Reading material

So THIS.... is the power.. of autism

see this user has the complete wrong idea. Reading through a time period in a chronology of significant works is a great way to kill your motivation to actually read.

test

>The pre-Socratics can be basically understood by trawling Wikipedia
Believe me, it's better to get some secondary sources, the primary is so scarce it leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Nietzsche wrote an unpublished book on them that I reccomend, Hegel's lectures on them are even more in depth but it's from a Hegelian perespective (very interesting), Russel actually gives them a fair shake relative to Plato. Just read all three desu it's why I did and I felt it was worth it.

Don't pleb project, this is for recreation and all of those are great reads. Hesiod is the "roughest" but you get that out of the way first

you shouldn’t read a philosopher’s take on historical movements of thought if you have any genuine intention of underatanding them, as a primary action at least. wait until you’ve familiarized yourself with thales, parmenides, heraclitus before you read Hegel and N talking about them. You’re coloring your understanding to vividly with others’ notions.

Again, user, BASICALLY understood. Obviously if one decides they want a deeper understanding of the formulation of ontological thought and the philosophical process they would want to bust out the denser texts.

But you can get Democritus' theory of atomos, and Zeno's paradoxes, and etc from wikipedia. They really are quite simple to grasp for people raised in a society built on their axioms.

This is the exception, you said yourself it doesn't take long to become familiar with their source material, that's why I brought it up, would not reccomend it for any other situation

relevant?

more relevancy.

That chart just isn't very good.
OP, It's also worth mentioning Ovid's metamorpheses
Inb4 someone says "but he's Roman" you stupid fucks that's about a hundred times better than an Anglo two millenia removed, Metamorphoses is incredibly influential

for full autism

read anna karenina

...

Does that book cover actually censor a statue's tits?

...

In a "it's just part of the design' kind of way, yeah. Still lame

Resume with the Romans is a meme peddled by people who don't get why the Greeks are important in the first place
The next step is unequivocally Continue with the Christians

>"Start with the Greeks" is alliterative

With the exception of Ovid and Virgil of course
Dryden's Aeneid is spectacular, Barth's Ovid not so much

take your LARPing back to /pol/

Start with Stirner and then just quit it all because you will realise it's all just faggots trying to tell you how to live and think of the world.

Make nothing your case. Live for yourself.

Fucking uncreative slaves deserve to waste their lives on retarded shit some mong said somewhere in some time that isnt now and doesnt apply to anything in the least to your own life.

What are you even talking about, if you can't understand the significance of Christianity to the Western Canon you're beyond saving. That must be bait

Lets be real, what do the fragments *actually* tell you? The majority of pre-Socratic fragments are actually later authors paraphrasing stuff they heard, a bunch are contained in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Unless you read Greek and are going to commit to becoming a scholar yourself, you are going to have to read some scholars take, without which you have no context for what you are reading.
I don’t necessarily think reading Nietzsche, Hegel and Heidegger on the pre-Socratics is the best way to get into them, and I tend to think reading great thinkers on other philosophers tells us more on the former than the latter, but in the end I don’t think it hurts.

breadpill?

A good reason not to buy that set is just that it’s never going to have the best translations, which is pretty important if you are actually going to read them.

For example, I’d not recommend Ben Jowett’s Plato anymore, they are good, but old and more difficult to read than newer translations like you can find in John Cooper’s Plato’s Complete Works.

Again with Kant, not the best translation. If you want to actually understand, and not just have a book on your shelf, you want the Oxford edition.

Why Huckfinn over Tom Sawyer in the Twain?

I would have picked Pride and Prejudice over Emma for Austin.

I’d consider Jane Eyre absolutely essential to the canon, and probably also Wuthering Heights, maybe I’m blind but I can’t see them here.

Odd choice for Dickens, he has so many famous titles, Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, yet the one they chose, so odd.

I question the inclusion of The Descent of Man over Voyage of the Beagle in the Darwin volume.

The Marx volume is a massive abridgement, and also a categorically bad translation. Again if you want to read Marx, this isn’t going to help you.

Tolstoy has a significantly abridged War and Peace, nothing else by him. I don’t know the translations but again, dollars t dimes it’s not good.

Dostoevsky, it’s got brothers, but I’d see Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment are clearly worthy of being in the canon.

I don’t know why 900 pages of James’ Principles of Psychology was necessary, lol.

No Chekhov...

To their credit, incredibly comprehensive Freud anthology.

It’s embarrassing they even tried to create one volume for ‘20th century philosophy’ of course dozens of notable absentees. The impossibility of all the 20th century volumes is so laughable.

You could spend all day pointing to absences, where is Balzac, Flaubert, Defoe, Hugo, Wilde, Whitman? Etc.

So yeah, overall, I’m sure it would look really nice in a bourgie house, but it’s not good for actually learning the canon. It’s a futile goal to list the entire western canon here on this thread. Just start. If your pirate bay still works, Search TTC and download a couple lecture courses on the ancient Greeks, that the best you can do before diving in. Get some history, some mythology, some background on Homer, then dive into The Iliad and Odyssey. Read Hesiod, read the Homeric Hymns, read the poets like Sappho, read the tragedies. Read the introductions, translators prefaces and so on, that’s the best you can do.