A Philosopher Every Programmer Should Know: Susanne K. Langer

EDIT: Maybe I'm going overboard here in attributing to philosophy in general what is only true of epistemology, my favorite branch of it. In that case, I should have been referring to "epidemiological justification".

As for the article, try the whole thing before you judge it (it's not very long at all). Quine is not being frivolous, and he takes pains to explain exactly what he means as the piece goes on.

Asking what philosophy book to read is sort of like asking which math book to read.

The answer really depends on what you already know. You're probably not going to recommend that someone completely unfamiliar with math read a calculus textbook, much less an advanced math monogram.

Likewise, it's probably not a good idea to recommend that someone unfamiliar with philosophy read Heidegger. You're probably going to get some very basic recommendations.

Even then, you probably won't get much out of reading them without taking a class on the subject in which someone with vastly more experience and understanding than you can guide you and your peers to gain a greater appreciation of what you read, and to stimulate critical thought and discussion about the books you are reading. That's really the ideal setting for getting introduced to philosophy: as part of a class led by a talented teacher, and with some intelligent peers open to talking about the issues.

That said, you should not allow yourself to be misled in to thinking the toe that you dip in to the ocean of philosophy is going to be in any way representative, much less the "best" that philosophy has to offer.

Even were you to read a "great" book when you just start out, you're probably not going to understand much of it or get much out of it on your first go. Even professional philosophers go back again and again to classics, as they get more out of them each time, with the benefit of greater understanding, and being able to apply the insight and methods they've gained in the meantime to the books they've already read.

What I'm trying to say is that reading philosophy in a way that does justice to the topic is a lifetime endeavor. A one-time bite at any philosophy book just isn't going to give you even an inkling of an idea of what it's about.

Still, for an introduction to Western philosophy, you probably won't be able to do better than starting with the Socratic Dialogues. They are the source and the foundation of much of Western philosophy that's come afterwards, and you really can't properly understand most of the rest without reading this source.

I would strongly encourage you to read them as part of an Ancient Philosophy class at a university, for the reasons mentioned a few paragraphs earlier. Unfortunately, the philosophy departments of universities in the English speaking world tend to be dominated by the Analytic school of philosophy. So what you'll get from class will probably be biased in that direction. Just keep in mind that there are other ways of approaching and understanding the issues you read about than the ones you are exposed to in class.

Yes, the Nazis looked for "intellectual" support, but you're ignoring that they got it. If you want to argue causality....

> They raped Nietzsche's philosophy until it fit their needs, with the help of his decadent Missgeburt of a sister.

Ah yes, the "Nazis were unpopular in Germany" defense.....

>Heidegger is perhaps a much more problematic case, but also not a matter of black-and-white.

Heidegger is "problematic" only if you choose to ignore his actual positions at the time in favor of post WWII revisionism. (In other news, early 1900s progressives were eugenicists and segregationists.)

We can argue about whether that alone make Nazism popular with philosophers of that era or they came to that support on their own, but to deny that there was widespread agreement is simply absurd.

To be fair, Nazism was very popular across all social classes in the 30s, so the intellectual support wasn't way outside the mainstream. My point is that isn't an example where the intellectual class got it right. Do you want to blame that on the influence of the rest of society? (They didn't at the time, but surely we shouldn't believe what philosophers say about their reasons.)