Ask HN: Best Philosophical Books?

The deepest and most interesting philosophical books are generally difficult and best accompanied by some form of instruction. This is true regardless of how clearly (e.g. Plato) or esoterically (e.g. Kant) written they are. There are some good secondary sources that can help but it's far preferable to be able to talk to an expert in a one-on-one or smallish setting. It would take a long time to explain why this is the case, so I'll just leave it as an assertion here.

Okay, that being said, I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from reading philosophy on their own. Here are some recommendations for books and articles that can be (more) fruitfully read on one's own. Anything marked with a + is a secondary source. Ideally I'd be giving you excerpts from each of these in a reader for a course. I'm going to skip some people like Aristotle who should be approached in carefully selected excerpts or with a guide, and also some more obvious things that almost everyone with a college education has read, like Descartes' Meditations or Plato's Republic.

On Fate, Alexander of Aphrodisias

+ Problems from Locke, Mackie

Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza

+ The Courtier and the Heretic, Stewart (on Spinoza and Leibniz)

Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant

Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant

On Liberty, Mill

"Modern Moral Philosophy", Anscombe

"What is Capitalism?", Rand

The Bounds of Sense, Strawson

+ "Rawls on Justice", Nagel

"The Naturalists Return", Kitcher

Sources of Normativity, Korsgaard

This crowd in particular might be interested in some of Frege's work as well, e.g. "What is a Function?" and "Sense and Reference."

- Pirkei Avot, it's a section of the Mishnah (a part of the Talmud), it summarizes the jewish moral thought (well, not for the Karaites Jews, they did not believe in the Talmud), I was born in a Orthodox Jewish family so it was important on my beliefs, even though I am an Atheist now.

- Organon, it's a compilation of Aristotle's logic works, they are the basis for the logical thought of the Western civilization, I think it's easier to read the originals than compendiums.

- Philosophical Investigations, the second book of Wittgenstein, it's dense, and obscure to some extent, but it's really eye-opener, some ideas that influenced the last century are introduced there.

- Proofs and Refutations, a posthumous work by Imre Lakatos, it defied much of my established view on how Mathematics works.

- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a powerful book, it's dense and you can only drag many conclusions from it when you read other works from Nietzsche, which lead to my next book.

- On the Genealogy of Morality, this is for me the most important of the 5 books that I have read from Nietzsche, in the first essay of the book the concept of master morality and slave morality is introduced, some people think that Nietzsche favors the first, I disagree, for me he describes and criticizes both.

- Truth and Method, the classic of Gadamer, some people call it a "postmodern" work, this only serves to show how "modern" some of the "postmodern" were, the book basically addresses how our current beliefs and customs, which he calls traditions, plays an important part in our hermeneutics and how we always are biased to interpret something.

- Epistemic Justification, this book of William Alston is a good refinement if you already know some epistemology, although I disagree with the "justified true belief" definition of knowledge, that is the main theme of the book and its essays, it introduced some questions about the nature and limitations of knowledge.

- Inquiry into the Human Mind, by Thomas Reid is a good read and also a staunch defense of the common sense.