7 Philosophy Books for Beginners

so the most common request I receive is to make a video on how a beginner could start studying philosophy especially for beginners who maybe aren't going to University or just need to study on their own and they just need some kind of guide to help them along so this is that video a quick disclaimer while I do have a PhD in philosophy and I actually have two master's degrees in philosophy my PhD institution was a heavily analytic Department with a big focus on logic and language and epistemology and the institution that granted Amendment my first master's degree was a more Continental department and that department focused on Heidegger and Hegel and huseral but also some lots of history of philosophy both of those departments were almost exclusively Western philosophy departments because of that my philosophical education is pretty much exclusively in Western philosophy and that's what I'm going to be talking about today there are many great philosophers who are not from the west and so by leaving them out of a list or a guide like this I am not trying to say that they are somehow deficient or bad I think they're worth reading I'm just not the one who can make the best guide for you about those topics and thinkers so the first thing you have to know is that by studying philosophy it's very hard to actually just be interested in philosophy in general the reason that it's very hard to be interested in philosophy in general is that philosophy asks a lot of different questions and so it's probably best early on to figure out what questions are you most interested in we can let those questions guide the kinds of books that we want to go and read so if you're interested in metaphysics maybe you pick up a little work by Aristotle called metaphysics right or you're going to go look for articles about metaphysics or you're going to look for topic pages about metaphysics to find a bibliography and that's going to be a very different Journey than if you're interested in ethics for instance though you know you might still read Aristotle but it's going to be a very different part of Aristotle's Corpus and if you are like a total beginner you might not even know what all of those terms mean and so you need some kind of book that will gently ease you into the language of philosophy so there are two books that I would recommend one of them is the problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell Burton Russell was a highly influential 20th century analytic philosopher and a logician and mathematician he wrote this book for non-philosophers it's actually written for essentially Ordinary People on the street as part of a popular campaign and yet I've used this book to teach introductory philosophy classes with what I would say is a fair amount of success Russell is exceptionally clear and the topics he discusses in that book are very interesting and there is one chapter at the end about the value of studying philosophy that I think is is a masterpiece it is gorgeous if you don't read Russell's book at least go and read that last chapter it's all about how philosophy increases your sense of wonder and about how it makes your life better and how it actually makes you a better person as like it leads to self-improvement so give that a shot at the very least my only criticism of that book is that Russell had a lot of opinions and he was writing a very opinionated book it is not a neutral introduction action and a lot of his views are a little outdated they they haven't really been taken up by many other people and so it can be a bit of an idiosyncratic introduction but it is worth reading I would just balance it out with this second book which is think by Simon Blackburn Blackburn is a contemporary philosopher he is still living my wife who is also a philosopher is a big fan of his work I'm a big fan of his work and I think that this book is great because it introduces you to some topics that just almost everyone is interested in Free Will the problems of knowledge and rationality the existence of God the existence of the self the problems of Ethics this book will just give you that gentle introduction to basically every possible topic and once you've figured out which topics you want to explore the most because you might be interested in them all right but but you want to figure out what you want to explore the most then you can start looking for more specialized books I do not recommend books like virgin Russell's history of Western philosophy or like a novel like Sophie's World which is supposed to introduce you to a lot of great thinkers I just don't think those kind of big historical surveys or that kind of fictionalization of it are all that useful or worthwhile I would prefer that you get into reading primary text as soon as possible yes primary texts are difficult some primary texts are certainly not suitable for beginners but there are many great primary texts in the history of philosophy that a beginner could start to read and at least benefit from we have to understand that when you read a work of philosophy it is not as if you could read it once and say you fully understood it a book where you can understand it completely the first time is probably not a book that's worth reading and the books that I will be recommending are difficult Works ones that a beginner could struggle through and that a beginner will need to revisit but just so you know like I have a PhD in this subject I still revisit these works and I find new things every time so it's not as if this is something you ever grow out of you're just constantly learning constantly growing constantly being intellectually formed think of philosophy really as this journey or this way of life and not so much as a checklist and and I think that's going to help you conceptualize and approach these texts a lot better to give you some primary text to read I have decided to limit myself to five books this might not be the same five that other philosophers would recommend uh it's particular it's peculiar but I think that all the books are definitely excellent and something that a beginner could read and benefit from so first of all I'm going to recommend the complete works of Plato you can buy an edition of the complete works of Plato for like fifty dollars in a hardback in a good translation fifty dollars is not cheap but if you consider that this is a text which could last you the rest of your life it's also a pretty good investment there are free translations of Plato on the internet but just know that when you start looking at translations on the internet there are problems about quality it can be a little hard for a beginner to assess what translation is actually worth reading I will provide links to editions of all the books that I recommend you don't have to buy those exact editions but just treat those as my strong recommendations for the ones that I would read now the reason I recommend the complete works of Plato is that many of those dialogues are very very short the Republic is very long and so it's a bit of an outlier in Plato's Corpus a beginner who'd said I'm gonna spend say a year reading slowly through Plato's complete works I think that they would be a remarkably different person at the end of that process Plato talks about ethics he talks about he has theories of creation he has theories of knowledge he has lots of metaphysical views he has political views so you're going to get a sample of almost every topic that has come up in the history of philosophy and for that reason alone Plato is a really great kind of companion with one of those introductory texts because you're going to see all those topics that were explained in that introductory text but you're going to see them in a primary text from a great thinker in history I thought for a little while about recommending specific dialogues the problem was that I kept listing them and I realized I was listing the vast majority of the dialogues at least the vast majority of the dialogues that I've read I've never read a couple of them though I've read the majority of Plato at this point I believe Plato is also pretty easy to read he's writing dialogue so they almost read like plays you can act them out with your friends if you had a particularly nerdy set of friends at the very least you can read them like conversations and so they can be very compelling they can be very dramatic but they don't compromise on philosophical Clarity or density either the second book that I'm going to recommend is meditations by Marcus Aurelius the meditations is really a great example of this idea of philosophy as a way of life he begins the work with a few paragraphs just listing what he has learned from his forefathers or from great orators or from philosophers and so already he's saying I've learned to live from these people and here's what they have taught me I just know that a lot of people find stoicism very compelling in this day and age I will I will do a deeper dive into that book for that reason because that's kind of puzzling to me why do so many people love stoicism nowadays but even before I can answer that question I would say read the meditations by Marcus Aurelius my third suggestion is maybe a little peculiar for some of you but you have to understand just how important this book was in the history of Western thought and that book is the Confessions by Saint Augustine now this might be less interesting to someone who is not particularly religious and doesn't like to read religious works but Augustine was a theologian and a philosopher and an orator so he can he can really blend poetry Theology and philosophy in a really compelling way while obviously there are huge religious components to every part of the confessions he also discusses the nature of time talks about motivation and the will particularly when he's talking about his drive to sin he is talking about the existence of God and whether or not one could prove it how um what what is evil for instance the metaphysics of evil comes up quite a bit and it's all wrapped up in Augustine's sort of autobiography and this book is one of those books that I think mostly religious people would Now read they people who are interested in the history of Christian thought but Augustine was so important in the development of Western theology that and you have to understand that Theology and philosophy weren't really easily separated for many many centuries in the west it was only really until kind of the modern period that they started to diverge more and so to understand Western philosophy you do also need to understand something about Christian theology I had Saint Augustine's confessions will get you there and it and it does that in a really beautiful way I would recommend Augustine definitely more than I would recommend something like uh any writings by Thomas Aquinas for instance the fourth book is another book called meditations but this is by Renee Descartes a book that I have mentioned several times on this channel it's a very important book though it's really important if you want to understand problems of epistemology which is the theory of knowledge or of skepticism which is wondering whether it's possible to have knowledge now skepticism is a perennial theme in philosophy um there were the peronian Skeptics in ancient Greece we have Descartes and Hume both representing skepticism in the modern period almost every era of philosophy has had its Skeptics and and skepticism here means something very different than it did around like the Year 2007 or something with like the new atheist movement these are people who really question whether it's possible to have any knowledge at all Descartes will go on though should say that you can you can have knowledge and he's going to ground that and there's a famous line from this work that says I think therefore I am it's it's Descartes idea that is that he has identified a foundation for all of knowledge the one thing that he cannot doubt which is the fact that he is thinking and the fact that he is thinking implies the fact that he exists and then he can build more and more knowledge out of that it's a really ambitious and remarkable project the meditations is also fairly simple to read but it's one of those works that's deceptively simple you will think you understood it you will think you have found problems in Descartes reasoning and then you will go back later and you will realize that you didn't understand Descartes at all it's very very hard stuff actually when you start paying attention but of course as a total beginner to philosophy you haven't learned to pay attention to those texts yet and that's something we're always all developing and that's why you can read philosophy really I want to say until the day you die and it will always be fulfilling and then the final book is uh the only work of political philosophy I will mention aside from Plato's Republic and I'm picking this one because it's fairly short and I think that it will demonstrate where philosophy went later and that is Jon Stewart Mills on Liberty John Stewart Mill was just incredibly influential when it came to the formation of contemporary political ideas of freedom and liberty and it's worth taking those very popular uh omnipresent Notions and going and tracing them back to some of their sources and so reading John Stuart Mill is pretty good Mill is also really really clear he was he was a genius identified from a young age was reading Latin and Greek when he was like four or something he wrote on Liberty he wrote utilitarianism utilitarianism I deeply disagree with but it's also probably worth reading and it should I should mention that it's been argued by historians that Jon Stewart Mill's wife played a strong role in the formation and even writing of some of these texts so you can't really regard them as solo works now all of those books I think a beginner can pick up and read um I don't want to say that that's the those are the only books that a beginner could pick up and read and if you think that I've missed something important or you can just think of supplemental Works to add leave a comment and just tell me what would you suggest to a beginner and also if you think hey um there's a topic that really really interests you and that I didn't address at all in this video well maybe I can give you some help too so leave a comment down there as well a beginner's guide to philosophy is a really General topic and I think that we would benefit from going a little bit deeper and more particular in the future maybe I could make some more topical videos like how to start studying metaphysics or ethics or epistemology if that's something that you would be interested in also let me know I hope this helps you though start your philosophical Journey it's a beautiful thing to do and it's something you can do for the rest of your life so don't wait just go and get started and happy reading

Channel: Jared Henderson

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Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2022