After a long discussion about Laotse one of my Chinese students from last year asked me for a 'crash course' in western...

>Cutting Locke
>Not cutting Hobbes
>Not cutting Machiavelli
>Not cutting Aurelius
>Adding Freud
>Not adding Dostoevsky

Absolutely nothing wrong with adding Freud

>Locke
>Hobbes
Please don't forget Russeau.

>Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation, On Women
>On Women

This is how I know you're a troll. Very, very subtle, but not subtle enough.

6/10.

Erase everything and substitute with:

(1) A contemporary introduction to X where X ∈ {Logic, Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Aesthetics}, and

(2) A contemporary introduction to Philosophy of Y, where Y ∈ {Logic, Mathematics, Science, Language, Mind}

How do you include Land, Deluze, Guattari and Locke, but not Metaphisics by Aristotle, no Augustine or Aquinas?

It's a troll. See

Where's Parmenides? Aristotle's Categories and Metaphysics? Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas? Spinoza and Leibniz? Some analytics?
Shitty list.

This honestly. All memeing aside, this is the best way to get a solid grasp of "western" philosophy while not reading for years on end.

Isn't something lost, or at least are skills not gained, by letting someone else interpret all of the original texts for you? Also, is there a comprehensive listing of the sets X and Y somewhere?

Also, what do you think of Copleston's History of Philosophy?

> Am I memeing him too hard with D&G/Land

Ye. Cut these. Cut Locke, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Aurelius, Epicurius, Epictetus, Schopenhauer & Heidegger. Add Parmenides, Wittgenstein, Marx's German Ideology & Grundrisse, Quine, Carnap, Plato's Permenides, in fact all of Plato, all of Nietzsche, Foucault's early work. Supplement with lyric poetry and mathematics.

S p i n o z a

It's good, probably still the best history of philosophy in English. However the first volumes contains a good amount of untranslated Greek and Latin since the book was written in a time that if you were educated you'd have a grasp on both.

I think the last philosopher treated in it is Sartre iirc, with possibly a mention of Derrida as a young gun but I might be mixing it up with a different book.

But yeah, it covers everything worth understanding. You could even consider it a worth while guide to direct your reading since it will tell you what the important works for each thinker are.

>D&G

big mistake friend

Nice, thanks a lot. And is there a list of good "Introduction to...{Metaphysics, Ethics, Epistemology,...}" books somewhere?

If he has actually no background in western philosophy I'm not sure that sending him down any laundry list of 'classics' is going to help him much. None of these people worked in a vacuum and understanding their times and influences is important. He'd be vastly better off sticking exclusively, at first at least, to secondary lit that explicates the ideas of these philosophers in the context of their times and lives, rather than just going straight to the works themselves.

If you do insist on a list however, I'd say;

[Secondary book explaining Greek religion and the context of the first philosophers]

Plato - Apology, Euthyphro, Crito, Symposium, Phaedo, and Republic

Aristotle. - Ethics, Politics, The Organon, Physics, On The Soul, and Metaphysics. + Aristotle by Christopher Shields (2nd Ed.)

Hobbes - Leviathan (abridged)

Descartes - Discourse on Method, Meditations of First Philosophy

Leibniz - Monodology

Spinoza - Ethics

Hume - Inquiry into Human Understanding

Kant - [Dont even bother at first, just get secondary lit. Kant by Paul Guyer, or Starting With Kant, Kant for The Perplexed]
then Prolegomena, CoPureR, Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals, CoPracticalR, then CoJudgment. Seriously, if you are going to do a deep dive on anybody, him and Aristotle are the only worthwhile two.

-German Philosophy: The Legacy of Idealism

Hegel [actually just stick with secondary lit, you aren't smart enough to read Hegel]

Marx - The Marx/Engles Reader, just read that and Capital (Abridged). Also David Harvey's book about reading Capital.

[Understanding Marxism by Geoff Boucher]

Schopenhauer - WaWaR

Kierkegaard - Either/Or, Fear and Trembling

Nietzsche - Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, Genology of Morals, + The Portable Nietzche compilation and Nietzche by Walter Kauffman

[Darwin by Tim Lewens]

Husserl [Husserl by David Smith or The Philosophy of Husserl by Hopkins]

Heidegger [On Heidegger's Being and Time by Critchley and Schurmann]

Merleau-Ponty - Phenomenology of Perception

Sartre - Being and Nothingness, Existentialism is a Humanism

De Beauvoir - Second Sex

[Existentialism: From Dosteovsky to Sartre by Kaufmann]

[Freud by Johnathan Lear]

[The Bloomsbury Companion to Analytic Philosophy and Analytic Philosophy: An Anthology]

[Understanding Poststructuralism by James Williams]

Althusser - For Marx, On Ideology

Foucault - History of Sexuality, Discipline and Punish

Derrida - Of Grammarology

[A Critical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis by Bruce Fink]

D&G - Cap & Schiz/Anti-Oedipus

Zizek - On The Sublime Object of Ideology

[Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects by Peter Gratton]

It's heavier on more recent stuff because I can't say what is going to matter more or less into the future but that's a list that would more or less bring you up to today.

Oh shit, I forgot;

Judith Butler - Gender Trouble

Something by Daniel Dennett and something by David Chalmers, and a book about Baidou

For particular Intro to different fields, personally I like the Key Thinkers series by Bloomsbury. They take a trip through the historical development of each field with a chapter on each major innovator. Topics in the series include: Ethics, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Phil of Mind, Aesthetics, Phil of Language, and Phil of Science

The greek playwrights are essential canon. You cannot understand their philosophy without a solid background in this. Also make sure he's read Homer, especially the Margites.

>Three Nietzsches but no Gay Science. It's his best work. Trust me.

Thanks a lot for the suggestions - I'll be adding these to my reading list.