(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best thought philosophy books

> If there is measurable evidence of objective value in existence then I'd love to see it. Give me one example.

What are you even asking? You don't need examples, because you have already experienced them. You know that some events are preferable to others. And close to no one thinks that they think its preferable based on some kind of illusion, and so there's no real reason to go out with friends instead of hitting yourself with a crowbar. Asking whether those are equally preferable is so incoherent that even asking for more depth is looking at this at the wrong angle. Its up to someone who thinks this value is an illusion to make a case against it. The empirical nature is there, as well as a theoretical basis of what the value reduces to to show it can exist.

https://www.amazon.com/Value-Reality-Desire-Graham-Oddie/dp/0199562385?ie=UTF8&keywords=Value%2C%20Reality%20and%20Desire&qid=1435241913&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

If you want a book, you can read this.

>What exactly does "preferable states of events" have anyhting to do with objective value in existence? do you mean we all want similar things? are you trying to say that because we all want food, shelter, comfort, love etc that there is our objective value in existence?

I don't know how to explain it any easier. You don't need to want the same thing as anyone else. This isn't about anyone else, just you. To you, there are presumably better and worse states. The same is true for everyone. Its not clear what the objective units are that make some states better that they reduce to are, but its not really very viable to act like they don't exist. Food and shelter are instrumental goods. They lead to primary goods like happiness and life (for possible examples) but aren't themselves primary goods. People want things for reasons. The reasons reduce to other reasons. The presumed irreducible goods that aren't for any other reason are the good candidates for intrinsic value.

>It doesn't matter that there are fundamental things human beings want or need in life...that is not evidence for inherent, objective value or meaning in our existence.

It just so happens that this is exactly wrong. You just saying it doesn't mean anything. Values aren't "spooky." The fact that experience can be positive and negative is itself what the "values" are presumed to look like. There's literally nothing else needed to have a case for them, because you don't need a pen and paper to know that preferable states exist. And trying to doubt that they do despite knowing that they do is trying to abstract away from the physical world whatever you're trying to get at.

I get what you think your point is. That the concept of value in terms of a true good may be different from a physical description, and its not intuitive that abstract concepts like good are the same as physical things. But that's the point. Realistically there's good reason to think they are. And while some more theory might be helpful to explain this, our experiential evidence is already enough that this is the presumed position until further notice. Value isn't something that happens in a secret other dimension. Its something you move through in your tangible life. The fact that you can directly experience something that looks exactly like what value should look like is alone a good candidate for its existence.

>Subjective - relevant to you. Special significance to you as an individual. You may share similar subjective values with other individuals...that doesn't mean all of a sudden this is objective value.

Happiness being a positive experience isn't dependent on your attitude towards it. Its a thing that's true pre-judgement. If you are having a positive experience, but by some delusion are led to define it as bad its still good. Unless its actually bad, in which case it wasn't good in the first place. It doesn't matter what things people like, because experiential goods reduce to intrinsic goods. Someone might like golf, and someone might like bowling, but in each case the instrumental good is leading to the objective good of happiness or preference satisfaction or whatever the intrinsic goods are. This has nothing at all to do with anyone agreeing about anything.

However, when talking about value, these distinctions between objective and subjective do not matter. Even if values were subjective, it wouldn't change anything. Preference satisfaction can I believe be interpreted as either subjective or objective. But it makes no difference, since subjective satisfaction can still be made sense of in amounts that hypothetically can be labeled as units, and so are enough to work with. Not sure how that means I should kill myself when I don't want to. That's mostly a purely academic distinction, since the results in practice would be the same.

>You aren't using much imagination though. Your life may be comfortable, you may not have many hardships or much suffering. For people who are enduring great suffering then I think suicide is justified. Especially when the only value in existence is subjective i.e. there is not any objective point, purpose, meaning or value to life.

If this is what you were getting at, you should have saved time and got to it right away. This has little to do with whether value is subjective or objective, because this is true either way. If the objective value of their life is so low that it is below zero with little likelihood of changing, then yes, it would be preferable for them (from their own perspective at any rate) to kill themself most likely. But in practice we warn that for most people who think this, it may not be the case. I'm not sure why you think value reducing to something objective would rule out suicide being a possibly preferable option.

> I admit these positions seem odd to me because whether one be a compatibalist, hard determinist or fatalist it seems as if each is committed to the thesis that mental states are determined by the initial conditions of the universe such that in your fatalist example the fatalist was determined to be a fatalist, and thus determined to believe his actions had no causal influence over the future, whereas the determinist was determined to believe differently- all regardless of the truth or falsity of the respective positions (given determinism, obviously).

This is all correct.

>I guess a follow up question would be whether those that adhere to these positions think that "reasons" have any influence over a persons beliefs. Can people believe anything "because it's true"? Do people who hold these positions think our beliefs can track truth? It seems as if the determinst wants to say that the beliefs they have they have been fated to have since the beginning of the universe- it could not be otherwise, and the beliefs others have which contradict their beliefs, too, those people could not have had otherwise, such that there is no room for truth or reasoning.

These are really good questions, and the answers depend a lot on how you interpret what exactly it is to say that reasons might "have an influence" or that we might have beliefs "because" they're true. I'd say that most philosophers (determinist or otherwise) think that beliefs can track truth--that is, that it's possible to have a belief that is true or false--at least to the extent that they think we have beliefs at all. Someone who was both a determinist and an extreme eliminativist about mental states (think Paul Churchland, maybe) would reject claims like "reasons can influence our beliefs" and "our beliefs can be true" in virtue of the fact that he rejects the existence of things like beliefs and (psychological) reasons in the first place. For people without that kind of eliminativist view, determinism doesn't usually imply anything in particular about the truth-functionality of beliefs, and I'd say that most determinists think we can have true beliefs, though the explanation for how that's the case is more controversial and messier. The basic correspondence theory of truth gives a nice (if somewhat overly simple) account of how this might work, though there are others. In the context of this discussion, "reasons" probably means something like "justification." That is, you're asking whether or not justification plays any role in belief formation. A justification, though, is really just a different kind of belief, what philosophers call a "second-order" belief--it's a belief about a belief. This sort of question, then, can get subsumed into the question of how determinists deal with the connection between beliefs and actions more generally, I think.

Whether or not a determinist thinks that reasons, beliefs, desires, or anything like that can play anything like a causal role in our actions depends a lot on how he understands the relationship between mental and physical states more broadly. For someone like me--that is, a non-reductive naturalist who thinks that psychological states are real, not reducible to particular physical states, and causally efficacious (in a sense)--the fact that our mental states are determined by past states doesn't imply that they're irrelevant. They're just as relevant and important as any other facts about the natural world, and (for some purposes) matter more to us, since they're facts that are very "close to home," so to speak. They play the same sort of role in our actions that other kinds of natural processes do. I don't like the language of "causation" for these discussions, so I prefer to talk about "constraints." I think it's right to say that psychological patterns (or laws) constrain our behavior just like any other natural laws do, though the argument for that assertion is quite long and would take us rather far afield from this discussion.

>It seems as if the determinst wants to say that the beliefs they have they have been fated to have since the beginning of the universe- it could not be otherwise, and the beliefs others have which contradict their beliefs, too, those people could not have had otherwise, such that there is no room for truth or reasoning.

This is the basic intuition behind hard determinism: if you don't even have any freedom over your beliefs and desires, then that's the ballgame, and there's no room for anything like free will. Still, there seems to be a meaningful distinction between an action that's in alignment with your own mental states and an action that's the result of coercion by some other agent. It might be true that all of our beliefs are the result of deterministic natural laws playing out, but it still seems odd to say that there's no real difference between a case when I take your wallet because I felt like it, and a case where I take your wallet because someone has a gun to my head and says "take that guy's wallet or I'll blow your brains out." It's quite common for compatibilists to endorse a version of "free will" on which the criterion for acting freely is something like "acting in accord with your own beliefs, desires, and reasons, rather than because of external coercion."

Many of us (i.e. people with determinist leanings who reject hard determinism) think that the only reason to really care about free will in the first place is for attributions of moral responsibility, since it's hard (though, again, not strictly impossible) to see how we might hold someone praiseworthy or blameworthy for actions that aren't freely taken. John Martin Fischer has a position he calls "semi-compatibilism" that's explicitly designed to address this sort of issue, and I think he does it pretty well. These sorts of accounts broadly are called "reasons-responsive compatibilism", and tie attributions of freedom (or, less strongly, moral responsibility) to facts about the explanation for some action or another. A "free" action on this view is one that's explanatorily related to an agent's reasons in the right ways.

Again, though, this sort of starts to brush up against some questions in the metaphysics of mind and the philosophy of science. If you don't think that reasons (or other mental states) are the kinds of things that can play a robust explanatory role in events, you'll reject this whole line of argument from the get-go. This is (at least in part) why I'm personally interested in giving a strong account of inter-level causation and emergence--it opens the door to these sorts of things in lots of areas.

>It seems like if determinism is true we have no means to determine the truth of anything, as our beliefs/reasoning do not aim at truth but are simply the inevitable result of the universe playing itself out.

Well, even if you're a hard determinist you might think that there's an evolutionary reason to think that our beliefs aim at truth--you'd just think that the thing doing the aiming is natural selection, not any kind of personal will. If our sensory apparatuses weren't at least somewhat reliable (and if they didn't tend to produce beliefs that were at least approximately true in many cases), we'd have a very hard time getting along in the world. We might think that being able to generate and maintain roughly accurate internal models of the world is one of the necessary preconditions on the evolution of organisms as complex as we are in an environment that's as complex as the one we find ourselves it. Things that can't do that tend to get hit by falling panes of glass, fall off cliffs, eaten by tigers, or otherwise fail to reproduce. None of that changes in the face of determinism.

I could say a lot more about the philosophy of science facet of stuff here, but if you're interested in digging into this (i.e. the connection between reasons, rationality, moral responsibility, and freedom) from the ethical side of things, that's not really my area of expertise. However, I can recommend a few great books on the subject. The first is Tim Scanlon's Being Realistic About Reasons, and the second is Derek Parfit's On What Matters (which is a two-volume set that also includes his Reasons and Persons). Both of these are classics in this literature, and go into these topics in great detail.

I've been lurking on reddit for a few months now but after reading this question I had to respond :)

For the last year I've been getting really into phenomenology. Not only is it a fun thing to do as its own end, but I've been told it is key to understanding a considerable portion of continental philosophy. I find myself doing Husserlian or Heideggarian phenomenology whenever I'm bored by myself, watching TV, or with friends.

(Note: I'm confused as to why platochronic thinks Heidegger doesn't do phenomenology. Sure it isn't phenomenology in the traditional, Cartesian sense, and he does reformulate its definition in the first Intro to B&T, but his re-casting of phenomenology from Husserlian epistemology into an ontology really paved the way for Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Derrida to do an ontological phenomenology. To say Heidegger's philosophy isn't phenomenological would be like saying only Husserl's is authentic.)

But, DReicht, the best place to start probably isn't Sartre's Being and Nothingness...or anything by Sartre for that matter. In order to not only have a surface understanding of B&N, you pretty much have to have an understanding of Husserl and Heidegger's Being & Time (of which Sartre based his title off of.) B&T is legendarily difficult; I've been spending the last half year intensely stomaching the first 250 pages of that mammoth. Sartre's other literary works are decent examples of what he tried to uncover in B&N, but are very hard and dry without knowing the source material. His shorter works are more like popular existential manifestos, and not a good introduction to Phenomenology. If you like Sartre (I love him,) you won't get the full dimensions of his philosophy without knowing his predecessors.

Husserl is definitely the best place to start. He's the origin of the movement, and It's usually best to start at the beginning. He's also the most Cartesian, I think, and this resonates with most western audiences right now. But, his language is a bit archaic, dry, and inconsistent. This is the best book I've come across. Robert Sokolowski is concise in his explanations and clear in his definitions. His 'Husserlian Meditations' is also excellent. If the 25$ is too much, just rent it from a library.

Cheers!

This is a great question, and like many topics in the sociology of philosophy, there's no single answer, but I can point to what I think is the single most important shift that took place in the last sixty years.

The shift, I think, comes from the work of W.V.O. Quine and Wilfred Sellars' in the 50s through to the 80s, in particular, Quine's work Epistemology Naturalized and Sellars' work Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Both articles are challenging but utterly superb.

In short, they represent an attack on the traditional view whereby we approach epistemology and metaphysics from 'the inside out'. The traditional approach (as exemplified by Descartes) assumes that we have some privileged epistemic relation to our own mental states, and that the difficulty resides in extrapolating from these to external objects, other minds, and so on. By contrast, the 'outside-in' approach more popular in recent years suggests we start with the natural sciences and other well-established fields of enquiry, and use them to understand the mind.

Quine and Sellars attack this traditional approach in different ways, too complex to neatly summarize here. But in brief, Sellars attacks the idea that we have any epistemically privileged access to our mental states that can serve as a platform for speculations about the external world (this, or something like it, is the notorious 'myth of the given'). Rather, our capacity to think about our own mental states follows from our understanding of the external world. Specifically, Sellars suggests that humans began (developmentally, and evolutionarily) with a theory of external objects (objects that are red and spherical and so on), and we invented the idea of 'sensations' as a way to explain how people might be victims of sensory illusions (enabling us to move from "it's red" to "it looks red, but it's not red!"). This was widely taken to be a serious challenge to a key assumption in skeptical arguments, namely that we know our own mental states better than the outside world.

Quine offers a positive proposal that cements this shift away from the traditional 'inside-out' approach to a more scientifically-focused 'outside-in' perspective. Again, very crudely, he suggests that - since we have to start somewhere in our theorizing about the world - we should start with our most successful sciences, including anatomy and evolutionary biology. That provides a basis for affirming that our senses are accurate: they rely on well-understood biological mechanisms, and if they weren't accurate, our ancestors wouldn't have lasted long.

To many people, the 'outside-in' perspective seems to be a kind of cheating: how can we assume the accuracy of the natural sciences before we've even established that there's an external world? To use a nice cliche, the outside-in approach might seem like it resorts to theft rather than honest toil. However, I think the defender of an outside-in approach can justifiably respond: "look, EVERYONE has to start from somewhere in their theorizing, which is not to say that anything needs to be sacrosanct; but if we start with the natural sciences, we stand a good chance of explaining and understanding how humans come to have thoughts and perceptions, whereas the 'inside-out' approach has little concrete to show for itself after half a millennium of investigation. So you start where you want; we'll start with the sciences, and we'll see who makes their way out of the woods first".

The latter approach has largely been the more influential in modern philosophy of mind and philosophy of perception. So philosophers like Jerry Fodor and Tyler Burge are interested in questions like "how can animals represent their environment?" and "does all representation presuppose a conceptual capacity?" rather than questions about ontology and skepticism.

For a summary of the above shift, and the underlying and ongoing debate between 'outside-in' and 'inside-out' philosophers, I heartily recommend Robert Stalnaker's book "Our Knowledge of the Internal World".

There have also been a BUNCH of other trends in recent philosophy pushing in a similar direction (that is, away from 'inside out' perspectives), notably anti-individualism and content externalism (in the work of Kripke, Putnam, and, again, Burge), as well as the shift in epistemology towards more formal methods and investigation of things like cognitive biases (the psychologists Kahnemann and Tversky and experimental philosophy being notable examples). But I think the influence of Quine and Sellars was the single most important 'push' away from traditional skeptical concerns.

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!

"One cannot simply choose whatever one's starting positions are arbitrarily. After all, I cannot simply say "I believe I'm the most important thing in the world, so I can justifiably steal from you or harm you for whatever purpose."

>Well why not?

If your moral theory compels you to accept an ethical proposition such as "I value myself and not others in such a way that I can (for example) permissibly torture you to death for the pleasure I derive from it" then that counts against the plausibility of your ethical theory. It's a huge bullet to bite. I'm not saying you're being inconsistent by adopting such a starting position and following through with it. But consistency isn't the only metric by which we can evaluate moral theories.



>I've not ever seen a good argument that objective, universal values exist. Or that values exist outside of our own choices at all.

I can recommend some well regarded stuff. Enoch's [Taking Morality Seriously](https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Morality-Seriously-Defense-Realism/dp/0199683174) Shafer-Landau's [Moral Realism: a Defense] (https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Realism-Defence-Russ-Shafer-Landau/dp/0199280207/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CNVDTNHGJW3FHXNR8821), Oddie's [Value, Reality and Desire] (https://www.amazon.com/Value-Reality-Desire-Graham-Oddie/dp/0199562385/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496676933&sr=1-1&keywords=Value+reality+and+desire), Huemer's [Ethical Intuitionism] (https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Intuitionism-M-Huemer/dp/0230573746/ref=pd_sim_14_4?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0230573746&pd_rd_r=0X50H65ZP0KD630TPQGQ&pd_rd_w=imPRX&pd_rd_wg=uCVqd&psc=1&refRID=0X50H65ZP0KD630TPQGQ), Parfit's [On What Matters] (https://www.amazon.com/What-Matters-Three-Derek-Parfit/dp/0198778600/ref=pd_sim_14_19?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0198778600&pd_rd_r=S7VW3J457CTBW6RT503R&pd_rd_w=Gz5f7&pd_rd_wg=Vrfn0&psc=1&refRID=S7VW3J457CTBW6RT503R)
Wedgwood's [The Nature of Normativity] (https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Normativity-Ralph-Wedgwood/dp/0199568197), Cuneo's [The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism] (https://www.amazon.com/Normative-Web-Argument-Moral-Realism/dp/019958138X/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496678105&sr=1-6&keywords=terence+cuneo).


And here's some free papers you can read (too lazy to name them all, sorry):

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard_Boyd5/publication/240034001_How_to_Be_a_Moral_Realist/links/556f6f4308aec226830aab09/How-to-Be-a-Moral-Realist.pdf

http://www.academia.edu/4116101/Why_Im_an_Objectivist_about_Ethics_And_Why_You_Are_Too_

https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=433000088031098030104101075089022124028072042008084011092124087113084016108098084005098003032035018116033080110110127020085084106080012039033080068103113067015099089032030091083096096084064089109093065079071016028099008078093021125125068072101086002&EXT=pdf

https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=207103102008006126082026003080087077015002001000090086121025066112086090029103080091030096049125038001052020081100031102121000046002046043009065006112075102115099049080048111067091106094117103109111097113120126103124079110093018090122114122112110007&EXT=pdf

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~umer/teaching/intro181/readings/shafer-Landau2005EthicsAsPhilosophyADefenseOfEthicalNonnaturalism.pdf

http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1007/s11245-016-9443-7?author_access_token=R2EN7zieClp6VWWEo8DyZPe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY6_LyD8T3yNLLNQUBcKQRpfV5lbirZE36eSIc6PLipzIUjIvQrTe9aO4meFw0oJ_Dp784B0R9TnA9qTFaNLe9oWPQUaroxf3o-BsITKWjp_6Q%3D%3D

http://www.owl232.net/5.htm

















>Maybe. But if so then what are these properties?

Moral realists are traditionally divided into two camps on this. Moral Naturalists take moral properties to be natural properties, and Moral Non-Naturalists take moral properties to be sui generis, irreducible, that they cannot be wholly understood in natural terms, that moral properties supervene on the natural. (This is a woefully rough outline: here's a good place to read about the difference: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/. And here's an attempt to describe what non-natural moral properties are: http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/INP.pdf


>And what is "good" and "bad". I've not seen a definition that doesn't just feel arbitrary.

It has been argued that it is precisely that these things cannot be defined that makes them what they are. See the non-naturalism SEP entry above in the section on Moore's Open Question Argument and this for more responses: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism-moral/#OpeQueArg

>And even if it's possible to believe in objective values one way or the other - the fact is that no-one's come up with an ethical system that's so convincing everyone agrees.

True, but disagreement about x doesn't necessarily mean right answers are impossible to derive.

>And the objective fact is that at present different people have different values (and good luck trying to get them to change!)

True again, but we can test the reasons why they hold these values.


"But even slaughtering a final generation is better than breeding and slaughtering generations in perpetuity."

>I think that if we're making that decision on animals behalf, without asking them - then that's still domination.

Slaughtering them? Sure is. I'm not saying that's the best solution. Just better than what we're doing now. That's how bad it is now.


>That's the thing I can't see any relation with animals at present that isn't some kind of domination.

That's why some vegans basically want to leave them be. Other vegans will argue having pets is ok, so long as the pet is amenable to being domesticated, like dogs seem to be, and provided we can provide them with a good life. In fact, helping animals like these could be argued as being a good thing.

Other vegans will maintain that some animal use is justified, like medical experimentation. (Not all, but some.) Others will argue that even killing animals for food is justifiable, provided a person does this to survive and be healthy -- or if affordable, healthful alternatives are not readily available to them.

>We all die someday. If had to choose between getting killed at 30 or not existing at all, I'd rather die at 30.

Again, this rather misses the point. The question is, is someone justified to kill you at 30 for whatever purpose, provided they were instrumental in bringing you into existence? It doesn't seem so.

>Equally there's plenty of people who know that they're about to give birth to a child with a life threatening disability, who still choose to make that life anyway. If we don't give farm animals that same choice then we ARE treating animals differently to humans.

In this case, the parents aren't really giving that child a choice. They are making the choice to bring a child into existence. Furthermore, it doesn't seem we have an ethical obligation to bring children into existence. Perhaps it's a permissible option, but it doesn't seem to be a duty. After all, I could have a child and probably provide her a good life. But if I get a vasectomy, that doesn't make me akin to a murderer. Non-existing beings cannot make choices, and they cannot be harmed.




>I don't personally think it's a bad thing to do that. But I do think that it's not possible to come up with a plan for agriculture that doesn't involve humans making decisions on animals behalf - either slaughtering them or placing further restrictions on their freedom than they have already.

Which supports the idea that we shouldn't bring them into existence in the first place.


Edit: fixed a link. And fixed "non-natural terms" to read "natural terms".

Here's my Davidsonian response to Plantinga's argument from this post a while back. It's not an uncontroversial one, but I think it works. There's a TLDR at the bottom.

Plantinga's argument is that believing the conjunction of naturalism and evolution is self-defeating. According to the argument, evolution designs us to believe what is useful for survival and reproduction, not necessarily what is true. As such it is possible that most of our beliefs are useful fictions. (The way the argument is formulated, he actually first argues for epiphenomenalism with respect to beliefs, but I won't bring that up since I find it patently absurd.) Here's the argument outlined. There's many responses one can give to Plantinga here, but the best one, I believe can be drawn from Donald Davidson. In his book Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Davidson puts forward a series of anti-skeptical arguments based on his theory of meaning. Here's how I think Davidson's arguments straightforwardly answer Plantinga's worries:

In the conditioning process of language-learning a child learns to say certain words and sentences in the situations for which they are appropriate. For simple object words, some of the first words learned by a child (and the sorts of words we can associate with empirical beliefs about one’s immediate environment), the appropriate situation in which they are to be uttered are when the object is present. Though this is a rough and oversimplified picture as Davidson admits, child learns the word “rabbit,” for example, by positive conditioning whenever a rabbit is present and negative conditioning when one is not present. The three-way interaction here between a language-learner, a language-conditioner and a stimulus in the world,is what Davidson calls "triangulation" and for Davidson this is essential both to interpreting beliefs and to language learning. To know the meaning of the word, Davidson asserts, following Wittgenstein, is no more than to be able to use it appropriately. To know the meaning of “rabbit” for example, is to be able to say it, in the most basic cases, when a rabbit is present.

Davidson is by no means modest about the epistemological implications of his considerations regarding belief and meaning. He concludes, “The fallout from these considerations for the theory of knowledge is revolutionary. If words and thoughts are, in the most basic cases, necessarily about the sorts of objects and evince that commonly cause them, there is no room for Cartesian doubts about the independent existence of such objects and events.” The idea here is pretty straightforward. The concepts in which my beliefs and thoughts are framed arise in a communal context which essentially involves another language user and shared objects and events to which language-speakers can both respond. In order for us to have beliefs about rabbits, for example, and for it to make sense to talk about these beliefs, there must really be rabbits and these rabbits must really be the things causally responsible for our beliefs about rabbits (at least in the paradigm cases, since, of course, a rabbit-shaped rock might sometimes be causally responsible for a belief about a rabbit). This handles the evolutionary skeptic pretty straightforwardly. Consider one strikingly absurd example that Plantinga gives:

>Perhaps a primitive tribe thinks that everything is really alive, or is a witch; and perhaps all or nearly all of their beliefs are of the form this witch is F or that witch is G: for example, this witch is good to eat, or that witch is likely to eat me if I give it a chance. If they ascribe the right properties to the right 'witches,' their beliefs could be adaptive while nonetheless (assuming that in fact there aren't any witches) false.

If Davidson is right, and I think he is, this sort of example that Plantinga proposes isn’t a coherent possibility. If the causes of beliefs must in the most basic cases be the objects of beliefs, then there is no way that all of the tribes beliefs could be about witches (since there are no witches there to cause these beliefs). What would it mean for all of the tribe’s beliefs to be about witches? For one we could not interpret them as only having beliefs about witches, since, to have any interpretive success we must interpret them as having mostly true beliefs about the objects we recognize them as interacting with in their environment. If they say their beliefs are all about witches, then the likely solution is that “witch” in their language means something rather different than it does in ours, for it seems that they can’t possibly think that all of their beliefs are about women capable of performing magic. And if they mean something different, perhaps something along the lines of thinking that all objects are enchanted in such a way that if not handled properly we can be cursed by them, then they are simply wrong about a certain feature of the objects their beliefs are about. That does not mean that all of their beliefs are about nonexistent things—they are still having beliefs about trees and rocks, but they just also have the false belief that trees and rocks have magical powers.

Now, of course, it is true that evolution may lead us to form some false beliefs in some situations, but this is perfectly acceptable insofar as these false beliefs arise against a backdrop of true beliefs. Consider the example of “auditory looming” in which we hear a sound which is increasing in volume to be closer to us than a sound decreasing in volume, even when the two sounds are the same distance away from us . The evolutionary reasoning behind this bias is that it is a relatively low cost to mistake that the source of the sound is closer than it is and be ready to early, and it is an extremely high cost to get hit or attacked by the source of the sound. The belief that such a sound is a certain distance away will be a false belief which evolution has designed us to come to. How do we explain this and still maintain that evolution isn’t going to give us a large amount of false beliefs? I think the answer is relatively simple. This belief, let’s represent it as “S is x feet away,” is couched in a slew of true beliefs, and only in the context of these true beliefs can this belief arise. All of these beliefs (“there is a sound,” “something is moving closer to me,” “this thing could be harmful,” etc.) must be primary to intentional cognitive bias. It wouldn’t make much sense for an animal to develop the false belief “S is x feet away” if it did not already have the belief that S is potentially harmful, and so on.

tldr: If our beliefs aren't really about objects that are really there, then it makes no sense to talk about us as having any beliefs at all.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a brief mention of projectibility here which should clarify what the issue is with the predicates 'green' and 'grue.' It's also free and not overly technical, which is helpful. Searching around on the SEP and IEP (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) may help. Both are trusted resources written by experts. Preferable to Wikipedia.

Goodman's Fact, Fiction and Forecast is technical, but otherwise a good primary source.

The collected volume Grue!: The New Riddle of Induction is an excellent overview of numerous approaches to solving Goodman's riddle. It's a bit more pricy than Goodman's Fact, Fiction and Forecast; however, it is several hundred more pages in length, and I think worth purchasing if you want to learn more about it.

There's a lot of renewed interest in logical positivism these days. E.g., from David Chalmers, Michael Friedman...

It's a much more sophisticated philosophy than the caricatures suggest. There's been a polemic interest in caricaturing logical positivism since it was the movement we were supposed to be distancing ourselves from through the mid-to-late twentieth century. But as this polemic interest fades into history, there's naturally an increasing interest in more nuanced engagements with the movement.

Philosophy of mind addresses some of these issues under the heading of intentionality.

In (continental) humanities side of things, sociology of emotions and affect theory is so in vogue recently that some scholars already identified as a turn. The focus and approaches vary but one influential strand of thought takes Spinoza-Deleuze's "affect" as a central concept and separates it from emotion. I won't get into details but basically "affects" are about physical bodies' capacities to act and be acted on. For that reason the term abolishes the distinction between physical and mental effects and covers them both. Brian Massumi is maybe the most influential thinker in affect theory who refined the concept of "affect" and put it in context of broader discussions.

The indispensable resources are:

Gregg and Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader

[Clough and Halley. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social] (http://www.amazon.com/Affective-Turn-Theorizing-Social/dp/0822339250/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375771321&sr=1-1&keywords=affective+turn)

[Brian Massumi. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation] (http://www.amazon.com/Parables-Virtual-Sensation-Post-Contemporary-Interventions/dp/0822328976/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375771409&sr=1-1&keywords=parables+of+virtual)

Not known that much outside of anthropology but this is very good too: Tim Ingold. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description

While I have not read Taylor's "Hegel," I have read his "Sources of the Self" and would absolutely be ready to recommend pretty much anything by him. In Sources, he does take a route very much influenced by Hegel to try and explain and explore where our sense of self comes from, and how it came to come from there. He does this by tracing a history of the idea of a "self" and filling it in from ancient times to modern, marking out and emphasizing each major change in what we draw our sense of self from. It's an absolutely brilliant work. I have never read a philosopher who is more respectful to those he disagrees with, too. He makes every effort to represent them fairly, while simultaneously clearly expressing why he disagrees with them.

In other words, if Taylor has a book or article on anything you're interested in, read it. Even if you disagree with him, you will come out better able to express your own opinions. You want secondary lit on Hegel? He has a book. Read it.

Caruso writes in his book Free Will and Consciousness that most free-will-believing philosophers (especially compatibilists) barely mention conscious vs. unconscious choices. But his book and the continuing interest in the Libet experiments have prompted several philosophers to clarify this particular aspect of their views.

The general opinion has been that free will does not require purely conscious processes. Unconscious drives and desires are just about always present when we make a conscious choice. Some choices seem unconscious as well. Often those unconscious desires are themselves importantly shaped by previous conscious choices, but not necessarily in a recognizable way. Free will is (likely) still active in all these cases.

These reviews of Caruso's book may be useful too: 1, 2.

>It feels as if the two concepts of consciousness and self are different.

Some think there is an intimate relationship between the self and consciousness, revealed by the reflexive or self-conscious nature of experience itself. Zahavi holds such a view that you can read about here. More generally there are numerous accounts of what the self is and how it relates to consciousness. The Oxford Handbook of the Self would be a good place for an overview (pm me if you don't know how to get a free copy).

>Is consciousness without the "self" what a p-zombie would be?

A p-zombie is something that lacks (phenomenal) consciousness altogether. You'd be best to read the SEP article on consciousness. SEP is a good place to start for any overviews of topics in philosophy, and is generally written by experts in the respective field.

https://www.amazon.com/World-Will-Idea-Everymans-Library/dp/0460875051

There's an abridged version. It's still verbose, I suppose, but maybe you'd like to check it out. I personally enjoy his writing style, but I know what you mean. Though I've also read a bit of Hegel and anyone sounds good after him, lol.

I've read Thinking Fast and Slow and thought it was a great book.

Free Will, by Sam Harris, I really didn't think much of. I thought he spent too much effort attacking a specific individual instead of presenting his own theory.

If you are interested in consciousness at all, I would recommend "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes. I found it a rather interesting book that seems to have gone largely unnoticed. The amazon page gives a better synopsis and review than I ever could.

Frederick Copleston wrote a ten volume history of philosophy with each volume loosely devoted to a particular historical period. You might find it helpful to select one or two volumes that seem relevant to your interests and use them to glean background knowledge.

William James wrote a collection of essays entitled Some Problems in Philosophy which gives an excellent overview of some of the most notable and persistent problems that philosophers have grappled with.

Becoming more specific, the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series is an outstanding resource for 20th century analytic philosophy. Each volume is devoted to a specific topic and consists of seminal essays on that topic written during the past hundred or so year. Given your interests, you might find the volumes on Ethical Theory and Truth to be of interest. There is also a volume on the Philosophy of Mathematics.

From a historical perspective, Plato's dialogues are foundational to Western philosophy. The Republic has been mentioned; you should also read the epistemological dialogue, Theaetetus. Be forewarned that these are challenging texts. The four dialogues that relate the trial and death of Socrates are generally considered more accessible: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo.

Finally, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an indispensable resource of introductory articles on many different philosophers and philosophical issues.

Abstract

Michelle Montague is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. As well as publishing extensively in phenomenology and philosophy of mind, Michelle is also the author of Non-Propositional Intentionality, Cognitive Phenomenology, and our focus for this episode, her 2016 book, The Given: Experience and its Content.

This episode is all about what some philosophers have called ‘the given’, that is, what is given to us in our immediate experience. From Aristotle to Hume, philosophers have tried to account for the categories, types, and distinctions within the mind. Michelle’s work continues in this tradition, however it takes a new and exciting turn away from the orthodox positions in philosophy of mind - she thinks that phenomenology comes first, that phenomenology is responsible for our mind’s ability to represent the world, and that there are many more types of phenomenology than we’ve currently admitted.

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Rawls is obviously important. It's also probably good to read something from the communitarian school of thought. Influential books include After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice by Michael Sandel, Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor, and Spheres of Justice by Michael Walzer.

If you like Harris and Pinker's philosophical stuff, check out John Searle, Noam Chomsky, and Dan Dennett (Dennett wrote a harsh review of Harris' book on free will). They're like Harris and Pinker, but better.

Sounds like it could be something by John Searle, maybe this book?: https://www.amazon.com/Minds-Brains-Science-Reith-Lectures/dp/0674576330

Ah, look man, don't go for the Dummies Guides! Reducing philosophy to any form of expression not done by the author is always a dangerous business, and is by no means the making of a good education. With that said, there are introduction texts that can appreciate the fact that you're a layman. Those are the ones you're going to want.

Here is one for phenomenology.

I took a semester with him. He's a character, sure. I wasn't that interested after the hype, wasn't a philosophy student. How about his 3 books with this face on the cover- http://www.amazon.com/Intentionality-An-Essay-Philosophy-Mind/dp/0521273021 don't judge a book by the cover?
Plus any student who wasn't a complete half-wit realized he made college more expensive. Look up Searle and rent control.

David Chalmers's newest book Constructing the World takes up this challenge, particularly in the vein of Rudolf Carnap's Aufbau.

Here's the link to his book.

And here you can listen to the audio files of his 2010 John Locke lectures from which it came. In the first lecture he also talks about other contemporary philosophers who are working on projects to establish a universal logic to construct the world with a finite number of fundamental concepts, so that might give you some additional resources.

edit: added a few words to clarify

On the topic of secondary sources, check out http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Phenomenology-Robert-Sokolowski/dp/0521667925

A text that might interest you is Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, which is a philosophical history of what it means to be a self. Be warned that it is a big book, and while the writing style is not very hard, it is certainly dry.

Another book that might interest you is Herbert Fingarette's Self-Deception. It's not exactly about personal identity as such, but it is about the philosophically and psychologically tricky notion of what it means to deceive oneself. The central question Fingarette explores is what it could mean to be both the deceiver and the deceived at the same time. The book crosses the line between philosophy and psychology, which is why it might appeal to you. It's also fairly small and the writing style is not too turgid.