(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best epistemology books

The best intro I'm familiar with is Theory and Reality by Peter Godfrey-Smith. That's what I use for introductory courses.

Other than that, here are a few other things that (depending on your interests) might be worth your time. These are probably best read after you've gotten some exposure to the basics, which Theory and Reality should more than suffice to achieve. In no particular order:

• Philip Kitcher's Science in a Democratic Society and/or Science, Truth, and Democracy both directly address how to reconcile the value of science with other things that we might also value. Kitcher's a naturalist through and through, but he's also quite pluralistic in his thinking. Both those books tackle the question of what science is good for, what it isn't good for, and how we might go about integrating scientific expertise into an egalitarian society.
  
  
• Nancy Cartwright's A Dappled World. This is a very, very widely-cited classic, and a must-read at some point. I don't agree with her thesis, but it's an excellent book and is very well presented.
  
  
• Bas van Fraassen's The Scientific Image. Another classic that's been very influential. Again, I disagree with a lot of what he says, but he writes clearly and makes many great points.
  
  
• Stathis Psillos' Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth. A clear, cogent defense of scientific realism.
  
  
• James Ladyman and Don Ross' Every Thing Must Go. A spirited and unflinching defense of what philosophy as a whole should look like if it wants to take science seriously. It's not an easy book if you're not well-versed on physics, but it's one of my favorites.
  
  
• Eric Winsberg's Science in the Age of Computer Simulation. A great look at how advances in computation are changing what science looks like. This is a personal interest, but I still think it's a great book.
  
  
• Tim Maudlin's The Metaphysics Within Physics. A look at laws, explanation, and metaphysics from the perspective of physical theory.
  
  
• Michael Strevens' Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation. One of the best books on scientific explanation (and what makes it distinctive) around. Long, but worth it.
  
  
• Oppenheim & Putnam's article "The Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis". Flawed, but on the right track. A good discussion of how the different sciences fit together.
  
  
• Jerry Fodor's article "Special Sciences (or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)" a counterpoint to Oppenhein & Putnam, and another very influential article. I don't like Fodor very much, but it's a good piece.
  
  I could go on indefinitely with this, but that's probably more than enough to keep you going for a few years. As an aside (and since you mentioned complexity already), I also recommend that anyone interested in the philosophy of science take a look at Cliff Hooker's anthology The Philosophy of Complex Systems Theory, which is (somehow) currently hanging out online for free. I paid something like $200 for the book, and while I think it was worth it, the fact that the PDF is right there is amazing. It's an incredibly wide-ranging look at some of the ways in which both philosophy and science are being shaped by complexity theory these days. It's really great.

My work is on theories of truth (and other, related topics). There's certainly a lot of literature in this area that's worth reading that isn't presupposing deflationism. In fact, even as a staunch anti-deflationist I don't think it's really fair to claim that much work presupposes deflationism; it's just a popular, well-argued for view.

Some basic sources.

Overall

The Nature of Truth: Classic and Contemporary Readings - This volume is the biggest and best collection of articles on the metaphysics of truth available. It's a bit out of date in certain places, but there's no better option.

Chase Wrenn - Truth - This is a nice short introduction to work on the nature of truth. Skip the last chapter if you don't want work on deflationism.

SEP article on truth - Sections 1-4 are on standard theories of truth apart from deflationism.

Substantivism about Truth

To be honest, the best place to look for work on this issue is the deflationists. A lot of those papers are included in the Nature of Truth volume above, although as I noted some update is needed given nearly two decades have passed.

One useful general overview is Gila Sher's recent PhilCompass piece here on substantivism about truth. Sher's own view is whatever, but it'll be helpful in pointing you to other places if nothing else.

Epistemic Constraint

The obvious place to start here is at the beginning, with Dummett's work.

Bernhard Weiss' - Michael Dummett is a good overview.

You should also look at Dummett's primary work. The easiest jump in spots will be his "Truth" and "Realism". Most of his important early papers are available in Truth and Other Enigmas.

You should also look at Hilary Putnam's later work, starting from about Reason, Truth and History. Putnam calls his view "internal realism" but it's basically a more American-pragmatist influenced version of Dummett's anti-realism. Putnam got too caught up in the stupid American use of "realism" as an honorific (and "anti-realism" as a pejorative").

Perhaps the clearest development of epistemic constraint is in Crispin Wright. See his masterful Truth and Objectivity, especially Chapters 1 and 2. Yes, even though Chapter 1 is on deflationism you will find the first half distinguishing types of realism/anti-realism paradigms important for the work in Chapter 2. If you want, you can skip the second half of Chapter 1, but Wright's argument against deflationism is one of the most powerful in the literature.

Truth Pluralism

I'm biased here, but I would also suggest you look at the literature on truth pluralism. A good starting point is the SEP article. The first truth pluralist position is Wright's Truth and Objectivity linked above.

For a clearer and more contemporarily influential view, see Michael Lynch's Truth as One and Many. Lynch's view is not the same as Wright's, despite what some (including Lynch at some points..) will tell you, but it's similar enough and much easier to jump into.

The pluralist movement is important to your questions because it involves a commitment to substantivism at its base, a commitment to epistemic constraint in some domains and a commitment to the view that there's more to truth than mere platitudes like the one you mention about the T-schema (this is most clear in Lynch's book).

Hope this helps. Feel free to ask any follow up questions.

For Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Kemp Smith and Guyer/Wood are both good options, but I would recommend the Pluhar translation.

If you want to try to read the Critique, you should first read Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. He wrote it to introduce the project of the Critique, and it does an excellent job at this. It's available in the Cambridge collection edition as part of Theoretical Philosophy After 1781 or on its own.

Secondary literature would also be a good idea. The best reference is Allison's Kant's Transcendental Idealism. Allison interprets Kant a very specific way on a number of contentious issues. For excellent references which adopt some alternate views, see Guyer's Kant and Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. All of these would be excellent secondary references and of great help in approaching the Critique. Guyer's Kant is probably the easiest read, so might be a good place to start.

For Descartes, you should get the first two volumes of the Cottingham edition called The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. The Discourse is an excellent place to start. With it you should also read The World and at least some of the Rules for the Direction of the Mind; perhaps the first six or so, or more if you find them interesting. These are all in the first volume. After these, you should read his Meditations, which are in volume two.

>I didn't know continental vs analytical terms are outdated.

Dated perhaps isn't the right term, but just know that they do have certain limits.

As for post-WWII philosophy, there's a lot, but I'm going to let you know that much of it can't be well-understood without a basic understanding of Heidegger, much of whose thought was pre-WWII. His best known work is Being and Time, but it's one of the most challenging texts in the western canon. For an easier introduction to prep you for it, I'd recommend some of his early lecture material, such as The Hermeneutics of Facticity and The History of the Concept of Time. This could just be me, but I've found his lectures to be generally easier than his primary texts. If you want to trace the development of his thought, much of which was post-WWII, the Basic Writings anthology has a number of essays by him. While nothing really eclipsed Being and Time, much of his later thought is still studied. I'd say the most significant work of his later career was his Contributions to Philosophy, which took the form of briefer aphorisms and anecdotes, more similar to Nietzsche in style, but still grounded in much of his own thought and terminology.

If you want to move away from Heidegger, some of the big texts would be Gadamer's Truth and Method (Gadamer was a student of Heidegger's, so the former's thought is very deeply influenced by the latter), Sartre's two texts Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism (note the similarity to Sartre's title with Heidegger's Being and Time, and also note that Heidegger would respond rather critically to Sartre's Existentialism with an essay in the Basic Writings), and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (a key feminist work heavily influenced by Sartre and Heidegger).

Beyond this my knowledge is a bit scattered, as I've only just completed undergrad. I really would recommend David West's text as a decent overview that will guide you in what the key texts are, as well as good secondary sources. I've not brought up Derrida, who was also huge, as well as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Michel Foucault and Charles Taylor just to name a few. On top of those, there's a ton of pre-WWII stuff that's hugely important for understanding these thinkers, such as the ideas of Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and the whole field of psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung and Lacan). Then there's postmodernism, postcolonialism, the various strands of feminism, and tons more. The more I type, the more I'm just reminding myself how little I know about this area (even though it's the area I'm most interested in).

Let me know if there's anything more you need to know or if you want to know a decent secondary source.

As far as online lectures go, the best one is by Louis Menand, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the history of pragmatism.

Richard Bernstein has a pretty good talk as well, though he rambles a bit.

And to hear it from the mouth of the philosophers themselves, there's a fascinating documentary called American Philosopher, that spends some time on the Rorty/Putnam debate.

More in depth, there's a good collection called 'post-analytic philosophy', edited by Cornel West. It's got a great essay by Nagel and a pretty good one by Putnam.

Also, if you're gonna read Rorty, I recommend The Consequences of Pragmatism, not 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature' - the latter is a bit too bogged down in disproving dualism, and other minutia of analytic philosophy.

As far as older stuff goes, the only work of classical pragmatism I would really recommend is The Will to Believe by William James, for its account of live, forced, momentous decisions. All in all, through, James is usually too clumsy/psychologically-minded, and Dewey is often too vague/dense to slog through.

For a really thorough account of a pragmatic epistemology, however, I recommend checking out Cognitive Pragmatism - which, while rather dense, adequately compares the pragmatist theories of truth posited by Peirce, James, Dewey, and Rorty.

Two other names worth mentioning are Joseph Margolis - who has been applying pragmatist ideas to interpretive practices like literary criticism & history; and also Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whose brilliant legal theories I think are too often ignored these days.

The cause of Brexit probably has more to do with elites saying that "the cause of Brexit was due to lack of education", rather than lack of education.

All joking aside though and for the record, this study looked at the average education on an area and then tabulated--it didn't look at individuals. Survey data shows that age was the strongest predictor, individually. Perhaps education has emergent county wide effect (so, for example, perhaps the benefit of any individual degree increases proportionally to the other number of people who have one).

Second, the selection and interaction effects are going to be very strong here. Age, education & turnout are all highly correlated. Younger people are more educated and less likely to turn out, all things being equal, even though education, all things being equal, is associated with turnout. The all things being equal caveat, however, is usually strongly violated. Education & income and to a lesser extent age and turnout do not vary independently.

In addition, selection effects operate as well. Among both the old and the young, those less likely to get an education may also be less likely to vote. If this is the case, then education will not causally result in more voting, as turnout wasn't predicted by education, but by features which predict education. There is evidence for this, as well.

These three things then--the discrepancy between individual & aggregate data due to emergent effects, the causal non-independence of the variables (on both an individual & group level) AND the non-causal selection effects among them--severely complicate these results.

So, for example, we know that age predicts both education, turnout & SES independently, that education predicts turnout & SES independently and that SES predicts turnout independently. We also know that there are strong emergent effects to income & education (on public goods, externalities and static & dynamic returns to scale & gains to productivity growth). Considering that opinion formation, criminality, turnout & social capital are highly social & mimetic, I suspect age has emergent effects, but I don't know for sure.

BUT, we also know there are strong selection effects. Parents SES predicts your education, turnout & SES independently of their causal relations. Also, variables such as 'intelligence', grit & personality, weakly predict all of these things as does social capital, location & culture more strongly predict these variables, operating as selection effects.

These last points are important: the selection effects on an individual & group level and the emergent effects of group dynamics, as well as the attendant hysteresis & path-dependence of these variables suggests that increasing education would NOT predicts no Brexit. Why? Because the added education would have diminishing returns to income, turnout & voting preference, as they increase, due to these above issues.

Gender & age can't be statistically manipulated the same way income, education & turnout can be, so they will operate as persistent (though of varying strength) selection effects on an individual level and dynamic causal effects on an aggregate level, diminishing the returns of education & income to turnout & stay in votes and of turnout on in votes.

The claim that if 7% didn't vote stay would have occurred is highly doubtful given the selection & dynamic effects of age & gender (these increase likelihood of voting & of the type of vote independent of education & income) and the aggregate effects on opinion formation.

I, therefore, think it's more likely to say events like Brexit & Trump are more the result of:

1. An aging population
   
   
2. Stagnant wages
   
   
3. Economic uncertainty (general, rather than specific)
   
   
4. Globalization & the porousness of borders to capital, money & migration
   
   
5. Elite manipulation of migration to scapegoat stagnation AND
   
   
6. Elite (populist) manipulation of stagnation to manipulate outcomes
   
   
7. Generalized declines in social trust & less so leisure
   
   
8. Elite condescension coupled with
   
   
9. Lack of credibility (they said globalization would lead to higher growth, but it didn't & they said growth would lead to higher wages, which it hasn't, thus double loss).
   
   The remain campaign condescended to people and failed to provide a credible case for remaining, assuming, incorrectly, that the momentum of remain was too strong, that Brexit just couldn't happen.
   
   The same thing was true for Clinton & Trump--first Trump 'just couldn't get nominated', then 'just couldn't win' and he did on each count, then he would 'get presidential' and he hasn't. The dems claimed that for every working class white person they lost, they'd gain two moderate republicans, except they didn't. They thought people of color couldn't vote GOP, which is true, except they just didn't vote at all. As some piece in TNR said recently (I'm paraphrasing) "instead of campaigning in Wisconsin, Clinton went on Broad City. Instead of Michigan, she wrote for Lenny Letter. Instead of the Working Class, Hamilton."
   
   Elites are so unwilling to admit they have made mistakes, that they have lost credibility and are alien to average people and liberal elites have the added unwillingness to admit their technocrat vision is unappealing & destructive and will never win those who vote culturally right wing.
   
   'Studies' like this not only mis-analyze the data--however sophisticated the statistical models, the logits, the regressions and however aggregated--they also commit two cardinal sins:
   
   
10. They are actually a component of the very thing they're mis-analyzing, in that this study comes off as patronizing & snobby
    
    AND
    
    
11. They affect the motivation & actions of those trying to remediate them
    
    For example, on Enough Trump Spam, I was downvoted 20 some times because I said being complacent in the face of the sophistication of 538 Predictions will lead to our downfall--in being assured of winning, no effort was committed to it. This was VERY true generally for the Remain.
    
    Some sources and analysis of the above, the polling, Brexit, Trump interaction & selection effects & social science methodology:
    
    http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/06/how-did-different-demographic-groups-vote-eu-referendum
    
    http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michigan-hillary-clinton-trump-232547
    
    https://thebaffler.com/salvos/withering-vine-tom-frank
    
    https://thebaffler.com/salvos/psephology-free-fall-kriss
    
    http://salvage.zone/in-print/class-and-brexit-or-why-we-should-stop-worrying-about-the-working-class-and-focus-on-capitalism/
    
    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/white-working-class-trump-cultural-anxiety/525771/
    
    http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/saturn-devours-his-young-president-trump/
    
    http://salvage.zone/in-print/order-prevails-in-washingston/
    
    https://newrepublic.com/article/143609/new-yuppies-how-aspirational-class-expresses-status-age-inequality
    
    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/05/how-remain-failed-inside-story-doomed-campaign
    
    https://www.amazon.com/Making-Count-Improvement-Social-Research/dp/0520060377/ref=pd_sim_14_24?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=KV6JDVEYE0XCCWT50JR4
    
    https://www.amazon.com/Craft-Sociology-Jean-Claude-Chamboredon/dp/3110119404/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502154354&sr=8-1&keywords=the+craft+of+sociology
    
    http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo25227312.html
    
    https://www.google.com/search?q=thinking+through+theory&oq=thinking+through+theory&aqs=chrome..69i57j0.3014j0j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
    
    https://books.google.com/books?id=g2m1CwAAQBAJ&pg=PA174&lpg=PA174&dq=selection+and+interaction+effects+social+science&source=bl&ots=gko18YlyIx&sig=eDjPHCu_nSfaoEGEKbaDf0bUBfc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwixj73OuMbVAhUBSmMKHRcOCQUQ6AEITzAF#v=onepage&q=selection%20and%20interaction%20effects%20social%20science&f=false
    
    https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/jibs.2014.50
    
    
    

I'm not sure how new you are to philosophy, but I would suggest an online course, such as this one offered at coursera, which starts in a couple of days (there are also many others available on youtube and elsewhere). You get taught by professionals, there is a chance to reinforce learning through assignments/quizzes, and there is a discussion forum where you can discuss the ideas you have just learnt with others.

I personally don't think you should start at the deep end, that is, reading popular historical philosophers, like the ones you mentioned, simply because the terms and ideas put forth are to be interpreted within the context that the particular individual was writing. For example, David Hume uses the term 'impression' very differently from how one would nowadays use the term in everyday language. Impression for Hume means 'lively perceptions' (his words) that occur 'in the moment' so to speak. Whereas the term nowadays means something more like an idea, or feeling. It is for this reason that if you are interested in a particular philosopher, and are struggling to understand their ideas, that I would suggest reading the work of someone who has studied said philosopher and who breaks down said philosophers ideas in an easy to digest manner. For example this text on Hume. Or this text on Schopenhauer.

In addition the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a great resource for introducing one to any number of ideas and philosophers. It is written by professionals in the field, and sometimes the material written there is even cited in academic papers. For example there is an article on Schopenhauer with a section on 'The World as Will'.

Also, Academy of Ideas is a great youtube channel which produces short (~10 min) videos on a whole range of philosophers and ideas. They have a video on Schopenhauer and the will

This reader has a beautiful breadth of authors; from Chladenius to Gadamer/Habermas/Apel. I'd def. read some smaller/older/romantic figures such as Chladenius, Schlermacher, and Dilthey.

From Heidegger, I'd somewhat avoid Being and Time, maybe look into Hermeneutics of Facticity instead. I'd also suggest looking into Husserl's influence on language and how that developed into a hermeneutics (Such as Hermeneutics and Reflection: Heidegger and Husserl on the Concept of Phenomenology).

I'd also consider going through Ricouer's Hermeneutics or On Interpretation. Recently Kearney is a major figure, his On Stories is phenomenal (as /u/MegistaGene suggests).

Personally, I'd also throw in some more recent 'applied/topical hermeneutics'. Books by either Kearney or Brian Treanor are brilliant.

• Carnal Hermeneutics,
  
• Hermeneutics of Nature (Either Interpreting Nature or Being-in-Creation are brilliant, though the latter has a much more religious emphasis),
  
• Hermeneutics of Religion (Kearney's Strangers, Gods and Monsters or The God Who May Be are amazing).
  
• Hermeneutics of Culture (There are a lot of works on the hermeneutics of race and gender, one that I really enjoyed was Slaves, Women & Homosexuals.
  
  Along side the other suggestions, as well, I'd definitely look into a bit of Philo, Augustine, or that crowd. They provide a fantastic background for the field's development (Grodin's Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics is a fantastic secondary source for this kind of stuff).
  
  Looking through the bibliography of the SEP page might give you more ideas! I hope the directed studies goes well!

Ooh, I'm studying this stuff right now! Check out this paper by Kripke for a semantic approach to truth inside a theory. That sparked a lot of interest in the area, so check out this book or just read this page, both by Volker Halbach, for a great outline of the different theories that have emerged to capture truth in a theory.

Basically, the whole idea depends on your notion of truth. Someone correctly mentioned below that you cannot define truth inside a theory (a predicate T such that for every statement P in the language you have the following equivalence: T(P) <-> P). This said, people have developed different axiomatizations of a truth predicate that enables certain qualities we think truth should have (that it is compositional for example, so that T(p&q) <-> (T(p)&T(q))). These each have their pitfalls, though; this paper by Hannes Leitgeb outlines nice qualities that a truth predicate should have (but cannot have simulataneously).

There are some really interesting results in the literature and I'd be happy to link you to further papers/answer questions if you're interested.

Yes. Trust me when I say that you'll need second literature if you are willing to understand one line of, for instance, the Critique of Pure Reason. There are good introductory books on Kant out there that can help you.

If you know almost nothing about his philosophy, I recommend Scruton's or Wood's books that approach his whole philosophy without any details, making it accessible. A good start. At the same time you could give the Prefaces A and B, and the Introduction of the first Critique a try.

For what I call "intermediary literature", there is Gardner's "GuideBook", and having "A Kant Dictionary" by your side would help a lot.

Some might recommend Allison's defense of Kant's Transcendental Idealism, I think it is great, started to read it some weeks ago, but as well as Strawson's The Bounds of Sense or Heidegger's Kant and the Problems of Metaphysics, it is way advanced.

The most important thing is that you (or any other who is reading this and is also interested in Kant) are motivated, that you don't quit when read at the first time and understand barely nothing. With effort and persistence it gets better.

p.s.: I do not intend to advertise for Amazon, you can read the synopses and reviews and buy somewhere else.

Oh man, that's such a mathematician's way of handling knowledge! Let's say people just legislate that S knows that P iff conditions A, B, and C are met. And now suppose that people who meet conditions A, B, and C are often not in a state anything close to what we'd pretheoretically call "knowledge," and that many people who fail to meet those conditions do posses our pre-theoretical standards for knowledge. Yeah, we could say "they (don't) know that P in our technical sense," but then we're inviting the question of irrelevance: who cares about this technical notion of knowledge? What's the point in studying it?

Here's an alternative approach: Look at the various sciences that talk about/attribute knowledge, and see how they use the term. Under what conditions is it explanatorily indispensable to say that S knows that P (e.g., that a squirrel knows where it buried a nut)? Once you figure out the explanatory role that knowledge plays, you'll have a much better grasp on what knowledge is (spoiler: it looks a lot more like the externalist/reliabilist picture than any thing Descartes would have endorsed!). This approach only works if 'knowledge' denotes a natural kind. For a readable, fun defense of this approach, check out Hilary Kornblith's Knowledge and its Place in Nature.

Clayton Littlejohn, in his Justification and the Truth-Connection, takes the idea that truth-guaranteeing justification is required for knowledge and develops it non-skeptically.

The picture that comes out is a kind of knowledge-first epistemology (Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits also owes a great debt to Zagzebski).

The author says that

>In order for the level of justification for a belief [to be knowledge] to be non-arbitrary, it is clear that one should be aware of all of the relevant pieces of information

Williamson and Littlejohn would say the only thing you need to be aware of to guarantee the truth of p is p. They argue that "being aware of p" is just another way of saying "knowing that p". So whether you're justified in believing p is determined by whether you are aware that p, which is determined by whether or not you know p.

Similarly, the only evidence you need to have a guarantee of the truth of p is p. If your evidence is what you know (Williamson believes this. Littlejohn's account is more complicated), then we get: Whether you're justified in believing p is determined by what your evidence is, which is determined by what you know.

What this points to, I would say, is that saving JTB by going for SJT doesn't do much saving: Strong justification just is knowledge.

> I didn't know that their were multiple versions of metaphysical naturalism, thats very interesting.

For this, I'd recommend looking at Quine, Peirce, Nietzsche, Early Wittgenstein.

> Anything i can read that would expand on these other versions of naturalism?

Well, to put it plainly, secular philosophies - both naturalistic and non-naturalistic - have dominated the discipline of philosophy for more than a century. So your best bet would be to acquire a passing familiarity with philosophy generally (/r/askphilosophy and the Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy are good starting points).

But I'll also throw up a few resources that I prefer for their engaging style:

• How To Make Our Ideas Clear
  
• Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
  
  Good luck with Nagel!
  

I think you would love David Hume.

http://www.amazon.com/Hume-Enquiry-Concerning-Human-Understanding/dp/0872202291/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381844680&sr=8-1&keywords=an+enquiry+concerning+human+understanding

It's a relatively short but very profound read. Basically he concludes that "logic" is a direct result of experience and not of a priori type rationalism. He also concludes that the notion that the future will always resemble the past is just an assumption and unprovable. According to him one cannot prove or disprove the statement "the sun will not rise tomorrow" until it is actually witnessed. The fact that it has risen every single time before does not in any way guarantee that it will rise again (the future resembling the past). The only way one can prove or disprove this statement is to sit there and wait until the next day and see what happens: experience.

His whole idea is that we accept something as "truth" after witnessing a so called effect rise from a so called cause a certain number of times. He calls this "constant conjunction".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_conjunction

edit: It is commonly stated that Hume has never been refuted. Kant tried, and it is up to you to decide if he was successful. But other than potentially Kant, his work has not been refuted.

I think you will learn the most by reading five textbooks, such as A History of Philosophy, volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5; or something like Metaphysics: The Fundamentals, The Fundamentals of Ethics, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, and An Introduction to Political Philosophy.

If what you have in mind is more of a "Great Books" program to get your feet wet with some classic works that are not too difficult, you could do a lot worse than:

• Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, often published together under the title The Trial and Death of Socrates. Socrates is so important that we lump together all Greek philosophers before him as "the Presocratics," and this cycle of dialogues is a great window on who he was and what he is famous for.
  
• The Basic Works of Aristotle. "The philosopher of common sense" is not a particularly easy read. Cicero compared his writing style to "a flowing river of gold," but all the works he prepared for publication are gone, and what we have is an unauthorised collection of lecture notes written in a terse, cramped style that admits of multiple interpretations. Even so, one can find in Aristotle a very attractive system of metaphysics and ethics which played a major role in the history of philosophy, and holds up well even today.
  
• René Descartes, Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Descartes is called the father of modern philosophy, not so much because modern philosophers have widely followed his particular positions (they haven't) but because he set the agenda, in a way, with his introduction of methodological scepticism.
  
• David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. I think Elizabeth Anscombe had it right in judging Hume a "mere brilliant sophist", in that his arguments are ultimately flawed, but there is great insight to be derived from teasing out why they are wrong.
  
• If I can cheat just a little more, I will lump together three short, important treatises on ethics: Immanuel Kant's Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, and Anscombe's paper "Modern Moral Philosophy".

I think those handbooks/companions are better suited for people who are already familiar with some philosophy, or are taking a class where they can get some guidance. For someone who is completely new to philosophy and learning on his own, I think introductory textbook would be better.

As others have mentioned, your interest in AI might lead to you questions in the philosophy of mind, for which this should be an accessible introduction:

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Mind-Contemporary-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0415891752/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=1Z3SDFGK8PSP68WF156V

If you feel like reading the preface Yirmiyahu Yovel has a good introduction based off it: Hegel's Preface to the "Phenomenology of Spirit". It is based off the 'introduction to Hegel' course he taught for more than twenty years.

The book Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking is a great place to start.

This book (or any book published by Routledge) gives a great into on the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Mind-Contemporary-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0415891752/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1452488236&sr=1-5&keywords=philosophy+of+mind

https://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-Thinking-ebook/dp/B00AR354AQ/

A bit academic, but interesting enough.