Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

Depends on your age. If you are in college, taking an introductory course or two on ethics and metaphysics could be useful. If that's not possible or realistic, Nicomachean Ethics, A Critique of Pure Reason, and Utilitarianism were the most useful classic philosophy texts I have read, and should be available on the internet and in most large public libraries. Be warned however that all can be quite daunting, companion books could be useful if you do not have a professor or TA to provide context.

For me, the biggest boost lately was Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Black Swan, Antifragile. He's a real philosopher in a sense that he addresses real world problems instead on messing with theory. He's an insightful practitioner who builds proper terms to describe phenomena he observes and follow consequences. For me, his books were not only very inspiring because of its messsage (not popular, but seems very true, using terms he proposes contributed much to my understanding of the world), but set a good example of forming a good base for finding out stuff. He's inspiring, because he has similar interests to me, especially cognitive biases and he shows with his success that you can refuse to do bull*t people do nowadays and be successful. Plus, he's much into Probability Theory, so he's a good choice for an engineer who prefer mathematics over more social stuff.

I would also recommend The Structure of Science Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn), very important book to understand how science works, what are its limitations, how should we treat scientific facts. It also show very nature of learning about world (it's not lineary incremental like most people think). It also emphasize that there is always quite a lot of dogma in science (you need some assumptions that can't be really proved right, only wrong if you dwell on it and eventually fail). If you are interested in modern science belief system and what are stuff it can't explain (according to Kuhn, any science paradigm has smaller or bigger blind spot), it's quite well explained in The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake.

If you are interested in nature of non-linearity of learning, what were steps in forming human's worldview, I think Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West make a good point. I can't say for sure, because I have only started (it's very long, 1500 pages), but I definitely like the guy. :)

A treasure trove of lectures on classical philosophy I discovered recently: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLez3PPtnpncT3FVrZqrLG...

So a lot of philosophical writing references a sort of general canon, at least as far as western thinking is concerned. Other traditions I'm sure have their own details but I can't speak intelligently to them. The field is enormous, and without more specific information regarding your goals it is difficult to pinpoint the classics in subfields that may interest you. That said, there are a few highlights I think you're bound to come across reference or allusion to in many, many other works that would benefit you to get some exposure to. I am strongly biased toward a western analytical philosophy tradition--you'll want to check into things far more broadly than I'm recommending to find your own path. My little list is not meant to be exhaustive and is coming from personal memory of "aha!" moments in my own life, but will perhaps serve as a useful beach head for your own investigations:

* Descartes' Meditations

* Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding

* Hobbes Leviathan

* Kant Critique of Pure Reason

* Kant Prolegomena

* Kuhn Structure of Scientific Revolution

* Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit

* Foucault Discipline & Punish

* Sellars Epistemology and the Philosophy of Mind

* Sellars The Scientific Image of Man

* Quine Word & Object

* Davidson On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme

* Nagel What is it like to be a bat?

* Searle Minds, Brains, and Programs

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [0] has a ton of great summary articles and bibliographies that could definitely keep you busy for a few decades or so. I've never been tremendously into ancient or non-western philosophy, which is a deficiency I aim to correct one day, but there are a ton of great essays there as well.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/

You can safely ignore hegel as I am afraid that if you don't ignore hegel you may think philosophy is useless after you get through 20 pages of any of his works.

Kant may also be a stretch for someone whose new - even the "idiots guide" versions of his works that he wrote because his other works were criticized in his own time for being hard to read

The rest listed here are good - but IMHO you should always start with plato/socrates. I'd throw in Timaeus and the sophist and maybe even parts of republic (at least the chapter involving allegory of cave and allegory of divided line) to this list