The History Book Club discussion

This is a thread for folks who would like to study philosophy and philosophers and do not know where to start.

Please add books properly cited with a brief explanation why folks should be reading them.

Absolutely no self promotion whatsoever.

In other words which books and/or philosophers should be on the must-read philosophy books' list for current and future amateur, chair side, or even professional philosophers?

These recommendations should be made regardless of field. You may also add links, urls to sites that give great examples of philosophical thought - but not to your own blogs or other sites or reviews on goodreads - remember no self promotion.

Here is an example of how to add books here which should be read. Please try to use this format. Since we want to steer folks in the right direction - we want on this thread to make it easy for them to find, read about and research how to find these books and judge their interest quotient right away.

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The Story of Philosophy

Will Durant

Synopsis:

The Story of Philosophy chronicles the ideas of the great thinkers, the economic and intellectual environments which influenced them, and the personal traits and adventures out of which each philosophy grew

Here are some open courses at Yale: (FREE)

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

The Department of Philosophy at Yale offers a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses in various traditions of philosophy, with strengths and a well-established reputation in the history of philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of art as well as other central topics. The Department has affiliated faculty members in the Law School, the Linguistics Department, the Political Science Department, and the Divinity School, and has close connections with the Cognitive Science Program and with the Program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics. Learn more at http://www.yale.edu/philos

PHIL 176: DEATH

About the Course

There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?

About Professor Shelly Kagan

Shelly Kagan is Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale. After receiving his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1976, and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1982, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois at Chicago before coming to Yale in 1995. He is the author of the textbook Normative Ethics, which systematically reviews alternative positions concerning the basic rules of morality and their possible foundations, and The Limits of Morality, which challenges two of the most widely shared beliefs about the requirements of morality. He is currently at work on The Geometry of Desert.

by Shelly Kagan

by Shelly Kagan

Shelly Kagan

by Shelly Kagan

Here is the link to the on line FREE course:

http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-1...

Here is the link to the syllabus:

http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-1...

Another open course at Yale:

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

The Department of Philosophy at Yale offers a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses in various traditions of philosophy, with strengths and a well-established reputation in the history of philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of art as well as other central topics. The Department has affiliated faculty members in the Law School, the Linguistics Department, the Political Science Department, and the Divinity School, and has close connections with the Cognitive Science Program and with the Program in Ethics, Politics, and Economics. Learn more at http://www.yale.edu/philos

PHIL 181: PHILOSOPHY AND THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN NATURE

About the Course

Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature pairs central texts from Western philosophical tradition (including works by Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, Rawls, and Nozick) with recent findings in cognitive science and related fields. The course is structured around three intertwined sets of topics: Happiness and Flourishing; Morality and Justice; and Political Legitimacy and Social Structures.

About Professor Tamar Gendler:

Tamar Szabó Gendler is Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science at Yale University, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy. She received her BA in Humanities and Mathematics & Philosophy from Yale in 1987 and her PhD in Philosophy from Harvard in 1996. After a decade teaching first at Syracuse University and then at Cornell, she returned to to Yale as a professor in 2006. Her professional philosophical work lies at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, and she is the author of Thought Experiments (2000) and Intuition, Imagination and Philosophical Methodology (2010), and editor or co-editor of Conceivability and Possibility (2002), Perceptual Experience (2006) and The Elements of Philosophy (2008). She has been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.

by Tamar Szabó Gendler (no photo)

by Tamar Szabo Gendler (no photo)

by Tamar Szabó Gendler (no photo)

by Tamar Szabó Gendler (no photo)

by Susanna Siegel (no photo) and edited by Tamar Szabó Gendler (no photo)

Here is the link to the on line FREE course:

http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-1...

Here is the link to the syllabus:

http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-1...

For a one volume history of philosophy, I very much like by Bertrand Russell. Russell is knowledgeable and writes well.

Coming from a different point of view (Russell was an atheist, Coppleston was a Jesuit) is the multi-volume (Goodreads seems to have only those volumes) by Frederick Charles Copleston.

Thank you very much Peter - great adds but try to use the format that I showed in message one for future adds to make it easier and consistent for folks to read your entries - for example:

A History of Western Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

Synopsis:

For a one volume history of philosophy, I very much like this book. Russell is knowledgeable and writes well.


and

A History of Philosophy 2: Medieval Philosophy

by Frederick Charles Copleston

Synopsis:

Coming from a different point of view ((Russell was an atheist, Coppleston was a Jesuit) is the multi-volume set of which the book above is a part.

Conceived originally as a serious presentation of the development of philosophy for Catholic seminary students, Frederick Copleston's nine-volume A History Of Philosophy has journeyed far beyond the modest purpose of its author to universal acclaim as the best history of philosophy in English.

and

A History of Philosophy 3: Ockham to Suarez

by Frederick Charles Copleston

Synopsis:

Conceived originally as a serious presentation of the development of philosophy for Catholic seminary students, Frederick Copleston's nine-volume A History Of Philosophy has journeyed far beyond the modest purpose of its author to universal acclaim as the best history of philosophy in English.

Copleston, an Oxford Jesuit of immense erudition who once tangled with A. J. Ayer in a fabled debate about the existence of God and the possibility of metaphysics, knew that seminary students were fed a woefully inadequate diet of theses and proofs, and that their familiarity with most of history's great thinkers was reduced to simplistic caricatures. Copleston set out to redress the wrong by writing a complete history of Western philosophy, one crackling with incident and intellectual excitement -- and one that gives full place to each thinker, presenting his thought in a beautifully rounded manner and showing his links to those who went before and to those who came after him.

The result of Copleston's prodigious labors is a history of philosophy that is unlikely ever to be surpassed. Thought magazine summed up the general agreement among scholars and students alike when it reviewed Copleston's A History of Philosophy as "broad-minded and objective, comprehensive and scholarly, unified and well proportioned... We cannot recommend [it] too highly."

Meditations

by Marcus Aurelius

Synopsis:

Written in Greek by the only Roman emperor who was also a philosopher, without any intention of publication, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) offer a remarkable series of challenging spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the emperor struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe. Ranging from doubt and despair to conviction and exaltation, they cover such diverse topics as the nature of moral virtue, human rationality, divine providence and Marcus' own emotions. But while the Meditations were composed to provide personal consolation and encouragement, in developing his beliefs Marcus Aurelius also created one of the greatest of all works of philosophy: a timeless collection of extended meditations and short aphorisms that has been consulted and admired by statesmen, thinkers and readers through the centuries.

Thank you Jose

How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic

by Madsen Pirie (no photo)

Synopsis

Deals with one fallacy, explaining what the fallacy is, giving and analysing an example, outlining when/where/why the particular fallacy tends to occur and finally showing how you can perpetrate the fallacy on other people in order to win an argument.

Thank you Jose.

by S.E. Frost Jr. (no photo available).

I call this book my Bible of philosophy because it gave me my start in studying philosophy. Great for a beginner.

Thank you so much Jimmy - many of our members who are on this journey are just starting out so this will be a valuable reference.

This is a link to The Stone, the philosophy column that appears in the New York Times. If you enjoy reading about philosophy, you will enjoy this column. It takes a modern look at the questions philosophy poses.

http://www.nytimes.com/column/the-stone

Thanks Pamela

You're welcome, Bentley.

Philosophical Dictionary

by Voltaire

Synopsis:

Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary is a series of short essays, hortatory and propagandist, over an enormously wide range of subjects.

It was deliberately planned as a revolutionary book and was duly denounced on all sides and described as 'a deplorable monument of the extent to which inteligence and erudition can be abused'.

The subjects treated include Abraham, Angel and Anthropophages; Baptism, Beauty and Beasts; Fables, Fraud and Fanaticism; Metempsychosis, Miracles and Moses; all of them exposed to Voltaire's lucid scrutiny, his elegant irony and his passionate love of reason and justice.

Encyclopédie” (1751-77)

by Denis Diderot

The publication of the Encyclopedie in the middle of the eighteenth century is generally recognised as a decisive factor in the conflict ideas which led to the French Revolution of 1789.

Yet, despite its importance in the history of eighteenth-century French thought, no outstanding work of the period is less read today, simple because of its bulk and inaccessibility.

Those parts reproduced in this edition cover religion, philosophy, science and political and social ideas and include articles which reflect the humanitarian outlook of the contributors and their attitude to the abuses of the ancien regime.

The selection is of value not only to students of French literature and thought, but also to all those interested in the history and political ideas of France on the eve of the Revolution; in these pages Diderot, D'Alembert and D'Holbach are allowed to speak for themselves, instead of having their ideas summarised (and sometimes misinterpreted) by others.

Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison

by David Wootton (no photo)

Synopsis:

A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents.

We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning--cost-benefit analysis--to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives.

Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought--from Machiavelli to Madison--to show how new ideas about politics, ethics, and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution.

As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded, theories about the rational pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit moved to the fore in the work of writers both obscure and as famous as Hobbes, Locke, and Adam Smith.

The new instrumental reasoning cut through old codes of status and rank, enabling the emergence of movements for liberty and equality. But it also helped to create a world in which virtue, honor, shame, and guilt count for almost nothing, and what matters is success.

Is our world better for the rise of instrumental reasoning? To answer that question, Wootton writes, we must first recognize that we live in its grip.

This is an excerpt from an interview done by Five Books with Editor of History Today - Paul Lay.

Last on your list is Power, Pleasure and Profit by David Wootton. Tell me about this book.

This is by far the most challenging book on my list. David Wootton is one of the best intellectual historians we’ve got.

He began as a historian of atheism, writing a brilliant short book about Paolo Sarpi, who was a Venetian humanist. Rather like England, Venice had an ambivalent relationship with the Pope. It was excommunicated in a papal interdict at the beginning of the seventeenth century and Sarpi became an apologist for the Venetian state.

David’s real breakthrough book, in terms of reaching a wider audience, was called The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution, which is full of bravura writing and interesting detours that he’s particularly good at. There is an entire chapter on ‘the fact.’

This book, Power, Pleasure and Profit, is incredibly ambitious because it tries to address a change in humanity during the Enlightenment, when the secular is emboldened.

People in the West turned their backs on Aristotle and Christ—who had underpinned rationality and morality up until then—and started to think in a Benthamite, utilitarian way about cost and benefit.

So you have people like Hobbes, Locke, and Voltaire who are interested in the selfish motives of human beings and the way in which you can build an infrastructure around those selfish motives that makes them beneficial.

It’s an interesting book because the Enlightenment has become fashionable again—I’m thinking of Steven Pinker, and even Jordan Peterson.

But, in a sense, it’s life reduced. Pleasure is good and pain is bad.

The old morality, where something was worthwhile in itself, is replaced by, ‘Does this hurt? Then it’s bad. Does this feel good? Then it’s good.’ It’s a very reductionist mentality.

There’s one passage where he writes, “The real transformation was not in the world of ideas; it was in the lives and behaviour of people who had come to accept that virtue, honour, shame and guilt counted for almost nothing; all that mattered was success.”

That has a very modern aspect, but in this profit and loss calculation it also seems like we’ve lost something.

I think about this in terms of Brexit where, for many people, if you tell them they’ll lose something economically, they still think it’s worth it.

It goes back to what we were saying about Iran, that a culture that’s very, very strong and deep is incredibly resistant, it can endure, it can overcome.

Whereas I think Wootton is arguing that this culture of profits and losses is very, very fragile because it’s not really built on anything.

It’s not built on the idea that some things are worth doing just because they’re worth doing or someone is good because they’re good. There’s always got to be a reason.

The book is very much concerned with Britain and the Scottish Enlightenment.

People like Adam Smith in particular are important to it. I don’t think David has looked at the Continental tradition, which tends to be more metaphysical.

If you think of people like Kant or Marx, their writing tends to have, for want of a better word, a more religious, deeper meaning.

Even Voltaire, who Wootton does refer to, is an Anglophile really. He’s one of the citizens of nowhere. David talks about that quite a lot—the citizens of somewhere.

Why would people vote for Brexit? Why would people vote for Trump? They must be irrational, they must be bad—whereas there may be deeper reasons that are almost, I wouldn’t say spiritual, but just not simply a profit-and-loss calculation. That’s what—I think— David is exploring in this book.

Of course, he goes on endless digressions, as David always does. In themselves, they’re fantastically entertaining. There’s an interesting character called Kenelm Digby who links a lot of things together because he’s there in the mid-seventeenth-century. He’s a Catholic acquaintance of Oliver Cromwell, a key member of the Royal Society, and the inventor of the modern wine bottle. So he’s quite an eclectic figure. But the main people are Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, those Enlightenment philosophers.

David always takes you on a ride. You read it once and you’ve probably understood 5-10 per cent of it, but you reread it and go back to certain passages.

The book is based on a series of lectures he gave at Oxford. There’s things where you think, ‘Oh yes, that’s absolutely right’—real epiphanies—and then you’ll see something and go, ‘Hang on, that can’t be true. That’s mad.’ It’s just so full of ideas. It’s always stimulating and it’s always well worth persisting with David.

Are you convinced by the argument he puts forward?

I think his diagnosis is convincing, with the caveat that he’s largely writing about an Anglophile tradition. The cure, I don’t know.

There does seem to be a reaction against that simple economic rationalism we’ve had for about 30 years or so, whereby money is everything and as long as GDP keeps going up and people’s wages keep going up, that will be enough. It doesn’t feel that way at the moment, as though that is enough. He’s examining a profound shift then in the light of a profound shift now, and so the book feels very, very timely. The problem is we know where they went, but we don’t know where we’re going. So it’s difficult, but it might be useful for navigating the present. Not that history ever repeats itself.

Source: Five Books

Preface to Plato

by Eric Alfred Havelock

Synopsis:

Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato's hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought.

The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction--Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative.

The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science

How does this book relate to the Future of Media?

According to Journalism Professor at Columbia University - Todd Gitlin - "The Greeks matter because some of them, at least, recognized that they were passing through a change in how people frame the world. In their case, it was the change from the oral to the written, and this is of course the subject of one of the Platonic dialogues, Phaedrus. In it, Socrates declares himself fully aware that human capacities can change, and that as memory is displaced or funnelled into print, a variety of changes may set in which affect not only how we know things, but also who we are as human beings.

Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato shows that the Greeks were aware that there was some connection, perhaps even an all-embracing connection, among forms of communication, memory and thought. It’s quite fascinating to me that people should have this awareness of a sea change in their way of knowing, this self-consciousness about it." -- Journalism Professor at Columbia University - Todd Gitlin in interview with Five Books

More:
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/todd...

Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers

by David Edmonds (no photo)

Synopsis:

On October 25,1946, in a crowded room in Cambridge, England, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper came face-to-face for the first and only time. The encounter lasted just ten minutes, and did not go well.

Their loud and aggressive confrontation became the stuff of instant legend. Almost immediately, rumors spread around the world that the two great philosophers had come to blows, armed with red-hot pokers.

Twenty years later, when Popper wrote an account of the incident, he portrayed himself as the victor, provoking intense disagreement. Everyone present seems to have remembered events differently.

What really happened in those ten minutes? And what does the violence of this brief exchange tell us about these two men, modern philosophy, and the significance of language in solving our philosophical problems?

Wittgenstein's Pokeris an engaging mix of philosophy, history, biography. and literary detection. David Edmonds and John Eidinow evoke with dazzling clarity the tumult of fin-de-siècle Vienna,

Wittgenstein's and Popper's birthplace; the tragedy of the Nazi takeover of Austria; and Cambridge University, with its eccentric set of philosophy dons, including Bertrand Russell, who acted as umpire at the meeting.

At the center of the story stand the two philosophers themselves -- proud, irascible, larger-than-life -- and spoiling for a fight.