Modern Philosophy An Anthology

[Madox Valdivia]

Andan eresource offers a wide range of supplemental online resources, including essay assignments, exams, quizzes, student handouts, reading questions, and scholarly articles on teaching the history of philosophy.

"This abundance of diverse thinkers, texts, and themes strikingly sets this anthology apart, and well worth special note is the exceptional number of writings by women philosophers and philosophers of color. . . . This is an exciting time for the history of modern philosophy, and the well-priced, well-intentioned, and commendably ambitious A New Modern Philosophy: The Inclusive Anthology of Primary Sources is a welcome and exciting addition to it."

"This new anthology by Sreedhar and Marshall reflects the most recent scholarly advancements by including an impressively diverse range of figures who tackled a myriad of fascinating and important philosophical topics in the early modern period. Students who read it, and instructors who teach it, will obtain a far more accurate picture of early modern philosophy than those using standard textbooks."

Of course there are introductory books, but I'm trying to get a sense of what primary texts have proven the most useful, whether in providing inspiration to students at the undergraduate level or just in terms of providing a stronger socio-historical understanding of the role of philosophy and the various recent movements and so on.

(This question is not "what is your favorite work of philosophy and why". I'm looking for a well-reasoned argument in favor of a particular text that would provide a good introduction to beginning students.)

Without a doubt, Bertrand Russell's two books: The Problems of Philosophy and History of Western Philosophy - not only are they introductions to timeless problems, the purpose and methods of philosophy, but they also present philosophical perspectives of their very own.

The bias is of course towards Western and analytic philosophy but Russell is a remarkably lucid writer and thinker and his exposition should serve as an exemplar for the teaching and popularization of philosophy. If you want to start anywhere, start there.

Introductory textbooks are far too boring and textbook-y to ever be a good introduction to philosophy. Chances are, there's a reason that these people didn't just take a formal philosophy class, and I'd almost be willing to bet that these textbooks are part of the reason. Not that they're bad, per se, but certainly dry.

But honestly, my experience tells me that the best way to get involved in any field of study is to just throw yourself into it and start trying to learn as much as you can about it. Too much hand-wringing isn't going to do any good, and fretting about how much there [potentially] is that you won't understand is a waste of time. Yes, there will be plenty of things you won't understand. But that's true for all of us when we started. Read the texts you can get your hands on anyway, and absorb the parts that you do understand. You can always come back later once you've further developed your knowledge to pick up the parts you missed.

And to that end, there's no book that I can recommend more highly than Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy. It's sort of like a combination anthology and introductory textbook, but it reads like neither of those things, which is a big win in my book.

More importantly, Durant attempts to show the interconnection of these philosophical ideas, in addition to presenting each as a separate case. The emphasis is placed on how the earlier philosopher's ideas informed the later philosophers, which is both undeniably true and undeniably useful. It also does quite a lot to make the book an interesting read.

And understanding what came before is absolutely crucial to jumping into the field of philosophy. As much interesting stuff as goes on in contemporary philosophy, all of it is based or premised on the work of people who came before. If you don't have at least some basic understanding of the field, it will be next to impossible to keep your head above water reading the works of contemporary philosophers, even though they might refrain from using such words as "thou" or "thine".

Like it or not, philosophy is a decidedly academic discipline, where it's become accepted practice (and some would go so far as to argue necessary) to dress up your thoughts in dense, oddly-worded prose in order for it to be accepted by the "community". That and academics are writing for a far different audience than the rest of the world. In particular, they're writing for each other. They can (and do!) make a lot of assumptions about what the reader is supposed to know, throwing around concepts as if you were as familiar with them as they themselves are. This is quite unlikely for most of us, of course, even fellow academics.

I highly recommend NOT to start off with any contemporary philosophers. This is because the contemporary field is highly specialized and fragmented, and will get you lost. One very important reason not to is that one of the hallmarks of philosophy is to get you to think for yourself, and so it is essential to know the history and origins of ideas and where they come from, and why is it they are as they are now.

was founded by Frege, Russell, von Quine and Wittgenstein, who emphasized a mathematical approach to philosophy. Their emphasis was on conceptual clarity, linguistic analysis and logical understanding. This led later to Logical Positivism and subsequently to current philosophy as it is now prevalent in Anglo-American universities.

includes the field of Phenomenology (Later Existentialism); Hegelism, who exposed a form of Idealism (Marxism and Critical Theory arose as a reaction to this); Freud and Psychoanalytic Theory. Structuralism and Post-Structuralism is in part influenced by Wittgenstein.

Why is it important to know how it all started and begin similarly yourself? Because in the realm of philosophical inquiry, there generally may be what is considered the 'Whole' and 'Part'. It is better to start off with the whole so you can firstly, try to figure out the problems for yourself, and identify what questions concern you the most. Is it the quandary of existence? The idea of a purpose? The question of an ideal society?

Most, probably all philosophy starts off with such questions as relates to our life and existence, relating to us as we are and our mortality. It starts off as speculation and wonder about the nature of things. It is only in the last 2 centuries that philosophy became mathematical and linguistic in nature - partly influenced by the scientific age and its insistence of empirical certainty, partly as a result of a dissatisfaction with vague metaphysical concepts. Modern philosophy tilted towards the material world, in one way or another.

arose as result for our need for clarification in order to understand the underlying meaning behind words so as to understand what we are talking about, that is also an offshoot of the scientific age.

It is not clear however that the answers are to found as we become clearer, or if there is even such a thing as an 'answer' at all. A large part of analytic philosophy, influenced by Wittgenstein, accepts the role of philosophy as simply conceptual clarity. A large part of Continental philosophy rejects that. A good part of both strides both sides. The question remains nevertheless whether the role of philosophy is merely to clarify, or to find specific answers. Normative questions continue to remain important to us, philosopher or not.

If you acquaint yourself with the language written long before, the use of the words may be different, and have a different sense of meaning. Many of these texts however, have good translations. It is important to read them as they are so that you can get a good idea of what those philosophers are trying to convey, and as best as possible, what they mean in the way they say it. Likewise, to get a feel of the concerns of those philosophers in their own time in the way they convey their thoughts to you through their style and language.

If you wish to obtain an introductory understanding of logical positivism1 then you should look no further than this book. It will either leave you feeling inspired and raring to dig into the work of the other logical positivists, or their academic opponents such as Quine, Popper & Kuhn.

Put simply, in Ayer's view philosophy becomes, in one corner, the trivial truths of deductive logic, and in the other, pure nonsense. God, ethics, aesthetics are all described as being literally meaningless2.

This is kind of an old thread, but I want to post my $0.02 here too because most of the answers above don't really address the question--they advise one to read the history of philosophy, or they give lists oriented around continental philosophy.

What I will do instead is give a list of some of the most important works a reading of which is necessary to understand the kind of mainstream analytic philosophy that is going on in the US, England, Australia and elsewhere today. I want to recommend two books.

Once you have Soames and Martinich under your belt you're probably ready to dive into which ever topic or field in analytic philosophy you want. So, say you read through these and find that you really want to go deeper in Epistemology. Then I would suggest that you look around on the philosophy department websites at a couple of really good philosophy departments (NYU, Rutgers, MIT, Princeton, Michigan, Harvard, Pitt, Yale) and see if you can syllabi in classes that interest you. Just start reading the stuff listed on the syllabus. That's how you get up to speed on the state of the art in a subfield today.

Much contemporary work is technical and involved and thus not a good entry point. There are plenty of texts written as introductions to the field that aim to be less technical and involved, and some of them are even good. None, however, are clearly as good as many of the classic (and, relatively accessible) works in philosophy.

3a8082e126