Overview of the Week's Blog Posts

>Skepticism about free will has become ever more prominent. If one browses the popular science section of any large bookshop or flicks through recent popular science magazines, one is likely to come across some books or articles arguing that free will is an illusion: a left-over from an outmoded, pre-scientific way of thinking that has no place in modern science. The authors typically cite some influential neuroscientific studies that appear to undermine the idea of free will by showing that human actions are caused not by our intentional mental states, but by physical processes in the brain and body. More broadly, if everything in the universe is governed by the laws of physics, and our actions are part of that universe, then how could those actions be free? This line of reasoning, in turn, puts pressure on our traditional notions of responsibility. How could it make sense to hold anyone responsible for their actions if those actions weren’t done out of this person’s own free will?
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>Such skepticism about free will is not yet the mainstream view among the general public. Nor is it the mainstream view among academic philosophers, the majority of whom are “free-will compatibilists”: proponents of the thesis that free will – perhaps after some definitional tweaking – is compatible with a law-governed, even deterministic universe. But free-will skepticism is on the rise, as illustrated by Sam Harris’s best-selling book, Free Will (2012). Many free-will skeptics have a noble moral motive, alongside their scientific motivation: they find the present criminal justice systems in many countries unjust and wish to argue for criminal justice reform. But one can certainly agree on the need for an overhaul of our criminal justice systems and advocate a more rehabilitative and less retributivist approach, while still thinking that it is a philosophical mistake to throw the notion of free will out of the window. Moreover, the idea of free will is central to our human self-understanding as agents, independently of its relevance to criminal justice. How, for instance, could we genuinely deliberate about which course of action to take – say, when we choose a job, a partner, or a political cause we wish to endorse – if we didn’t take ourselves to be free in making this choice?
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>In my book, Why Free Will is Real (Harvard University Press, 2019), I offer a new defence of free will against the growing skepticism. Crucially, I do not proceed by denying science or watering down the definition of free will. Rather, my aim is to show that if we understand the lessons of a scientific worldview correctly, the idea of free will – in a fairly robust sense – is not just consistent with such a worldview but supported by it. In short, I argue that there is a naturalistic case for free will.
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>In this series of blog posts, I will first describe what I take to be the main challenges for free will from a scientifically informed perspective and then explain what my strategy is for answering those challenges. And I will illustrate this strategy by zooming in on the most widely discussed challenge, namely the challenge from determinism. Of course, I will only be able to sketch some key ideas relatively informally; more detailed and precise arguments can be found in the book itself, as well as in some of my earlier articles (available on my webpage).

The Rest of the Blog Post(s)

Use the link from the OP to find the rest of the blog post summarized above as well as the remaining blog posts from Christian List throughout the week.

The Podcast Version

You can listen to Christian List discuss their book Why Free Will Is Real on the New Books in Philosophy podcast here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/christian-list-why-free-will-is-real-harvard-up-2019/

I think the best route is to trick her into being interested in books. I think I just might have a trick for that.

Send her the wikipedia article for "trolley problem", and then send her the wiki article on judith thomson's violinist argument in favor of abortion. Then send her a link to parfit's transporter thought experiment. It's ideal if you can find versions of these online which are easy to read and presented in a cool manner. (blog entries are ideal for this. Here's a blog entry on parfit's teletransporter: http://twophilosoraptors.blogspot.com/2010/07/teletransporter.html)

Then buy her What If...collected thought experiments in philosophy off amazon or ebay. A used one will be cheap, or take it out from the library and renew it online while she uses it. If she got intrigued by the above thought experiments, and is intrigued by strange paradoxes about truth, like the liar paradox, or leibniz's law, then she will absolutely love this book. It's full of one-page, easily consumable versions of thought experiments, and then the page next to that one contains elaboration on the experiment and current work on it. One of my favorites in there is Max Black's two spheres, which seem to violate leibniz's law. A fun alternative to this, with bite sized philosophy things is "plato and a platypus walk into a bar".

If she continues to show interest in these, you can feed her new information about them via blogs like peasoup and thoughts, arguments, and rants, by googling the name of blogs like these next to a particular paradox or thought experiment, e.g. "thoughts arguments and rants moores paradox". This will lead you to new work by contemporary philosophers on the subjects, which may feed her interest into what it is that philosophers actually do. Eventually this may prompt her to want to read a full book on philosophy, to have a more mature understanding of how these paradoxes and TE's work, then you could get her the very interesting Think by simon blackburn, which is a general intro to philosophy, or the shorter very short introduction books. You can work up to more advanced, interesting work from there (like David Lewis' On the plurality of worlds, which opens the trippy possibility that all possibilities are realities).

Hope she enjoys her reading!

I think Dylanhelloglue has given you a good start, and I would second the recommendation that you get yourself a copy of Pinkard's translation, if not to read it in place of the Miller then to cross-reference particularly difficult passages.

When Hegel talks about the Absolute, he is talking about, well, everything. The Absolute is something like the universe construed as a whole in its most metaphysically real sense. You could think of the Absolute in Hegel on analogy with substance in Spinoza--the Absolute is the unified metaphysical reality underlying the appearance of difference and distinction. So whereas from our finite point of view thought and being (or subject and object) look distinct, from the point of view of the Absolute thought and being are identical. The sense in which thought and being are identical in the Absolute for Hegel is a bit weird--he doesn't think of identity as the inert equivalence of A=B. Rather, identity in the relevant sense is a property of processes, so that two things are identical if they can be shown to be "moments" or elements of a larger process from which they cannot be abstracted and upon which they depend. The Absolute is something like the largest possible process in which everything else is a dependent moment. Hegel talks about it as a 'self-moving whole.'

Spirit is basically self-consciousness or self-knowledge writ large--something like the collective self-understanding of a historically-situated people. The shape that Spirit takes is the beliefs and way of life of that people, that people's cultural and religious practices, etc. So Hegel thought of democratic Athens as one shape of Spirit incorporating Athenian religious, political, cultural, and philosophical ideas and practices. Basically, a shape of Spirit is what makes a given people or historical epoch distinctive. Democractic Athens was distinctive because it was a shape of Spirit. Western Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries (i.e., the Enlightenment) was a shape of Spirit. Spirit is a kind of self-understanding or self-interpretation--a way of picturing what you are, what you know, and what you do--but it is a supra-individual form of self-understanding. No one person living in democratic Athens was the arbiter of the shape of Spirit represented by democratic Athens--the shape of Spirit represented by democratic Athens was a product of the collective thoughts and deeds of Athenians.

Notion is a bit complicated. The German is Begriff, which is more commonly translated as "concept"--Miller uses Notion to try to draw attention to the fact that what Hegel means by "concept" is not what people usually think of when they think of a concept. For Hegel, a concept in the sense of Begriff is not something in human minds by virtue of which humans sort the objects of their experience into different categories. (Picture it like this: you have a whole bunch of sense data, and you sort that sense data by labeling sense datum A "table" by subsuming that sense datum under your concept of tableness, labeling sense datum B "chair" by subsuming B under your concept of chairness, etc. This is not Hegel's picture at all. Hegel calls concepts in this sense Vorstellungen, which Miller translates as "picture-thoughts.") For Hegel, the concept is something like the essence of a thing, and the more a thing corresponds to its essence the more it becomes "actual" [wirklich] in Hegel's technical sense. Hegel is inspired in a lot of this by Aristotle, so it would probably help to have some familiarity with Aristotle's Metaphysics. This might help. In short, the concept is that by virtue of which a thing is what it is, and the more a thing corresponds to its concept the more it really is, or is actual. So when he talks about the Phenomenology as describing the development of the "concept" of knowledge, he means that the Phenomenology is going to reveal what knowledge truly is, what it means for knowledge to be actual knowledge.

Hope that helps. I'd also add that you should try to pick up a commentary on the Phenomenology to read along with the text itself. The Phenomenology is super, super difficult, so you should take all the help you can get. My two favorite books on the Phenomenology are Michael Forster's Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit and Hyppolite's Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. The Forster is an extremely helpful introduction to and broad overview of the aims and concerns of the Phenomenology. (Forster identifies 11 distinct 'tasks' that the Phenomenology tries to accomplish, which he then divides into metaphysical, epistemological, and pedagogical tasks; his book then traces how the Phenomenology goes about accomplishing these tasks.) Forster offers some commentary on specific chapters, but for the most part his book is focused on the whole rather than paying detailed attention to the parts. The Hyppolite is a straight-up chapter-by-chapter commentary. Fred Beiser also has a commentary worth looking at, and I've heard good things about the commentary by Kalkavage.

Apologies for getting carried away with the length of this. (*edited to correct some typos.)

I recommend the Wadsworth website. This link is to their timeline series:
http://www.wadsworth.com/philosophy_d/special_features/timeline/timeline.html
They also have by topic and by philosopher.
Another good website, mentioned by others, is Squashed Philosophers, but it has a different purpose (to skim original works).

If you prefer audiobooks, there's a good lecture series, Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition:
http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=470
You probably don't need the whole 84 lectures, just a few of the bigger names like Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein will give you a solid foundation.

For books, Philosophy Made Simple is a solid entry level intro,
http://www.amazon.ca/Philosophy-Made-Simple-Richard-Popkin/dp/0385425333

I also like from Socrates to Satre
http://www.amazon.com/Socrates-Sartre-Philosophic-Quest/dp/0553251619
Which goes in for just a few big names, and has a companion tv show.

There's no definitive anything, and probably better than these that I'm not aware of, but a good approach is to graze a little from a few different introductory books, aiming to familiarise yourself with terms and names - and then graze again to get a slightly deeper insight into how they connect etc.

If you are interested in learning philosophy then, ostensibly, you already have some big questions floating around up there. Ask yourself what interests you. Language? Ethics? Epistemology? I would first familiarize myself with some basics here and here but then from there, you should just start digging in.

Now, some authors will be inaccessible if you don't have a firm grasp of the historical tradition of philosophy cough Heidegger cough but you can do just fine with others.

Plato is fine to start with but if you really want to be captivated and excited, you have to start with Nietzsche. He is implicitly answering philosophers like Plato and Descartes but again, as long as you have a rudimentary understanding of them, it's doable. You can do more detailed analysis later.

Nietzsche's writing is full of passion and sets out to undermine every assumption behind Western philosophy. He tackles morality, epistemology, language, aesthetics, and just about everything else. He'll motivate you to get into the rest of tradition so that you have a more contextual understanding of where is he writing from.

I recommend:

Kaufman's Nietzsche

and

Beyond Good and Evil

I don't where you can find it, but his essay, On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense is fantastic, if not just for the first few paragraphs.

I'd actually recommend watching through the documentary in the link above as a halfway decent introduction to the main themes relevant to studying Nietzsche in an easily digestible format.

As far as books go, afaik most philosophy courses on Nietzsche start out with Beyond Good and Evil. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is his self-designated magnum opus, though I recommend having some background knowledge of its context before attempting to scale it. My personal favorite, Gay Science, is a wonderfully thought-provoking and entertaining read.

There are also plenty of good commentaries and biographies around. A classic would be Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. It's a bit old, but I wouldn't hold that against it. Kaufmann can of course be accused of revisionism, but his influence in presenting some of the first analyses encompassing Nietzsche's entire work as well as rehabilitating his academic respectability post-WW2 is seminal. Some others over here might have hints on more current biographies worth checking out. Also, most translations of Nietzsche's original works have decent commentaries with them, I'd look out for RJ Hollingdale's and Kaufmann's versions in particular.

Good luck with your pursuit of philosophy :)

Edit: typo (or two)

Hi, I have a degree in Philosophy and teach Philosophy/English to high schooler. The following advice and recommendations are what I give my students who are interested in philosophy. I would not recommend Kant as an introduction (not that he's bad, but he is difficult to understand). Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar is a book that explains philosophical topics and questions through humor and uses jokes to illustrate the concepts. It is accessible and thought provoking. If you are interested in logic you might enjoy Logicomix. It is a graphic novel that gives a biographical narrative of Bertrand Russell, an English philosopher whose work is the basis of all modern logic. It is not a book about logic per se, but it does give a good introduction to what logic is and how it can be used. Also, Russell's book A History of Western Philosophy is a good place to start your education in philosophy. If you are interested in atheism, read Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion. This book goes through the most common arguments for the existence of God, and debunks them using logic and reasoning. Good luck and read on!

I'm not /u/hungrystegosaurus, but here are a few personal suggestions:

Philosophy on the whole -- Copleston is the standard and for good reason

Early Greek philosophy -- Nietzsche has a relatively accessible and worthwhile overview on many Greek sages that I found to be a supremely helpful, though controversial, introduction

Plato -- Very, very tough to recommend any good introduction to his work taken holistically, but I'll go out on a limb and recommend something Straussian, which is a little tough for a first-timer but grounds Platonic philosophy in living moral and political issues OP is likely more familiar with. Shorter dialogues like the Meno and the Apology might also be worth checking out

Aristotle -- Forget the abstruse metaphysics; stick with the ethics. The Cambridge intro is adequate

Renaissance / Enlightenment philosophy -- Not my primary interest, but rather than plunging into Kant, try something like the Novum Organum by Bacon, which is an admirably clear laying-out of the Enlightenment project, written without impenetrable jargon and in a digestible aphoristic style

Nietzsche -- Most anything by Kaufmann will do, but this is a nice piece

Heidegger -- Richard Polt's introduction

Existentialism in general -- Not a written reference, but this video lecture series by Solomon, an excellent UT philosophy professor, makes for a nice companion

Contemporary philosophy -- /u/ReallyNicole, one of this subreddit's moderators, would be able to offer a ton of great introductory material. She's sort of a pro at linking to articles

This is barely scratching the surface, but scratching the surface is more than enough. If OP can get through even half of this material in a year or two's time, he'll be well on his way to developing his philosophical faculties and familiarity.

To recommend motherfucking Being and Time or the Critique of Pure Reason (without supplemental aids, no less) to a 17-year-old novice is so egregiously, maddeningly, ball-shrivelingly stupid and such wholly, purely, offensively bad advice that I honestly wouldn't mind seeing /u/JamieHugo permanently banned from this subreddit for corrupting the youth.

Thank you. I read your first article and thought you might like this book:

Philosophy in the Flesh

This may sound like word salad, but I can expand anything if you're interested. I'm someone who is trying to explain philosophy itself. One thing I conjecture is that evolutionary mechanisms operating on thermodynamically-driven self-organizing structures will eventually "carry up" the fundamental logical properties inherent in the Universe to the neurological level - where they can then manifest in our awareness as logic and math as we know them. That is, as structure evolves through biological complexity - some fundamental logic of the Universe must be there somehow. Our neurological architecture then allows extrapolation from these fundamentally embodied aspects to the symbolically represented and conceptualized "ideals" we have like perfect circles and real numbers and so on, which are entities that don't really exist as upsetting as this idea is to most mathematicians.

The book I linked makes a very cool, but hard to convey point, but once you realize the implications it's pretty amazing. Our thinking is based on the senses we have. We basically have models of the world in our heads that are the same as the way we experience the world - the neurology of experience is the same as thinking, essentially (e.g. you can get better at piano by practicing in your mind because you can "re-experience" it).

Language, then, is a metaphorical way of expressing our sense-based models of the world, which is why language is filled with metaphors of time, spacial orientation/relationships, sequences, and so on. I really can't do justice to the idea quickly, but it's a quite profound realization to have in your toolbox.

Although I would love to say "read Kant" or "read Wittgenstein" or "read Sartre" or "start with Plato" I don't think you would get a really good start to reading philosophy because sometimes they can get a little complicated.

I think the best way to get introduced to Philosophy is to learn a little bit about a bunch of philosophers and their philosophies.

So seeing that you are 16, there is a great book that was written called "Sophie's World" http://www.amazon.com/Sophies-World/dp/0297858815 It's a novel about a girl around your age who studies philosophy but it touches upon almost every major philosopher and it's not too harsh of a read. The plot is ok and the dialogue is miserable but I think it gives a good sampling of the major philosophers that is on a reading level for your age.

If you want a great book touching upon the major philosophers - there's always Bertrand Russell's "The History of Western Philosophy"http://www.amazon.com/History-Western-Philosophy-Bertrand-Russell/dp/0671201581/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343832717&sr=1-1&keywords=bertrand+russell+history+of+western+philosophy The reading level is more advanced than Sophie's World but you get a very in depth perspective of the major philosophers from a major philosopher.

And then again, you can try to read a philosophical writing. If you're going to try that, I think Plato is an easy beginning along with Descartes.

> It does not fly in the face of physics, it is physics. If you consider for a moment that currently accepted physics isn't entirely accurate and more of an approximation, you should also be able to consider that there is more to the equation than what is currently being taught.

I have an degree in physics from an elite school, where I won an award for my performance in physics. From this same school, I also have an honors degree in philosophy - where I focused primarily on philosophy of science.

I don't know how to be any more clear about this. I have studied the shit out of both the actual physics and the philosophy of science that you are totally mangling when you say stuff like:

> It does not fly in the face of physics, it is physics. If you consider for a moment that currently accepted physics isn't entirely accurate and more of an approximation, you should also be able to consider that there is more to the equation than what is currently being taught.

All I can think of is the quote from Isaac Asimov:

> My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

You have yet to read, obviously, about any of realism, positivism, anti-realism, agential realism or any rigorous philosophy of science. You are taking a pretty "anti-realist" stance - which, again, is not terribly popular. And I am saying, time and time again, you are not even really doing so very well. Not only am I denying that the anti-realist stance is a very good one, I am saying that, even if it were, you are not doing a very good job of defending it. Your entire argument, at this point, is coming down to the exact same argument as the one people use when the criticize evolution or global warming for being "just theories."

Relativity is never going to be overturned - at least not the features of it we are discussing here tonight. Ever. End of story - full stop.

We may learn of theories that augment or supplement relativity, for instance, a way to unify relativity and quantum gravity - that explain areas that are currently not covered by relativity, such as where it breaks down, but for the cases that relativity covers now, it covers it with literally perfect accuracy. Check out the "fine structure constant." It has been measured to resolutions that approach theoretical limitation.

So, what I am saying to you is this: that space and time are parts are the same, objectively existing reality is really well fucking proven. You can, in fact, measure the fine structure constant with a fucking hydrogen spectrum tube, a strong electromagnet and a diffraction grating, which I have done, personally, in a physics lab, and derive the fine structure constant to alarmingly high resolution with even very crude instruments.

What I am telling you is this: the same equations that give marvellously accurate results in these circumstances are the same equations that have allowed us to engineer and power the computing device you are using, and they also underly and explain how space-time works. I don't know how else to put it. If our description of space-time was inaccurate, we never would have been able to perform the electrical engineering necessary to make nanometer-feature-size microprocessors, the large hadron collider or prototype nuclear fusion plants. Cathode ray tubes would not work. Just tons and tons and tons of modern technology simply would not work.

I cannot make this any more clear: this science is never going to be overturned. It is too well understood. If a paradigm changes (I urge you to read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions), it will not do so in a way that destroys the space-time identity. It can modify, enhance, or supplement, but it cannot supplant.

Is that making any sense? Just because science is fluid doesn't mean that extraordinarily well supported hypothesis get abandoned. The history of science is that poorly supported ideas get abandoned. I can think of literally no more rigorously proven and tested ideas than E=mc^2, and that is the fundamental basis of understanding spacetime.

Edit / Update: I have re-read your comments. I have to say I have been harsh, and you have been civil, and I apologize for that. Additionally, you are clearly grappling with some very tough concepts and are doing so on your own, or lagely self taught. This is laudable, and I commend you for taking the time and being intellectually curious. What informed my tone, however, was your manner of argumentation - your insistence, basically, that you are right and that the people disagreeing with you don't know anything. If we were in a classroom setting, I would have been more kind and tolerant, because that is the place for airing your opinions and arguing about them in a collegial setting. That is often lost on reddit. That in mind, I really encourage you to read about these topics. You are obviously curious about them, and there is no reason you cannot do this reading on your own and learn all about it.

I recommend http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Science-Very-Short-Introduction/dp/0192802836, http://projektintegracija.pravo.hr/_download/repository/Kuhn_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions.pdf and the lecture I linked above. Enjoy!

Although this sort of historical approach may work for some people, and it will definitely give you a very good background, it certainly didn't work for me. I wanted to get ideas that were articulated in easy to understand contemporary terms that I could grapple with right away without having to worry about interpreting them correctly first.

I started in early high school, after being recommended by a friend who was majoring in philosophy at the time with The Philosophy Gym by Stephen Law which gave a great and really readable introduction to a lot of philosophy problems. Depending on your previous knowledge of philosophy, it might be a bit basic, but even still it's a worthwhile read I think.

From then, I went on The Mind's I by Daniel Dennett and Douglass Hofstadter, which was a really good and fun introduction to philosophy of mind and related issues. After that I think you'll have enough exposure to dive into various subjects and authors that you come across.

After reading a couple of the replies, it came to me that you might enjoy reading Sophie's world. It's a novel, but also a general introduction to Philosophy. Since you're sort of 'starting over' in terms of personal philosophy and looking at the world in a new way, you might find Sophie's journey comforting and fun as well. I picked it up a few years ago while I was living in Japan and couldn't put it down:

http://www.amazon.com/Sophies-World-Novel-History-Philosophy/dp/0425152251

note: I'm linking to the Amazon page because it describes the book better than the Wikipedia page, imho.

This doesn't really have a lot to do with answering your question, but for a fun take on Russell's life, read the graphic novel Logicomix (http://www.amazon.ca/Logicomix-Apostolos-Doxiadis/dp/1596914521/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1301008590&sr=8-1). The author takes some liberties with Russell's life, but a lot of the story is accurate and does give a fun romp through the world of philosophy and mathematics at the turn of the last century.

Though less philosophically inclined, but still a really good work that surveys a lot of different vitalist/new materialist positions and their value for political theory: Jane Bennett's Vibrant Mattter

It's a pretty smooth read but gives a good lay of the land.

Bit late to this discussion but you might like the book Against Empathy by Paul Bloom: https://www.amazon.com/Against-Empathy-Case-Rational-Compassion/dp/0062339338

I heard about it on a Sam Harris Podcast which was fascinating. Basically the argument is that what most people mean by empathy is instead compassion and that actually empathy often leads to bad emotional decisions and burnout in the workplace.

Here's the podcast if you're interested: https://soundcloud.com/samharrisorg/the-virtues-of-cold-blood-a-conversation-with-paul-bloom

Matthieu Ricard also talks about this from a Buddhist perspective in a great TED talk if you can find it.

First i want to clarify that this is not a direct quote of Epictetus, it is from a book on Stoicism called A guide to the good life and it is a somewhat altered version (but more accurate i believe) of Epictetus' own "dichotomy of control". However, i think that this version better represents what Epictetus was trying to say.
The closest quote we have that relates to this is from the Enchiridion and it is as follows (note that the Enchiridion was not written by Epictetus, he never wrote anything, but compiled from notes by his pupil Arrian).

"Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions."

Now to answer your question, Stoicism was a complex philosophy with a long history and with branches in metaphysics, ethics and logic. This illustrates one of the main ideas of the ethics of stoicism, which strove to be "free of the (negative) passions" through the use of a variety of exercises (askesis). The core of this is illustrated in the image, though of course, it is not the whole story. To see how stoics practiced these ideas, one must look at Arrians notes of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius' meditations (a hypomnema, a type of philosophical diary was another form of stoic practice), and Seneca's letters.
Hope this helps

It starts with why you are interested in philosophy. Begin with your personal areas of interest (looks like you have a head-start there).

• Route 1: I like Routledge and Cambridge stuff for general surveys, which is really where most folks should start before moving on to heavy-duty original text, imho.
  
  
• Route 2: Chronological study is ok too, getting a history of philosophy book or series of them, learning what the canon is and then knocking out original texts from era to era, it's just not for everyone.
  
  Perhaps a mix of both...
  
  While true that there is no substitute for original texts, a little mediation to provide context and framework (which you can later disregard if you so choose) isn't so bad. In fact, that's what you're doing by coming to Reddit!

While these are all incredibly important books that outline the major chronological achievements in philosophy, I don't think that starting with ancient philosophy and working your way up is always the best move. Some of ancient philosophy is drawn out and can be intimidating to someone who's never read philosophy before, and reading whole books can be a daunting process. These are all books that would be necessary to read if one were getting a degree in philosophy, but OP is just interested in learning more on a casual level. I would recommend starting with an overview of modern problems of philosophy, like Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy. If OP is interested in learning more about specific philosophers I always found that The History of Western Philosophy is a good place to start. And of course the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy will always have more.

Yeah, it is definitely hard sometimes to sort out the pseudo-science stuff because there are a lot of charlatans out there when it comes to this subject. Consciousness and the Brain is pretty good IMHO. There are lots of science-ish books, like books on artificial intelligence, that touch on consciousness, referencing legitimate published scientific papers, but they invariably wind up being speculation; sometimes really good speculation, but still not what I would consider neuroscience. The actual neuroscience text book I've been reading doesn't have a lot on consciousness, but they do talk about consciousness as "awareness of something". They also talk a little about the default mode network, which you should do a web search for, because it is really interesting. But at the top of the short section they do have directly on consciousness, they say this:

> There are challenges right at the outset; even defining consciousness is controversial. Suffice it to say numerous definitions have been offered over the years, and numerous models of consciousness have been proposed. Our intent is not to jump into this controversy.

So no matter what you find, be forewarned that it is likely bullshit. If you are really interested in the subject, an actual neuroscience 101 textbook, while a bit pricey for casual reading, can be highly educational.

Start with this and this. However, the two best books on the phenomenology are this and this. Personally, Quentin Lauer's commentary really helped me get a handle on Hegel and I think it is the best that is published. However, this will be the best commentary when it gets published (in full disclosure I was a student of Houlgate when doing my MA and learned Hegel from him and had access to the manuscript of this text learning a lot from it).

For those new to philosophy, I'd recommend The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher, as well as Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar. I'm not all the way through the second one but it seems interesting. These are fairly simple but interesting introductory books that teach you some of the issues philosophers deal with.

Hope this helps!

> assume you might be thinking bout some of the experiments that show we can observe what decision a person will make before they are conscious of the decision

Not at all, although I'm familiar with those as well. Rather, there's demonstrable evidence that you have no free agency in exercising your mind to bring about specific conscious thought on demand. Further, that your biology and your environment are the driving forces that shape your nuerodevelopment, neither of which you have any command of. Thus, by extension, 'you' are the product of concurrent and prior processes that you do not control.

To return to your example,

>Did the neurons that make up my mind not weigh the options and produce an answer on their own?

Yes, and chose an answer based on the sum of your experiences that you had no true free agency in experiencing, and neither did your ancestor's whose biology you share that informed that conclusion.


See: Sam Harris on Free Will, for a deep dive into this topic. Essay Book Lecture

I would also recommend Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar. I found the book extremely entertaining because of the corny jokes (and some of them are god awful), and it made some schools of philosophy easier to understand for me.

There is also a new blog someone from Reddit started yesterday, and it is highly entertaining.

>also possess a set of psychological characteristics that many would consider prototypically immoral."

The implicit equation here is that empathy = moral goodness. When empathy leads us to feel good about making a decision that is objectively bad for the whole world excluding ourselves, that foundation is very dubious despite our kneejerk instinctive reaction. For example, people are more motivated to donate to a cause if they hear about one person being harmed in detail, and then become LESS motivated to donate if they learn they will help that one person and many others in the same situation. Motivation to act altruistically declining when an intervention is objectively superior with no drawbacks is a clear problem. It would seem that letting emotions be our guides is not always a reliable route to the most ethical action possible.

Against Empathy is an interesting exploration of this subject (albeit a questionable stocking stuffer).

From Socrates to Sartre gives a pretty good overview. Yes, there are many gaps, but by the end of the book you should have a pretty good framework that you can work off of.

I know I'm tardy to the party, but I found that it's best to start with general surveys of philosophy, so you're exposed to a wide range of thought, then narrowing down your interests.

Personally, I found the following to be the most helpful:

From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest

Think

What Does It All Mean?

The Problems of Philosophy

I would recommend an introductory book. Personally, I suggest Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. But if you really want to understand it, you're going to have to get in the habit of reading slowly and rereading until you really understand it. And have a dictionary and look up of all of the words you don't know.

If you finish the book, I guarantee your entire perspective on life will be completely different. Not necessarily for the better, as some people learn more than they bargain for. But if you finish and really want to learn more, I can give you other good introductions.

Sam Harris has written a shot but excellent book on the topic of "free will" and how it relates to our current understanding of neuroscience. It is called, oddly enough, Free Will

It is hard to find books that really square this topic, and I'm not sure of your exposure so I'm going to suggest some fun fiction works to start you off.
The Diamond Age is a good book to express some of the computer science concepts.

and

Cryptonomicon is good to understand how some of Turing's ideas were understood.

For actual philosophy ideas I recommend just ordering some heavier works that are harder to get through like

Quintessence

German Idealism

History of Western Philosophy

And (while I hesitate to mention it because I worry about the backlash on /r/philosophy) I think that Philosophy: Who Needs It is important to read if only to argue with people that believe in Ayn Rand's teachings.

I'll leave it at that for now. Most of what I've learned about this have been by reading Wikipedia and random usenet and irc posts. Books that are succinct and good are hard to come by.

I've been reading A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. So far it strikes me as a pretty accessible work. I also like that he's big on historical context.

I also picked up a copy of Main Currents of Western Thought at a used bookstore, and it seems like a useful book for a relative newb as well.

As a philosophy major, I am trying to get my younger brother (11 years old) more interested in philosophy, or at least more knowledgable about philosophy so I got him a copy of Action Philosophers. Its a big comic book, and its super easy to read and I just answer questions for clarifications and explanations. I was actually thinking about this yesterday.

I've been looking at this book as a way to introduce my kids to logic and critical thinking: The Fallacy Detective.

Also, if you haven't seen the philosophy comics, they are worth a look. These are really more for teenagers I think, but they look really good.

• Action Philosophers!
  
• Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
  
  There are a lot more than just these if you look around, but I think these are a good start.

If you want a shorter, concise but very good introduction try Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction by Samir Okasha. I found it very useful at university. (www.amazon.co.uk/Philosophy-Science-Short-Introduction-Introductions/dp/0192802836)

> wouldn't pure logic be the goal of rational thought?

What do you mean by "pure logic"?

It's not true that brain function consists of two distinct parts, one that is based on emotion and the other that is based on pure logic. On the one hand, emotion plays a larger role in thought that is usually recognised. Descarte's Error, by
Antonio Damasio talks about this.

On the other hand, the "non-emotional" aspects of brain function are hardly operating by "pure logic". For one thing, so much of our reasoning is subconscious (See Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson), and even when we explicitly reason through some argument, that's still sitting on top of a lot of subconsicous evaluation of the correctness of the points, using processing that isn't based on logic. A lot of reasoning seems to be pattern matching, making analogies, manipulating mental models, etc.

That a person can learn to avoid so-called logical fallacies (or cognitive biases) does not mean that the (fallacy-free) reasoning they are performing is a matter of "pure logic".

.

> By "more complex", I'm inferring that from the programmers perspective, logic may seem an easier puzzle to solve than decision making based on modifiers like superstition, hatred and passion and that you could infer that it is a more evolved form of problem solving.

There's never any reason to assume that anything that was in fact more complex would be better at a stated goal.

If you are new to Stoicism, I recommend you check out A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
William B. Irvine

This may be too simplistic for what you're looking for, but Sophie's World is a pretty good introduction to philosophy.

You were categorizing people. Everybody you classified would describe themselves with a "originality and personal individuality".

(i just pasted your wording so my sentence probably is bit awkward).

I was trying to expand on your notice that all of us can be 'grouped' which emphasizes the same-ness and non-originality of everybody.

"In a class by himself" actually becomes the set of "class by himself" (old philosophical problem...).

I was just playing with your (unintentional?) point that "people are easier to portion-out than to dig for their "original personality", which then could be further typed-out until, really, no one is 'in a class by himself'.

This is an Amazon post for a graphic novel you will probably get through a library (if you dig that sort of thing) that touches on the problems with "sets".

Thanks.

>If someone ignores plausible ethical theories by discouraging consideration of empathy, then, regardless of how "moralistic" their language might be, they have effectively ignored one of our best ways to reach insight into morality (empathy). I'd be comfortable saying that a person who does that has ignored morality.

There are good reasons to think empathy biases us in problematic ways. We don't need empathy to be moral, many normative theories don't depend on it. This is an interesting book on the topic.

I think you would enjoy Sam Harris's book, Free Will. It confirms and explores many of the insights you have had, and provides a good deal of interesting evidence from cognitive neuroscience to support your suspicion that our brains operate deterministically.

I think S. Blackburn's Think is an excellent introduction to some of the major areas in philosophy. You might also what to look at some of the philosophical books in the "Very Short Introduction" series, for example the Philosophy, Metaphysics, Ethics, Philosophy of Science and Free Will ones, which as you can guess are good places to start.

A book I quite enjoyed as an introduction to the great philosophers was The Philosophy Book, which not only gave clear descriptions of each of the philosophers' views, but also often gave a clear flowchart summary of their arguments.

I think that A History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell is one of the better places to start imho.

It will provide you a toes wet entry into a broad spectrum of western philosophy.

I'd likely think you'll get hooked on certain era's or persons and stick with them for a while. This isn't a bad thing, apply their thoughts to others perspectives and try your best to be critical of all.

I like to recommend Simon Blackburn's Think as a primer. I would try reading Descartes' Meditations, Aristotle's 'Posterior Analytics', and perhaps G. E. Moore's Philosophical Papers (particularly his essay 'A Defense of Common Sense') alongside Blackburn's book. The recommendations in the sidebar have a few good suggestions (Williams, Blackburn, etc.) for introductory works on ethics.

I sat down and read about five books on Stoicism a couple months ago. I've considered myself a Stoic since then. Besides the older texts, I recommend A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. It's a great book.

One thing in it, I have to share. Epictetus says that there are things within our control and that there are things out of our control. If we focus on what's in our complete control only (our internal thoughts, goals, dispositions), we can be sure to be happy/tranquil. And then there are things like the sun rising tomorrow or not, which we have no control over -- and it is a complete waste of time to spend energy on (“Nothing is worth doing pointlessly.” - Marcus Aurelius). But wouldn't it be inaccurate to say we have no power over what people think of us? What Epictetus appears to present as a dichotomy is really a trichotomy. There are some things we have some but not complete control over. We can set our goals and thoughts to living virtuously in the external world, but obviously we can't base our goals on the external world and be "invincible" (as Irvine calls it). Our internal goal for the things we have some control over is to do our best. E.g. a person who bases their happiness on the outcome of a tennis match puts their happiness/tranquility on the line, opens themselves up to frustration and anger. The Stoic who invests himself in doing his best, has only incidental interest in the score, cannot fail, doesn't expose himself to frustration and anger.

The Philosopher's Toolkit and The Story of Philosophy both seem like great places to start.

That image is a figure (p 97) from "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy" by William B. Irvine.
http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-Stoic/dp/0195374614/

The best way, I feel, is to read a summarization of the discourse. Read every volume in Frederick Copleston's A History of Western Philosophy. From there, delve into a specific philosopher—the obvious starting point is Plato, which is what I recommend.

Sophie's World is a good recommendation. If you don't want fiction, I'd suggest (and have in other, similar threads) Simon Blackburn's Think as a good, high-level overview of Philosophy. I'd also pick up a text specifically about logic and/or critical thinking that covers basic argument structure and the common fallacies (perhaps The Philosopher's Toolkit ). After reading those, you should have a grasp on both how philosophers do their thing as well as an overview of the various topics in philosophy. From there, you can start reading more about the areas that particularly interest you.

Richard Popkin's intro book Philosophy Made Simple is a pretty good resource I've found.

http://www.amazon.ca/Philosophy-Made-Simple-Richard-Popkin/dp/0385425333

Here are amazon links for:

• Will Durant - The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers
  
• Gunnar Skirbekk, Nils Gilje - A History of Western Thought: From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century

from David C. Moses's amazon review of Russell's History of Western Philosophy

>Despite this book's well-deserved status as a classic work, it has some major flaws that a reader should keep in mind, all stemming from Russell's intolerance of viewpoints different from his own... Russell has no tolerance for systems of thought that do not conform to his preferences for democracy, atheism, pacifism, and social liberalism. So... Nietzsche is depicted as a warmonger... Russell's book is a great place to start, but to get a fair treatment of thinkers such as Rousseau and Nietzsche, it should be supplemented with material such as the chapters on those thinkers in Strauss and Cropsey's "History of Political Philosophy."

Even though your understanding of how choice works is correct, the conclusion that follows (life is "worthless") is false. You seem to be keen on explaining your depression with the fact that you have considered how choice works... but I feel like there's an underlying cause you didn't mention. You even hinted at this in your closing line (major factor means there are other factors at play).

I know this is /r/philosophy and not /r/psychology, but heck, I'm going to say it anyway: you might want to reconsider what the real reason is for your depression instead of (arrogantly) assuming that the "no-choice" life isn't good enough for you.

We do make choices, by the way. Every choice may be a culmination of past experiences and events but that doesn't mean there's not a lot to choose from. Introspection, reflection, meditation and creation can change us within the constraints of a formulaic universe.

Edit: Taking a risk here in /r/philosophy by suggesting this, but here goes: you might be interested in Sam Harris' "Free Will": Amazon link (I'd recommend getting it at The Book Depository alas, it's out of stock there).

Plato and the platypus might be pretty good for you. It goes over the basics. Not sure how it stands up to other books.

http://www.amazon.com/Plato-Platypus-Walk-into-Understanding/dp/0143113879/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317963654&sr=1-1

Most of us are unconscious several times in every 24 hour period, hopefully while safely in bed, so with so much discontinuity in our consciousness there is no reason to assume that today you possess "the same consciousness" as yesterday, but nor is there much of a reason to deny it either. It's a very typical metaphysical dilemma, in that it seems at first to suggest two distinct possibilities, one of which must be true and the other false, but on reflection it turns out there is no way (even in principle) to distinguish between them, so we may have been tricked by the appearance of a dilemma, but which just gives us two different ways of describing or approaching the same thing.

A common approach to creationism is to note that it describes an infinite set of possibilities: the universe might have been created at any instant in the past (even seconds ago) and you along with it, with all your memories in place so as to fool you into think the universe is much older. Much as fossils of dinosaurs are supposed to be a trick (put there by Satan?) in the more popular kinds of creationism.

Pretty much any idea that is likely to occur to us about minds/memory has occurred before to a lot of people and hence has been extensively written about by philosophers. Has anyone pointed you toward this book yet? It's a classic compendium of stuff along these lines.

Given that Daniel Dennett has recently published a book on thought experiments called Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, I thought it would be good to show one of Dennett's most famous intuition pumps.

This section of the movie is based on Daniel Dennett's though experiment first published in Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology and reprinted in his famous compendium with Douglas Hofstadter, The Mind's I.

The original paper is available here and elsewhere online.

The movie itself is a documentary and dramatization of several themes in the book The Mind's I and includes an interview with Douglas Hofstadter earlier on.

No, seriously, the word objective has a ton of different meanings, and different aspects of the word are invoked by different people.

I'm quoting from Elisabeth Lloyd who outlined four different ways the word objective is used:

1] " " means detached, disinterested, unbiased, impersonal, not having a particular point of view

2] " " means public, observable, or accessible (in principle)

3] " " means existing independently or separately from us

4] " " means really existing, Really Real, the way things really are


These uses of the word objective can mean different things depending on the context. Detachment is a property of a knower, ontological independence is a relation between a knower and reality, publicity is a relation between knowers and reality, and Really Real is the status is what is regardless of perspective or relation to any knower.

As an example, consciousness is something which is Really Real but not public. I cannot be detached from it but it exists independently of anyone else. Mirages are Really Real--they exist in people's experiences and are public but they do not exist independently of us as knowers.


The sort of materialism I subscribe to certainly isn't boring. If you're interested in a sketch of what it is, check out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Vibrant-Matter-Political-Ecology-Franklin/dp/0822346338

This is a great light start into philosophy! http://www.amazon.com/Plato-Platypus-Walk-into-Understanding/dp/0143113879

I'm 16 and this book helped me get a handle on the basics
It's a bit corny, but it's understandable and goes through ethics, logic, metaphysics, etc, as well as some of the well known philosophers.
You can flip through the first few pages to get a feel for it.

This does a great job of explaining the recent experiments scientists are using to probe consciousness. It also puts forth a very reasonable hypothesis for what gives rise to consciousness.

Can I offer some other choice reads that will make you question your rational decision based on "how it feels" we make decisions rather than how they "actually are made"? We can now do brain studies that show our unconscious brain makes our decisions before our conscious brain is even aware of the choices. We rationalize our decisions based on our emotions, not logic. The beautiful thing is we feel like we are the ones in charge, the 'I", me, you, they, she, he, whomever, but every single person is as predictable as our Earth's rotation around the sun.

Let's see, some interesting books with hundreds if not thousands of sources in them each: Subliminal, Free Will, Incognito to get you started.

Feelings are only feelings, they are an old response before our prefontal cortex made its appearance. Don't let those get in the way of learning about how we work. Sure it feels like the earth is flat, it feels bad when we get rejected, it feels like your conscious mind made that choice to get a burger over the salad, but don't let feelings get in the way of what's actually happening. It's all an illusion, man..

What about sophie's world? Does a really good job of introducing the basic history and why philosophy is important. Although it's a kids book, so probably below her.

>If I’m going to want to learn philosophy, I’m going to have to open a book and do it myself.


Hey, good for you! I'm working through Philosophy Made Simple.

https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Made-Simple-Complete-Important/dp/0385425333/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519172180&sr=8-1&keywords=philosophy+made+simple

So far as I can tell it is doing a pretty good job of covering the basics.

Also, I'm sorry you had a bad experience. I agree a bad teacher does tend to put people off.

I would say that philosophy is the act of questioning.

I would posit the three pillars as grammer, logic and rhetoric.

To get a deeper understanding of those things, I would recommend reading any book you can on the "trivium"

But, the book I always recommend for people to start their philosophical journey is this

It sort of reminds me of Action Philosophers in that it presents philosophical concepts in the least boring way possible. I like it.

I recommend some books to you:

http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/0316180661

http://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/0465030785

http://www.amazon.com/The-Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self/dp/0465030912

Your sense of self, your "I", your mind, is produced by your brain, which is a physical structure that is not destroyed and remade during sleep. This is why you remember what happened yesterday. "You" are a pile of grey goo in a skull.

Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar - amazon

Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy - wiki

And even though it is pretty heavy philosophy, I can't leave out David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature - wiki

OP, I think you might be interested in this book. It was a course text in one of my undergrad courses.

Lakoff & Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought

I’m sorry I linked you to that page as it seems to say little about his philosophical and logical work (I’m confused as to why that is the case and it is my fault for not reading the page and assuming there was relevant information there when there isn't). He is probably most noted for Russell’s paradox. You may be interested in reading Logicomix. One of the coauthors is a computer scientist, and it will give you a better understanding of his work and also introduce you to some other philosophers interested in logic and its limits.

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

The Guide to the Good Life for a practical approach with a little discussion of history.

A lot of Bertrand Russell's books are accessible, as long as you're willing to put up with some of his personal biases. There are arguably a lot of misinterpretations of individual philosophers in his book "A History of Western Philosophy," for example, but it can still give you a good general overview that's also very accessible. I've also heard nothing but good things about The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. I haven't read it, but I've read other books by him and they're all very accessible.

I like Bertrand Russel's A History of Western Philosophy

my flatmate got this Bertrand Russell graphic novel, it's damn good.
amazon link

guardian review

Will Durant's 'The Story of Philosophy' is what got me excited about the subject when i was a young man.

The same man giving this talk also wrote the most comprhensive book I know about western philosophy, he starts with the greeks and offers his opinion while going step by step through the past 2000 years, it's a very long read but you can always skip and move in eras and philosphoers according to what you find ineresting at the time .

http://www.amazon.com/History-Western-Philosophy-Bertrand-Russell/dp/0671201581

http://www.amazon.com/The-Simpsons-Philosophy-Popular-Culture/dp/0812694333

http://www.amazon.com/Plato-Platypus-Walk-into-Understanding/dp/0143113879/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343839215&sr=1-1&keywords=plato+and+a+platypus+walk+into+a+bar

These aren't really comic books, but they might be what you are looking for.

I prefer Frederick Copleston's History of Philosophy over Russell's. Copleston doesn't inject as much of himself in there as Russell does in his work.

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

"The Mind's I"

Read this. It's a bit long, but includes many very thorough discussions of exactly what you're asking and proposing.

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

(just adding some books some may find interesting)

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied-Challenge-Western/dp/0465056741/

http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011/

• The Study of Philosophy, by Will Durant