentialism and it&#39;s written primarily as a kind of Defense of existentialism from common objections and that&#39;s one great way to learn about a view is to see how it defends itself from its detractors the next book I want to talk about is something that I&#39;ve mentioned in my beginner friendly videos before and that is the problems of Philosophy by Berard Russell this was written for as a popular introduction to Philosophy by ber and Russell however like with everything ber and Russell wrote it really just explains ber and Russell&#39;s views of things rather than being some kind of Broad and neutral introduction to the subject but it is a really great read and I&#39;ve actually taught in in directory class where we just read this book first well I had to explain to people that a lot of the views that Russell holds never really got picked up by a lot of other thinkers Russell&#39;s method of analysis definitely did especially in analytic philosophy and his emphasis on blending the analysis of language with logic and Mathematics I think was um really it&#39;s really powerful it&#39;s a great example of it it also has the best last chapter of any book I think that I&#39;ve ever read at least philosophical books furthering this kind of emphasis on The Logical analysis of language would be AJ A&#39;s book language truth and logic AJ a is known as one who kind of oversimplified the views of other analytic philosophers from the Vienna Circle and I have more respect overall for the work of the other writers in the Vienna Circle but they didn&#39;t write the accessible book that could be picked up by English language readers or even college undergrads and understood just like that AJ a did that this is a version of logical positivism which held that the only language that was meaningful was that which could be verified by basically by science or by experience so kind of a radical empiricism about meaning itself um I don&#39;t know anyone who actually holds this view I don&#39;t know anyone aside from a maybe a few others who took it really seriously but seeing where a philosopher can go by taking a radical idea and then just running with it and dealing with all the consequences is a powerful exercise especially to see early on in your philosophical career and the last book that I would recommend in 20th century philosophy and again there are a lot more that you might want to talk about but the last one I would recommend is JL Austin&#39;s how to do things with words the reason that I&#39;ve focused when I&#39;ve talked about analytic philosophy so much on philosophy of language is in part because it&#39;s my own interest it&#39;s where kind of my heart is in philosophy or at least was for a long time but also in the 20th century we underwent something called the linguistic turn where almost all methods of inquiry in uh the humanities and the social sciences took a strong emphasis more on linguistic analysis rather than conceptual analysis or analysis of like the things themselves and the idea was that by understanding our language we can solve or dissolve philosophical problems or even problems in other fields you even see this I think in jurist Prudence stuff that came up when people wanted to talk about originalism or textualism those kinds of very prominent uh Juris credential theories I think they&#39;re kind of products eventually of the linguistic turn where law becomes a matter of close reading and Analysis of the text J Austin though is not doing logical analysis he&#39;s not doing the kind of formal analysis that someone like a or Russell would do instead he&#39;s really focused on how we use words and he is help and he helps to develop something called Speech act Theory speech act theory is both influential in philosophy but also became very influential in other disciplines that wanted to use a little bit of philosophy for themselves talking about speech acts and the field known as PR matics which is more about the use of language rather than its formal properties J Austin also is just a really enjoyable writer all right I hope that you get something out of this I hope some of these books are useful if you&#39;ve read any of them and you think that they&#39;re good for beginners let me know if you think they&#39;re not good for beginners let me know too or try to fill in the gaps in those recommendations down below all right I look forward to hearing from you and I&#39;ll talk to you soon

Transcript for:Beginner-Friendly Philosophy Books

Transcript for:
Beginner-Friendly Philosophy Books