The first 7 philosophy texts you should read

the reason that I think you should start with Plato and not his student Aristotle is not that Plato is more important or more influential than Aristotle but just that Aristotle is weird basically everything Aristotle wrote goes like this let us consider question X I shall Begin by spending 20 Pages reviewing the implausible and incomprehensible theories of X put forward by no one you've ever heard of by contrast almost everything Plato wrote is a dialogue it's a conversation between two people the dialogue that I'm going to recommend you read first is euthyphro written by Plato around the year 399 BCE it's a conversation between Socrates and euthyphro Socrates asks youthifo what is virtue and euthyphro puts forward a theory of morality a theory of what makes certain actions right and other actions wrong and the theory is that the right actions are the ones that are loved by the gods if you think it's implausible that there are many gods you could instead read this as a theory about one God the morally right actions are those actions that are commanded or approved of or loved by God and Socrates asks the following question are those actions good because God loves them or does God choose to love them because they're already good Socrates asked this question 400 years before the year zero and still to this day there is no satisfying agreed upon good answer okay let's Jump Ahead in time two thousand and forty years to 1641 in France where we encounter Renee Descartes what do you think of my drawing of Descartes I got his mustache I included that that's good I know I'm skipping a lot by jumping from Plato to Descartes but this is a list of the first things that one could or should read in philosophy it's not the last things and there's a lot that I have to leave out I'm recommending the meditations on first philosophy which Descartes published in Latin in 1641. there are six chapters though the chapters are called meditations in meditation one Descartes explains the project his plan is to figure out what he can know for sure by doubting everything that he believes and building up his beliefs from a firm certain foundation in meditation too he argues that he has found something that he knows to be true for certain that he himself exists you may have heard the famous Latin phrase kojito Ergo Sun I think therefore I am that phrase does not appear in this work but this is the work you need to read to understand what's going on with that famous phrase in meditation 3 Descartes offers an argument that's meant to prove Beyond any doubt that God exists it's a pretty weird confusing argument and if you're not reading the meditations as part of a formal course with an instructor then you probably want to watch my video about meditation 3 which I will link to or something then you should skip meditation for it's a sort of interesting discussion of a problem of air which is modeled off of the problem of evil which is a famous problem in theology but it's too confusing and you don't need it this is your first time through just skip meditation four meditation five is a different proof for the existence of God and meditation six is a an argument that's meant to prove that all of our normal beliefs about the world that we have hands that there are trees and buildings and rocks and so forth all of those things are true as well the next thing you should read is just a few sentences long and it's by a philosopher who's much less famous than Plato or Descartes her name is Princess Elizabeth of bohemia and in these few sentences she introduces a problem the foundation for the central debate in the philosophy of mind it's called The Mind Body problem this happens in a letter that she wrote to Descartes in May of 1643. instead of a drawing of Princess Elizabeth I have drawn a big oval and maybe I'll edit in a picture of her this is what she looked like and she wrote a letter to Descartes I beg of you to tell me how the human soul can determine the movement of the animal spirits in the body so as to perform voluntary acts being as it is merely a conscious substance the it in that sentence is the soul and the animal spirits were just the thing in the body the physical thing that Descartes thought you know moved your body she's asking this question how is it possible for an immaterial non-physical non-spatial mind or soul to move a physical body this is just a staggeringly good example of a clear precise question that cuts to the heart of a philosophical Theory and sort of Blows the whole thing up in one move next David Hughes dialogues concerning natural religion there's Hume he was the greatest philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment and that's what he looked like I know some of you are going to be asking why didn't you pick David hume's 1739 A Treatise on human nature it's his Masterpiece well yes but it is not his most approachable work it's long no one read it when it was originally published it's not the first thing by David Hume that I think one should read the point of reading a philosophical work on topic X is to understand topic X to come to some insights about it the point is not to feel like a smarty pants or to convince other people or to convince yourself that you're sophisticated or cool if you have that cringe-worthy mentality toward philosophy then you won't learn anything and everyone will think that you're very annoying this is also why I won't recommend that someone who's somewhat new to philosophy start by reading kant's critique of pure reason it's 700 pages long and it is utterly incomprehensible by contrast hume's dialogues concerning natural religion published originally in 1779 are totally readable they include very clear discussions of the argument from design that's a very old and very famous argument that is meant to show that God or some kind of intelligent designer exists and these dialogues also include a very clear discussion of what later came to be called the problem of evil this is a problem that very much seems at least on the surface to show that no all-knowing all-powerful and all-good God could possibly exist the discussion of these issues is clear but subtle and utterly riveting you should read it the next text that I want to recommend is a paper written by H.P Grice in like the late 60s or early 70s or something like that it's called logic and conversation here's a famous example that Grice gives to illustrate the problem the puzzle the question that he's after in this paper suppose that there's a student who's applying for admission to a PhD program in philosophy and one of their professors who've taught them when they were an undergraduate is asked if they're a good student and that professor says that they have excellent handwriting and that's it that's all they say they've uttered a sentence Jesse has excellent handwriting but this sentence is not used to mean the normal thing that it normally means this sentence is used in this context to convey the idea that this student Jesse on making up the name is actually bad at philosophy is not well suited to be a PhD student in this program how is that possible like these words have specific meanings how can you take these words which have established meanings and use them to mean something totally different and if you are using them to mean something totally different how does the person who's listening know that except the person who's listening does know everyone understands what's going on in this context and it's kind of a puzzle as to how Grace totally answers this question I remember reading this paper in the library at Oxford and just being blown away by a clear introduction of a truly puzzling puzzle and just totally the right answer you could quibble with the details of grice's solution to this puzzle but the general thrust of the solution which which just must be correct is that language and conversation in general are a Cooperative Enterprise and it is only by assuming that the person that you're talking to is cooperating in almost all instances that we can use a sentence that means one thing to communicate something very very different the next thing that I want to recommend are chapters 2 3 and 4 of HLA Hearts seminal 1961 book the concept of law this book is the central work in 20th and 21st century Philosophy of Law but these three chapters in specific are just a really great example of presenting the view of one's opponent in Chapter 2 Hart presents some other guy's theory of law it's John Austin's Theory and it's a theory based on the Notions of sanction and habit it's a clear presentation of this other guy's theory of Law and when you read it you think oh maybe this is right and then in chapters three and four he just dismantles that theory and it's a great clear example of what a counter example to a theory looks like if you don't know what a counter example is I have a video that explains that philosophical tool which I will link to somewhere don't worry you can skip chapter one I teach Philosophy of Law almost every semester here at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro I skipped chapter one every other Professor that's teaching Philosophy of Law skips chapter one just start with chapter two the final text that I would recommend on the list of the things that everyone should read first to get a taste not just for the history of philosophy but for the activity of doing philosophy is Peter singer's 1970 whatever paper famine affluence and morality this is arguably the seminal inaugural paper in a whole field of philosophy called applied ethics and it is utterly readable if you understand what's going on in this paper which you will because it's a clear paper then it will just shatter your whole ethical worldview singer says I shall argue that the way people in relatively affluent countries react to a situation like that in Bengal he's talking about a famine in Bengal where people are dying because there's not enough food to eat this was in the 70s and now there are different famines the moral reaction that most people in affluent countries have to the of death and starvation of other people in other places in the world cannot be justified indeed the whole way we look at moral issues our moral conceptual scheme needs to be altered and with it the way of life that has come to be taken for granted in our society this is the kind of philosophical paper that not only is a model for how clear philosophy should be done but is also the kind of paper that like will make it hard for you to sleep for several days after reading it maybe that's not a selling point like maybe I shouldn't tell you that before you read it and some people won't want to read it then let me just be clear that I don't think that this is a comprehensive list it doesn't include literature from all over the world this is just a good place to start

Channel: Jeffrey Kaplan

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Length: 11min 54sec (714 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2022