There are many great first year lecture series by a variety of universities that are pretty good.
probably the one I enjoyed the most was "Justice" which you can find here http://justiceharvard.org/justicecourse/ ( the site seems to be super snazzy now, was a bit more basic years ago when I first saw it )
But there's a lot more indepth lecture series out there, I'd sugest starting with the greeks / socrates / plato / aristotle.
Whether you agree with her philosophical theory or not, she makes a brilliant case for the layman needing philosophy (for life on earth).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Philosophy_%28Cop...
There was a famous debate between Russell and Copleston broadcast over radio by the BBC (1948):
I would start with "Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction" by Edward Craig, see what catches your interest, and go from there.
Also +1 for Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy".
The History of Philosophy Without any Gaps is also decent.
Also, white paper looks yellow under a yellow light because it white. White is the color of the paper.
They don't even mention Heidegger, the most influential 20th Century philosopher in the Continental tradition. Being and Time is his most influential book.
They don't mention Sartre, who probably comes in 2nd. Being and Nothingness is his most famous book (you can tell the Heidegger influence just from the title).
Their token Continentals are Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, and Ricouer... out of a list of 30.
Update: Looks like I misread the title of the article as being about philosophers from 1900-2000, but it's from 1950-2000. Sorry. My bad.
I swear I've looked up the difference between analytic vs. continental multiple times and never understand the difference.
> Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject.
Analytic philosophy is the tradition that grew out of this reaction, and focuses on precision in language and logic, with a particular focus on the philosophy of language because it turns out it's hard to map natural language to the kinds of rigorous logical propositions that analytic philosophers prefer. Continental philosophy is the tradition that rejected this critique and burrowed even deeper down the path they were going, eventually inventing postmodernism and poststructuralism and other new and exciting forms of what analytic philosophers would consider mumbo-jumbo.
Continental philosophy: we care about unexpressed human experience, morality, insight and meaning (or its lack thereof). We can be as poetic as we think suits the subject matter in inquiring for those things.
Analytic philosophy comes from the British empiricists (think Hume) and idealists (think McTaggart), and values precision of language and relation of ideas to concrete particulars (e.g., logic). Continental philosophy comes from the phenomenology of the German idealists (think Kant, then Hegel) and values accounts that accord closely with human experience (contributing to the common complaint that continental prose is pointlessly obscure).
The analytic tradition is dominant in American and British philosophy departments, while the continental tradition remains somewhat popular in Germany and enjoys some traction in American liberal arts as a whole.
To make things slightly confusing, philosophers are frequently exchanged between the traditions: Kant has experienced a resurgence in interest among analyticists following Rawls' work, and research in moral psychology has been worked into contemporary critical theory.
"Continental philosophy" is a continuation of the other 99.9% of philosophy as it existed before 1880.
Continental philosophers are harder to characterize in a few words (at least for me), because in a sense they use more diverse methods when seeking insights. Many of their works are at the same time philosophical and sociological. For example, Habermas states that truth is a social construct, and explains how society constructs their truths.
I'd say both schools contribute useful insights to philosophy. Read analytics to deepen your understanding of language and scientific method, and to refine your 'fallacy detector'. Read continentals to deepen your understanding of human behavior and social structures. And this is of course a huge simplification, because a) the distinction between these schools is purely artificial, and b) philosophers of both schools have contributed significantly to all areas of philosophy.
You'd be surprised, since Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, and all kind of post-modernists and late-20th-century continental philosophers also had made inroads in US universities.
Perhaps more on other humanities departments (e.g. social and gender studies) rather than philosophy?
Levinas, Foucault, and Derrida were all influenced by Heidegger. You would be hard pressed to find a 20th Century Contintenal philosopher who wasn't.
Heidegger was hugely influential, and also a Nazi (which should not be overlooked, but it should also not be used to try to erase his contribution to philosophy).
Well, that's not how the European history of 20th century philosophy (or, for that matter, most celebrated European philosophers) see this.
See this article which was posted here a few years ago: Wittgenstien for Programmers http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20110219T1113Z.html
When Wittgenstein said "Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent." He meant it in a respectful way, as a defense of religious mysticism. The Logical Positivists assumed that attitude in the exact opposite direction: to attack religious mysticism and religion in general. They labeled it as meaningless nonsense. No wonder Wittgenstein wanted nothing to do with them, despite their (misplaced and misunderstood) hero-worship of him.
I'm really not sure what any programmer would get out of reading the Tractatus... at least not for anything programming-related.
[1] - The full title being the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", just in case you missed that it was supposed to be logical and philosophical. Wittgenstein starts by labeling some of his statements as "axioms" and constructing what might appear as derivations.. which don't actually follow. On superficial inspection it might look like some kind of logical treatise, but that impression vanishes if you actually try to read and make sense of it.
If you have some time to kill, you can read what I wanted to say here:
https://pastebin.com/raw/YukL4uc5
(apologies for any obvious/stupid mistakes, been a long day)
Except by Wittgenstein himself, who largely renounced this philosophical project in the second half of his career. Still essential reading, though.
However it might be the case that what he wrote in the Tractatus is still relevant for formal languages, such as programming.
A couple of things about this. Wittgenstein famously did not write much on ethics. A couple of lines in the Tractatus, no passages that I know of in Philosophical Investigations (not saying there are none, I just don't know of them).
He did give a lecture on ethics to the Heretic Society in Cambridge in 1929. It is short, here is the transcript: http://www.geocities.jp/mickindex/wittgenstein/witt_lec_et_e... Well worth the read, I don't think his position evolved from this.
I would rather say that the subject matter of Philosophical Investigations is Philosophy of Language and also Epistemology. To call it "hit or miss" is nowhere near the consensus view among philosophers, in fact one is compelled to say that it is the direct opposite of the view that contemporary philosophers hold. Given that the list in the article is rank-ordered and Philosophical Investigations is #1 should clue you into its status. Easily in the top three most important books in philosophy in the last 100 years.
The problem is that logical atomism isn't actually tenable, as many (not least W himself) have pointed out. But you've actually read the Tractatus and PI, so I'm surprised to hear you still supporting the Tractatus. A full discussion of why logical atomism is wrong is, of course, out of scope here, but essentially, the problem is that there are no logical atoms.
As inspiration for programmers, the Tractatus is probably fine. But as the only take on philosophy of language/epistemology that a person might ever read, it is at least very far from where modern thinking is at.
A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring.
I doubt there's an objective measure, but I feel like how to be happy and to live a good life are among of the main goals of philosophy. Are they? Did many of them succeed?
> He habitually dined well, at a good restaurant; he had many trivial love-affairs, which were sensual but not passionate; he was exceedingly quarrelsome and unusually avaricious. ... It is hard to find in his life evidences of an virtue except kindness to animals ... In all other respects he was completely selfish. It is difficult to believe that a man who was profoundly convinced of the virtue of asceticism and resignation would never have made any attempt to embody his convictions in his practice.
Afaik Socrates was saying something about philosophy being the quest for finding out what is "good" and then trying to "reach" it, so nothing directly related to happiness. I'm not a philosopher by any means but I found this description about what philosophy should be as the one closest to the truth. Also, as a pseudo-Kantian I also think that philosophy should have the task of teaching us about our sense of "duty" when pursuing said "good".
Putting the two above concepts together you could say that "inquiring what good is and then trying to pursue and reach it out of a sense of innate duty" is what a "good life" should be, so in that respect I think you're correct.
> As an addendum, Ho adds that “most of the works on the list are analytic philosophy,”...
Interesting that analytic philosophy is both seen as being the most harmful yet also most prestigious.
I graduated from the philosophy program with a profound distaste for analytical philosophy, believing it to be pedantic BS that really only shows the limitations of whatever language you’re using for discourse. Hence the abstraction into symbolic logic, but symbolic logic only works as a pure abstraction: any link to the real world becomes limited by the language constructs you can use to describe the world, the subject/object relationships, etc.
There are many languages and writing systems in the world. I expect the peculiarities of each to rear its head when attempting to use them to do “real” philosophy (I honestly view most of the analytical offshoots of philosophy as mathematics; somewhat telling, the university disagreed and forced all CS majors to take logic classes in the philosophy department).
>that really only shows the limitations of whatever language you’re using for discourse.
It's not entirely clear that natural languages are more powerful than formal ones (in terms of stating true facts,) but what is easy to see is that English makes it far easier to appear to prove something you haven't. That gives it an illusion of power.
Ironically Neitzsche had something to say about this: you've got the small claims that seem pedantic and insignificant, and the grand claims that explain the meaning of it all, but in the end the small claims can be made so much more certain than the grand ones that they're what you want to base everything off of. Viscosity of water vs. angels on the head of a pin.
I also think this is part of the reason why philosophers like John Dewey aren't as well regarded as they should be and/or used to be.
There's a whole wide world out there.
> That is, western philosophy was consciously created to oppose religious dogma and scientific reductionism,
Where are you pulling this stuff from? Western philosophy traces its roots to mainly Catholic (and some Islamic) philosophers, many of whom were very religious. These philosophers often drew upon earlier philosophers (the Catholic Church is probably the reason why Aristotelian philosophy survives to the present day). These earlier philosophers were also religious.
The separation between philosophy and religion (And between philosophy and science for that matter) is something that has only arisen in the present day, and -- in my opinion at least -- is unlikely to last very long, if history is any indication.
> In other words, part of what makes philosophy "philosophy" is that it insists that it's something different than religious or scientific theory.
These are your own thoughts and opinions on the subject. You are unnecessarily antagonizing science, philosophy, and religion, and I think this perhaps stems from the very western desire to segregate and classify everything.
Along with Popper and Kuhn's works on that list, read Larry Laudan's "Progress and its problems" and "Science and Relativism: some key controversies in the philosophy of science". This goes under Philosophy of Sciences.
“After Virtue” is a legit recommendation.
> Along with Popper and Kuhn's works on that list, read Larry Laudan's "Progress and its problems" and "Science and Relativism: some key controversies in the philosophy of science". This goes under Philosophy of Sciences.
I demur. Comparing two giants of the Philosophy of Science (nb: not plural) to a relative unknown. I would recommend instead “Against Method” (1975) by Paul Feyerabend or “The Sleepwalkers” (1959) by Arthur Koestler.
I say this because of what I personally like to think of as 'paraduality' in science which both Lakatos and Feyerabend discuss & address, but from 'opposite' ends. I put "opposite" in single quotes here because I find too difficult to phrase the point I wish to make, so I can only allude to it: Reading Feyerabend without reading Lakatos carries with it the same (and not just similar or the opposite) problems as reading Lakatos without Feyerabend does - and vice versa. The same applies to science itself, which kind of sums up the problem both of them approached, from 'different' sides.
I thus find it rather helpful to read the entire matter chronologically 'backwards', starting with 'For and Against Method' and then going back from there.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/inside-ethics-on-the-demands-of-mor...
Need a little Pragmatism on this list.
Quite so. Except Rorty later admitted that he was not really a Pragmatist. I would say he was more of a liberally-oriented Existentialist.
Note also that this list was collected "at the behest of a Chinese publisher seeking important philosophical works for translation", so the fact that A.C. Graham is missing doesn't disturb me much.
