Has anyone else read many oxford very short introductions?

I actually read Nicomachean Ethics and Art of Rhetoric before picking up the intro, I wanted to see if there was anything glaring that I missed. I wouldn't discourage someone from picking up this particular intro though, since it's clear and he hasn't warped anything to suit his views (that I can think of...). It did convince me to pick up Physics before Metaphysics though.

As for Kant, I read Prolegomena and managed to tease some points out of it before picking up the intro, but even for his "explaining critque" work, it really is hard to extract what he's trying to say

>I can understand why someone would want a very short intro. to Kant
I can see why, but it's still shit, you can't condense an authors thought into that short amount of pages and still expect it to come out coherent.

Short introductions are okay if they are just that. Introductions that imply you're going to read more. But it makes me nervous to think that someone is going to read The Short Introduction to Kant and then dismiss its articulation of the Categorical Imperative since it can't be found embedded in his wider perspective on rationality and the human subject.

I had to read ASITexistentialism for a class and it was horrible, it presented the existentialists in pretty much the way that the mainstream tends to view them, without any nuance and quite juvenile.

My prof recently published the short introduction to Hermeneutics, I haven't read it yet, but it's pretty much the summary of the class I took with him anyway, so I probably won't bother when I've already read Gadamer and Riceour etc. in their own words.

Hegel (by Singer) was good. French Revolution, Kierkegaard and Political Science were alright. Empire and Christian was acceptable. Heard that the one on Wittgenstein is retarded.

>Postmodernism
The author goes his way to criticize PM. I already know a bit about PM so it's okay to see some critique on the subject, but it probably wouldn't be the best introductory material.

didn't Ayer write the Hume one? what's wrong with it?

>Hegel (by Singer) was good
Inb4 triggered

Ayer just can't make a point to save his life. He seemed to enjoy starting to make a point, then dancing around it. "What did Hume think of X" is never clearly answered. If he thought different things at different times, that would be fine, but he never explocitely states anything.

It's almost as if, by not explicitely stating something, he can't be proved wrong so he's protecting his scholary status.

Also he relies on the treatise rather than the enquiry too much.

Read The British Empire one. It was decent, but it was a bit unbalanced and was more historiographical than I would've liked.

The one on Habermas was great.

Agreed on their variable quality.

I've read:

- Metaphysics (too broad)
- Psychoanalysis (dedicates too little space to people who aren't called Sigmund Freud).
- Marx (a decent overview of key concepts)
- Foucault (again, a decent overview of his ideas for a complete layman).

I like them but they're best served as an introduction to a subject you think you might want to explore further down the line.

Also a good stocking filler.

>guttural

For one thing, a modern introduction may give you some sense of the tradition, of further reading, and of which translations to use if you aren't reading the Greek.

>absolutely guttural
>a very short introduction to Star Wars (Christmas edition)

>Hegel (by Singer) was good.

Is this true? I was about to read this, but saw that it was Peter Singer, who doesn't seem like quite the right person to be explaining Hegel.

I've read:
- Globalization; shit tbqh

- Keynes; okay for his economic theory, but actually quite great for detailing the historical and social background that he was writing in and his legacy as it currently stands

- Antisemitism; the author wisely confined himself almost entirely to the political antisemitism of the 19th and early 20th century (he calls other pre-Enlightenment varieties "anti-Jewish prejudice/ sentiment"), focusing mostly on Central Europe. Very little attention is given to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust; it's assumed that the reader knows enough about that, and it is presented as the culmination of what had happened in the 100+ years prior. This was an excellent book, really provided tons of historical background on how antisemitism became a viable political platform and how it would become a key aspect of Nazism, not just a superstitious prejudice. However, the concluding chapter was a fairly weak, trying to do too many things like shallow overviews of Holocaust denial and the "new" antisemitism concerning Israel; it also included some cringey statements that /pol/ would likely jump all over, like pointing to Jewish people leading the way in making the US and Europe more tolerant and multicultural, and that this was good for Jews because then they would be safer (aside from the benefits to various minority groups). I knew what the author was trying to say, but he said it in a way that could easily feed into conspiracy theories.

They are hit and miss. The introduction to Medicine was shitty. Introduction to Plague was great. I guess there's no way of knowing since they all seem to be different authors.

Heidegger, Hume, and Kant were all decent. Heidegger especially so.

>Absolutely guttural
What are you trying to say there, mate?

>Is this true? I was about to read this, but saw that it was Peter Singer, who doesn't seem like quite the right person to be explaining Hegel.
That user who made the long philosophy reading list rages on it and says that he fell for the thesis antithesis synthesis meme.

Yes I've read three. The Russian Revolution was garbage but The French Revolution and World War I were both phenomenal.