Is it ok if I read most of Plato and Aristotle, then jump straight to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche? Will I be missing out on way too much if I skip Kant and Hegel? Should secondary sources suffice? My interest in philosophy is Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenologists.
Also, which order should I read Kierkegaard and Nietzsche? I keep seeing varying lists for both of them.
One last thing. Is Adorno's book on Kierkegaard worth reading?
i went straight into Kierkegaard, fuck the rest.
Read Heraclitus then skip to Nietzsche then stop.
I shit you not read Descartes then skip directly to Stirner then stop.
>will I miss anything if I skip the most important modern philosopher
I'm really not in the mood to read Phenomenology of the Spirit and Critique of Pure Reason
Remember all of philosophy subsequent Plato is merely an historical footnote.
Everybody loves vague advice from casuals, right?
Unfortunately there is a reason why hundreds of years later we are still talking about these guys. There is no real way to skip any of the all-timers. Everybody reads everybody else, and in the end, if you're serious, so will you.
Secondaries are okay, but bear in mind that there really is no substitute for reading the genuine article. The guys who are actually contributing the big ideas have very powerful and very particular ways of describing them - and this is coming from a casual who can only read in one language.
For myself, for what it's worth, the only real reading order that matters is to read the shit out of the guys you like. Invariably they are going to leave you with some kind of question unanswered that will be better left to somebody else. There's no time wasted with any of these guys, at least until you get to asking yourself what you are doing with your life. That's always an uncomfortable moment.
But because there are no answers you will usually forget about that once you just pick up the next good book that seems worth reading to you again. The feeling of being lost never really goes away, but you do acquire a slightly better vocabulary for talking about it. And this will only impress the steadily diminishing number of people you come in contact with. It's a win all around!
sik pasta bro. may i?
totes brah
Honestly the only thing you need for Kierkegaard is the bible. Otherwise, he's pretty accessible. Nietzsche however, is more difficult.
Plato/Aristotle -> The Moderns (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz/Locke, Berkeley, Hume) -> Kant -> Hegel
Get Descartes in. Read both his discourse on method and his meditations. Note the differences, some are pandering to the Latin reading audience, others are relevant thought.
Wonderfully said. At the end of the day, I still think it's worth it.
You can probably skip right to either Kierkegaard or Nietzsche but you wont get the most out of either if you lack an adequate background in the Greeks, and yes, Kant and Hegel.
Kierkegaard was significantly influenced by Hegel whom he is very critical of so I would at least be somewhat familiar with Hegelian concepts like the Absolute Spirit, Im sure you can get by by simply reading his wikipedia page.
Nietzsche responds to to many different philosophers but they are usually hilarious ad hominem attacks. For example, here is his "critique" of Kant:
"But let us reflect; it is high time to do so. "How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" Kant asked himself- and what really is his answer? "By virtue of a faculty" - but unfortunately not in five words..."
This is funny because Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is 700 pages of pure autism but if you did not have the background knowledge to understand this then you would have read this passage or many, many other passages where he criticizes other philosophers and not know what the fuck he is talking about. Having a decent background in philosophy is going to help you appreciate Nietzsche's wit and snark but it is not necessarily essential to his broader philosophy.
tldr You will get more mileage out of both if you have an adequate background in philosophy but you wont be entirely lost if you jump right into either.
>Kierkegaard was significantly influenced by Hegel whom he is very critical
Not OP, but Hegel's organization of philosophical propositions (Hegelian dialectic) is very critical in understanding the structure of Kierkegaard's writings, correct? I only read Kierkegaard several years back and I wasn't fully prepared to do so, what is his take on the Medieval Scholastic tradition, and more importantly on the Reformers?
>I-is it ok i-if I read it in this order?
This meme needs to stop. Read whatever you want to, and if they start discussing anotger philosopher, take the detour and learn about what they're talking about if it's warranted
this
If you read and reasearch, essentially work through those texts with as much effort as they deserve, then you can start with any philosopher you want.
1. Wittgenstein
2. Kant
3. Saint Augustine
4. Kierkegaard
5. Richard Montague
These are the 5 greatest philosophers and both the order in which they should be read and the order of their greatness. Alfred North Whitehead, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Noam Chomsky are the runners up.
>mfw this post actually happened
>mfw2 when i see the runners up-list
which is worse, STEMfags or analyticfags?
i just can't tell desu
Kant is a mediocre philosopher at best. A non-entity to me.
Is reading Fichte and Schelling necessary for understanding Hegel?
Topkek the only analytics I mentioned are Montague and Chomsky, and besides those are pretty decent analytics. The real shit is stuff like Ned Block and David Chalmers who perpetuate 40 year old discussions about whether "swampmen" have intentionality or not.
Also STEM is the shit. Especially logic and math. If you don't see the aesthetic value in shit like symmetry and abstraction a la abstract algebra, topology, and category theory, then I truly pity your poor soul. Math has just as much aesthetic value as any of the arts, and a lot of mathematicians have a personality and temperament more akin to that of an artist or a poet than say a chemist or something like that.
People who denounce STEM or analytic philosophy on aesthetic grounds are just as contemptible as those who denounce the arts and literature as "impractical".
Fichte is not absolutely necessary, but incredibly helpful as he functions as a direct bridge between Kant and Hegel. Fichte was the first to show that Kan'ts notion of "the thing in itself" was incoherent, and that therefore a step towards idealism was necessary. The tripartite idea of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis actually has its genesis in Fichte.
Schelling was Hegel's college roommate and was the one who convinced Berlin university to hire Hegel, who at the time was working as an undistinguished tutor. Much of the Phenomenology, especially the preface, is written in response to Schelling's ideas, most notably Schelling's idea that he could "jump" immediately to the absolute simply because he was a genius. Hegel's philosophy does away with the idea of immediate revelations, and replaces it with a long arduous process of dialectics. Infamously, Schelling ended his friendship with Hegel the second after the Phenomenology, and its damning preface, was published. After Hegel died, Schelling would go on to give a series of scathing lectures denouncing Hegel and his ideas. These lectures were attended by Kierkegaard and Marx, along with a few other important but more esoteric figures.
Still, from the perspective of pure philosophical ideas, Schelling is largely seen as nowhere near as important as Fichte, let alone Kant and Hegel. There has been a slight movement to take Schelling more seriously, especially from Zizek, but Schelling was infamous for constantly changing his mind, and his exact ideas are hard to precisely pin down.
In a *far* too simplistic form:
-Fichte was the one who came up with the self positing subject, which created the world around it through the necessary negativity caused by its own determination, note Spinoza's phrase "all determination is negation"
-Schelling was the one who pointed out that objects in the world were just as important as the subject which posited the world, and that the true absolute lies not in the subject itself but in subject object unity
-Hegel was the one to declare that Schelling's absolute was a "bad infinity", because it could not account for finitude. For Hegel, the absolute consists in both subject object unity, and subject object difference. He believes that in order to reach subject object unity while maintaining subject object difference, we need to go through an arduous series of dialectics, a path that has already been traversed by what Hegel calls the "world spirit". The phenomenology itself is basically a preface showing how we must interpret history to arrive at a moment in which we can then begin to do philosophy. But nobody takes the latter half of the Phenomenology seriously, as Hegel's interpretation of the consequences of his own ideas, namely that he believed 1800's Germany to be the "end of history", is quite ridiculous.
Republic (Plato)->Meditations on First Philosophy(Descartes)->A History of Western Philosophy(Russell)->A Treatise of Human Nature(Hume)->everything else
Pure autism (with a hint of Christian faith).
not a terrible rebuttal. ok user
Plato&Aristotle > Stirner > Diogenes > Camus > Nietzsche
>Putting a phenomenological philosopher along with Ludwig "There is no such thing as phenomenology" Wittgenstein
This is worse than my .
Of course Veeky Forums unironically think that a list of the top 5 philosophers would look like:
1. Nietzsche
2. Stirner
3. Plato
4. Schopenhauer
5. Wittgenstein
Which is even worse than some continental meme tier list like:
1. Derrida
2. Bergson
3. Deleuze (trippiest of keks - incomprehensible pseudointellectual rubbish)
4. Heidegger
5. Hegel
Doesn't mean shit. A lot of people into phenomenology like both, e.g. Alva Noe, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Thomas Metzinger, Hubert Dreyfus, etc. You don't have to subscribe to all of a philosophers beliefs to like them. Besides much of PI is phenomenological in character.
*Toppest of keks
>Richard Montague
literally who?
read the philosophy you are interested in, OP. quit worrying so much
>>>
listing Augustine and not Aquinas... fuck this list and fuck you
Based logician, linguist, and mathematician.
he has no books dude, i'm pretty sure you made this guy up
>Being this unknowledgeable of philosophy and linguistics
Alright then, where should i start with him then?
I'd read Aristotle & be aware of Aquinas and Newton before Hume.
Montague - PTQ (proper treatment of quantification in English); UG (universal grammar); English as a Formal Language;
Also David David - Introduction to Montague Semantics
He was murdered before he actually wrote any books. His work has been extremely influential on logic and computational linguistics. He seems to have been a great mathematical and philosophical genius. His untimely death was a great loss.
You honestly can definitely skip Hegel and Kant.
Kant is important and all, but you're not going to be confused for missing him.
Hegel is a guy that you gotta kinda"buy into". He's super important if you think he's right, he's irrelevant if you don't.
>He's super important if you think he's right, he's irrelevant if you don't.
that is literally all of philosophy
nah, what you originally wrote was funnier
No one actually knows what Kierkegaard was talking about.
>only philosophers between Aristotle/Plato and Kierkegaard/Nietzsche are Kant/Hegel
>believing you can understand and appreciate a guy like Heidegger without a quite solid foundation in the philosophical tradition before him.
Wew, pseudo-laddie.
Why not?
>Is it ok if I read most of Plato and Aristotle, then jump straight to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche?
No. Take a look at the Enlightenment, both post- (the earliest protoromantics), classical (Hume, Newton) and pre- (Renaissance), first.