Does your list show 0-6 with each group your more preferred philosophers? Of which, which is the most preferred, 0 or 6?

I wonder why it is that people automatically assume that studying philosophy means studying philosophers. I am not saying that is not one way of doing it. But it need not be the only way of doing it. It may be that you want to study the problems of philosophy.

I believe in a God who is immanent in each of us, universally loving, and (unlike any human being or social institution) an absolute moral authority. [...] I'm inclined to think that God, although deserving worship [...] is /not/ omnipotent, and He (or She, or It!), just like any of us, is constantly engaged in a struggle with Its own deluded dark side. [...] I think God's 'dark side' is a real power in the world for evil [...] I [...] believe in the existence of paranormal phenomena. I think that Jung's concept of synchronicity provides ample room for such phenomena to occur, within what is called coincidence. I believe that human beings are minds, not bodies; and that it is a philosophical error, and it fatally damages confidence in human judgement, to imagine that knowledge about human bodies could give a human mind enough knowledge of other human minds, or its own self. I am a political liberal, and a moral realist. (That seems to be an odd combination!) I think animals have rights. However, I eat meat. Contradiction?

Does it not seem sensible to read some of what some great philosophers have had to say about them? !

My aim is, simply, to understand some things about myself, other people, and the world we all live in. To try to have some such understanding seems as natural to me, and as necessary, as breathing - and if I can't do it, then I'd literally rather not breathe, either.

My aim is, simply, to understand some things about myself, other people, and the world we all live in. To try to have some such understanding seems as natural to me, and as necessary, as breathing - and if I can't do it, then I'd literally rather not breathe, either.

In trying to understand self, others, and the world, it would be foolish to rely on one's own unaided guesswork, or on conventional wisdom, or on the opinions of friends, or on science, or on established religion, although all of these (even the last) can be of some help.

I don't know any word better than 'philosophy' to describe the search for an overall understanding of one's place in the world. And, just as it would be foolish to rely on the sources of opinion I have just listed, it would be foolish to neglect the opinions of philosophers who are or were, by common consent, great (even if they made great mistakes).

As I've surely mentioned before, I find it a struggle to get through any books at all these days, so I'm likely to prove a slow pupil. This is somewhat maddening for me, and no doubt also will be for anybody who wants to enthusiastically recommend something for me to read.

The bias towards Western philosophy is shameful; I just don't have any clear idea how to remedy it; also, of course, it is easiest to consolidate ideas which have already influenced me through the culture into which I was born.

Philosophers (0)
------------

Berkeley
Meister Eckhart *
Heidegger
Mill
Plato *
Schopenhauer

Philosophers (1)
------------

Chomsky
Descartes *
Feyerabend
Fromm
Jung *
Sartre *

Philosophers (2)
------------

Bergson
Freud
Kant *
Kierkegaard *
Locke ?

Philosophers (3)
------------

Aquinas
Aristotle ?
Gabriel Marcel
Marx *
Merleau-Ponty
Popper *

Philosophers (4)
------------

David Bohm ?
Bradley
Emerson
William James
Marcuse
Nietzsche *
Rousseau *

Philosophers (5)
------------

Hegel
Hume
Husserl
Leibniz
Spinoza
Wittgenstein

Philosophers (6)
------------

Averroes
De Beauvoir
Hobbes
Machiavelli *
Maimonides

Twirlip:

I would recommend that you seek out books. You cannot get an understanding if you don't read good books. Good books are books that give you the kind of material that is most urgent for you.

I love books. I collect books and I adopt the ones that I find most valuable. For me, it's all about books. And of course, there are many, many different kinds so it should be easy enough to find some that are capable of teaching you the kinds of things you most urgently need to learn about.

Thanks.

I would recommend psychology over philosophy.

I would recommend that you seek out books.

Whether there exist infinite sets? (I forgot to mention that one, except for the remark that I'm not looking to philosophy as such for the answer.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Twirlip
Does it not seem sensible to read some of what some great philosophers have had to say about them?

Of course it does. I hope I didn't say anything that gave you a different impression.

I wonder why it is that people automatically assume that studying philosophy means studying philosophers. I am not saying that is not one way of doing it. But it need not be the only way of doing it. It may be that you want to study the problems of philosophy.

I was under the impression that a man called Georg Cantor has proved there were (and transfinite sets too). It is now a branch of mathematics.

I was replying to:
It would seem vain, wouldn't it, to presume to study the problems of philosophy without studying what the great philosophers have written about them? The question is, rather, what I wrote to give you the impression that I wanted to study philosophers (meaning, read their biographies?) rather than learning from their writings about the problems of philosophy. I took it as read that that was what I wanted to do. This is no "automatic assumption", but a conscious decision.

And I'm certainly not ruling out reading books by people other than the recognised Great Philosophers. For example, I've been dipping into Wayne C. Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of AssentThe Passions. Also, an academic textbook for beginners in moral philosophy: David McNaughton, Moral Vision: An Introduction to Ethics.

But I'm painfully aware of my lack of general background. Tackling Heidegger, in particular, seems like sheer folly without some preparation. On the other hand, do I have to plough through the Nichomachean Ethics first? Aquinas's Summa Theologica? All of Kant, all of Hegel (God help me!), all of Husserl? What do I actually need to read? Heidegger already makes some sense to me, but I don't imagine I would get far by starting at page 1 of Being and Time and trying to plough straight through (not even with a guidebook).

I suppose my question is, where am I less likely to come a cropper than with Heidegger? Plato, certainly - that's a given. Plan A is just to read a few of his dialogues. And Berkeley's Three Dialogues looks very inviting: I'm about to order a copy of that (unless someone tells me that it is essential to read his Principles of Human Knowledge first, but that seems unlikely). But then, might I not have to be already well acquainted with Locke? Even an abridged version of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Hackett) runs to nearly 400 pages (and I'm a slow reader, even when I can manage to persevere in reading at all). And so on.

I like Anthony Flew's, An Introduction to Western Philosophy, because I think he takes a very sensible approach to the subject, and gets into interesting relations among the ideas of the philosophers he discusses. I think reading that first would give you a better idea of which philosophers you really want to read. And why.

May-be Sir Isaac Newton's eso-teric writings are interesting

Well, if you really want to ask me, I would not read Heidegger at all. In fact, if you read him, I think you should read three dialogues by Plato, and Hume's Enquiry to make up for your loss of philosophical acumen as the result of reading Heidegger.

It certainly has its uses. Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority, for example, is a book everyone should read. And everyone should try to get to grips with the idea of an unconscious mind (not easy!). But are you really suggesting that there exists a scientific field, called 'psychology', which addresses (and even answers) the kinds of questions I listed, about good and evil, God, liberalism, animal rights, synchronicity, the concept of a person, and so on? That is very surprising, and hard to reconcile with what I already know (little though that may be). Does there now exist an experimental method for determining whether any entity exists that might reasonably be called 'God'? Whether a person can be identified with his or her body? Whether political liberalism is compatible with moral realism? Whether there exist infinite sets? (I forgot to mention that one, except for the remark that I'm not looking to philosophy as such for the answer.) Whether dreams and coincidences can have meanings? Whether it is wrong to eat meat? Whether aesthetic judgements are nothing more than statements of subjective preference? (Another one I forgot to mention.) If science has advanced so far, it must have escaped my notice. On the other hand, if a 'psychology' which addresses such questions is not a science (how could it be?), then is it not still philosophy?

OK, I'm about to order a second-hand copy of that. One question: the subtitle seems to have changed from Ideas and Argument from Plato to Sartre to Ideas and Argument from Plato to Popper (!), so does this mean that there are large differences between different editions?

(I'm also distressed to discover that my copy of Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy seems to have got lost, probably at my ex-wife's house, like so much else.) :depressed: (Yes, I know it's not exactly an unbiased account.) (Either Russell's account of history, or my implied account of marital woes!)

Talking of bias: I did read one book of Flew's, a long time ago, one of those "straight thinking" books, like Thouless. (Now so long out of print that it isn't even listed at amazon.co.uk!) I remember thinking that his conservative political philosophy rather infected his account of rational thinking. Is his history as unbiased as Copleston's is reputed to be (and Russell's isn't)?

---------- Post added 03-02-2010 at 02:29 PM ----------

I hadn't thought of that, but indeed they might be (although it might be very hard for me to get into the right frame of mind to understand them). Do you have a reference, say, to an online version of some of them?

---------- Post added 03-02-2010 at 02:30 PM ----------

(Sorry, that was a reply to Pepijn Sweep's message #10. I'm not yet very adept at using this interface.)

I have to disagree that Copleston is slanted, even though he writes as a Thomist and within the Jesuit tradition of scholarship at the highest level. He is very careful to separate and distinguish any religious observations about a position from the exposition itself.
EVEN Wikipedia admits that "Copleston's work has arguably come to represent the finest and most complete summary of Western philosophy now available."

Now while it is possible to read philosophy by concentrating on a particular branch (e.g. ethics or politics) that seems important at the time, and garner all sorts of different viewpoints and positions about a particular subject, I am not convinced that this method is the best. Of course, one learns a great deal about a certain subject by reading (generally excerpts), but one is deprived of any kind of understanding about how a particular position in that area fits an architectonic structure that encompasses a total perspective about the world, and how that structure helps persuade the reader that that position makes sense. [Digression and example: Plato's political philosophy only makes sense if one understand how it fits into his educational philosophy and his view of true knowledge as an understanding of the Forms.]

For one of the important things philosophy can accomplish for an individual is to present a different way of viewing the world than he might come to on his own, just as in better times, a young man, having finished his formal studies, would normally spend a year or so travelling the world.

But if you can watch someones brain activity while making a judgement, and use it to prove your point, isn't that the ultimate trump card?