Philosophy books to buy?

I may be 15 but my mind is 67

Decrepit and sclerotic?

Jesus christ the memes

Philosophy isn't this holy grail of unreachable knowledge until you surpass neckbeard level and hit basement goblin level.
Read some shit that interests you. A lot of nietzsche is easy to follow, some of the greeks are actually interesting. No you don't have to dwell in a cave for five years to read the full works of aquinas secondary translated from chinese to reach enlightenment.

Pick up something interesting and read.

I doubt I'd come out ego inflated. I don't have much of one

Yeah this guy is kind of right. If you're going to read Nietzsche without reading Hegel, and I would never do that anyway trust me Kierkegaard is a better existentialist, then read Beyond Good and Evil.

I'm telling you though, while Nietzsche aphorisms are sententious, I would like to believe that overall Kierkegaard's philosophy not only requires more thought, but is more rewarding to the individual.

Mods!

Thanks for the suggestion

Don't listen to these guys.

When it comes to the Greeks, I always had the feeling that Aristotle is quite hard to handle. Plato is fine, you could get one of the texts that are significant-yet-readable, like Gorgias or Meno or maybe Phaedo (the most 'important' among these, which doesn't mean the most interesting to everyone). The length is usually a good criteria with Plato : the longer, the harder.

Beyond Good and Evil is cool too.

THIS

the most troublesome meme on this board is the idea that you MUST follow a lit/philosophy flowchart before you can dare tackle anything outside of that

putting the greatest works of western thought and literary achievement into a sequential reading list to be grinded away at like the training levels of an RPG is not how it should be experienced

yes, im talking about "start with the greeks"

i guess it's comforting to believe that hipster brownie points and higher consciousness are easily achieved following a quantifiable, pre-outlined path

As someone who has attempted to self study philosophy before taking classes in it, start with Plato.

Your face is b&

There is literally no way to understand Kant, Hegel or Heidegger without reading at least a handful of their predecessors. Everything that came after those guys (Nietzsche, Sartre, etc) is a response to them. If you just pick up Being and Nothingness or Thus Spake Zarathustra (etc. etc.) you will waste time and understand nothing.

If by "philosophy" you just mean self-contained feel-good wit like Meditations then that's fine, you can tread water forever. But learning philosophy as a subject requires thought and education which means understanding at least some of what a writer is responding to. Doesn't mean you have to read everything ever written in sequential order but you need a grounding in each period's major thought process to understand what came after.

The Art of the Deal - President Donald J. Trump

Start with the Greeks. If it's philosophy you're interested in try The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists by Robin A.H. Waterfield. I'd suggest following one of the meme charts though even if it's just Homer and the basics.

>Implying you can understand Plato without the presocratics
>Implying you can understand Aristotle without Plato
>Implying you can understand Aquinas without Aristotle
>Implying you can understand Leibniz without Descartes
>Implying you can understand Hume without Locke
>Implying you can understand Kant without
>Implying you can understand literally any philosopher after Kant without Kant

You want the Pre-Socratics, especially Heraclitus. (Be warned: Penguin's latest edition of Heraclitus, while it does contain the original Greek, has a poetic translation, which is much different to a scholarly translation. Unless you want to learn Greek, try to get an Oxford Classics edition or other translation with good notes and attached scholarship).

Nietzsche can be read on his own, but he is rife with allusions and you really will get more out of it for having read the Greeks. For instance, within the first few pages of Zarathustra (who's name itself is a reference to Zoroastrianism) you'll run into a figure holding a lamp. This is reference to Diogenes the cynic, but without learning about the PreSocratics and then the Athenians, you could just assume this is some guy with a lamp or afraid of grues.

I'd recommend starting with Genealogy of Morals or Beyond Good and Evil if you want to go in cold. The PreSocratics really are fun to learn about though, so it's not a chore like getting through Aristotle's Ethics.

If you want a general overview of philosophy Durant's is very good, but you can also get away with buying Sophie's World, and reading only the parts in Arial font if you don't want to follow the story in which the philosophy lessons are set.

>I am going to purchase my first philosophy book tomorrow on a trip to Barnes and Noble and am curious as to what might be ideal to buy.

Plato. Easy to understand compared to others, engaging compared to others, arguably the first, and essential to understanding later philosophers.

There are many collections but you should look for collections that contain Euthyphro, Meno, Euthydemus, Theaetetus, and Republic.

Ideal is The Complete Works of Plato since it is annoying to have multiple copies of the same dialogue in multiple books.

Before doing this you should wiki the branches of philosophy and see if anything peaks your interest. Maybe you really dig Logic and would prefer a textbook on logic instead of a book by Plato.

If you have to buy Nietzsche buy The Genealogy of Morals, NOT Beyond Good and Evil, or anything else. Genealogy is focused and tight, making it much easier to understand since one thing is continuously worked on. BG&E are many aphorisms put together, making it far more difficult to understand.