Ask HN: Learning about philosophy

I'd add Heidegger's Being and Time to that list, and Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra or The Gay Science to that list.

These are are probably the most significant works of Continental philosophy, and should definitely take precedence of Foucault, who's really the only representative of Continental philosophy (with the exception of maybe Hegel) on your list.

It should also be made clear that plato.standford.edu is a highly biased site that mostly depicts philosophy from an Analytic perspective, where Continental thought is barely represented (or misrepresented).

NOTE: As I tried to make clear in a later post in this thread, I'm not recommending Heidegger or Nietzsche for a beginner. I just think their works belong on the list of the person I replied to more than do a lot of the other people he lists (many of whom, by the way, also aren't good for beginners to start with).

I was a philosophy major at a good (but not top) department. You are getting a lot of advice from autodidacts here that is well-intentioned but, in my view, unproductive.

First, as a general heuristic, if there's some topic (in philosophy or otherwise) you want to learn, find syllabuses of courses in that subject at good universities and figure out what books they use.

If you do this for philosophy courses, you will find either anthologies of (contemporary) articles, or modern textbooks like Jaegwon Kim's Philosophy of Mind. At a high level, these more or less follow the same format (after perhaps some historical prologue). A reasonable view is presented, then in the next chapter (or essay) an important objection is discussed. This goes on for a while until you understand the strengths and weaknesses of various positions. At the end, you may favor one or another, but rarely is there is a clear winner.

Note that philosophy is distinct from the history of philosophy. If you care about what is true, and not the historical development of ideas, there's not much point in reading things written before, say, 1900, or even 1950. So no Hume or Hegel or whatever. In general these texts are poorly written and unclear compared to modern ones. And of course, they can't treat the developments that have taken place in the intervening years. Consider an analogy: you would not read Newton's original manuscripts to learn calculus.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good reference work, but it presents mainly literature overviews, not pedagogical essays. Again, you wouldn't read an encyclopedia to learn math; it is similarly unwise here.

You write about developing models that address "the bigger questions of life," and "a personal philosophy." This is not something that contemporary academic philosophy talks much about, at least in the broad sense. But, in this direction, you might enjoy "Six Myths About the Good Life: Thinking About What Has Value" by Joel Kupperman. There's a good review of the book here: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/six-myths-about-the-good-life-think....

Just take classes part time at your nearest CC/Uni.

Plato’s dialogues are mostly accessible and deal with basic philosophical questions. He was not the first philosopher, but his works are a great starting point to understanding the foundations of western philosophy. I forget the names of each one, but the series of dialogues involving Socrates’s trial and imprisonment are quick to read and thought-provoking. The best part of Plato is that he doesn’t just tell you what he thinks, he teaches you how to think critically and philosophically.

Once you’ve finished Plato, you can move onto Aristotle, particularly his Ethics.

As for “how to deal with bad things,” the Stoics are very popular now. Also check out the Epicureans. I think you should balance out these views with alternate approaches, maybe from Laozi.

After that, you may be interested in the rationalist-empiricist debate. (I’m skipping over a lot of medieval work that laid the foundations for this.) Descartes and Hume are the most readable of each group, respectively, in my experience.

If you are interested, you can move onto questions of “the meaning of life” or however you want to phrase it. A lot of this work rests on the very difficult works of Hegel and Kant, which would take a ton of time and effort to read and are probably not worth it for a non-academic. Kierkegaard is wonderful but also difficult to read. Fortunately at this stage, there are novelists who have read this stuff and put it into novels. Dostoyevsky and Camus provide a good synthesis of existential thought, coming to very different conclusions.

Everything I’ve mentioned in this comment can be read in a year or less, assuming you read at least the major one or two works from each author I’ve mentioned. At that point you won’t have an academic understanding of the field, but you’ll have a solid practical philosophical foundation for your daily life.

The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant is a good if slightly outdated intro. I also read Sophie's World and would recommend reading that first, but you can skip it if you don't want to read fiction.

If you want something that talks purely about ideas without reference to the famous names, Bertrand Russell's book The Problems of Philosophy is also good. It give a very good overview of the major questions that philosophy keeps coming back to without dwelling too much on the history of the different answers. He also gives his own opinions on some of these issues, but you don't have to take that too seriously.