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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

25 “must read” books in philosophy before starting graduate school?

Brian Leiter

A student writes:

I will be starting my MA (terminal) programme in Philosophy in the Fall of this year, in Europe. I don't have a background in the subject and want to spend the few months before the session begins, in reading several works in the subject.

Could you please give (or ask on your blog or, perhaps, direct me to any pre-existing link) a list of "25 (or so) Must Read Books before starting Graduate School in Philosophy"?

Since I am only beginning to explore the various fields of the subject, I don't want to limit myself to any particular areas of interest.

This is a tough one, since many important books in philosophy are surely not profitably read on one's own; and what will count as "must read" will not be indifferent as between "fields of the subject."  Even allowing for that, what would readers recommend?  It might be particularly useful to say something about whether or not the book (or article) can be approached by someone without a background in philosophy.

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32 responses to “25 “must read” books in philosophy before starting graduate school?”

  1. Michael B

    Get some obvious ones out the way:

    Republic, Plato.
    Nicomachean Ethics; Metaphysics, Aristotle.
    Meditations, Descartes.
    Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume.
    Sense and Reference, Frege.

    Reply
  2. trane

    I am a political scientist with an interest in philosophy. I found Robert Paul Wolff's post on this inspiring:
    http://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.dk/2015/01/the-25-must-read-philosophy-books-for.html

    Reply
  3. hck

    The student writes she/he intends to study in *Europe* . If that's continental Europe: with quite some probablility this will be a programme with some focus on *history* of philosophy. And it will priviledge local philosophers. So it might be a good idea to ask some of the persons teaching that programme for their advice. And I'd be surprised if "this and/or that by Kant" wouldn't be on the list.

    My own list of classics woulb be:
    Aristotle: EN
    Aristotle: Politics
    Aristotle: De geneatione animalium
    Ioannes Duns Scotus: Quaestiones super libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis
    Ioannes Buridanus: Sophismata
    Christine de Pizan: Cité des dames
    Montaigne: Essais
    Descartes: Meditationes
    Leibniz: Essais de Théodicée
    Vico: Scienza Nuova
    Hume: Enquiry
    Hegel: Enzyklopädie
    Marx: Das Kapital
    Husserl: Logische Untersuchungen
    http://www.wittgensteinsource.org
    Satre: L'Être et le néant
    Quine: Quiddities
    7 additional works by aristotle.
    (That's 24, as, as said, the student will be pointed to Kant.)

    Reply
  4. Fritzmc76

    I've marked the books that are going to be difficult for people without a philosophy background with an asterisk. I think it's good to get a grounding in history and in 20th century philosophy.

    History:

    Plato, the dialogues in Five Dialogues
    Plato, Republic
    Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
    Hobbes, Leviathan
    Descartes, Meditations
    Kant, Groundwork *
    Kant Prolegomena *

    20th Century

    Moore, Principia Ethica
    Wittgenstein, Tractatus *
    Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations *
    Quine, From a Logical Point of View
    Quine, Word and Object
    Kripke, Naming and Necessity
    Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds *
    Rawls, A Theory of Justice *
    Nagel, The View from Nowhere
    Fodor, The Language of Thought

    Reply
  5. Donald Dummett

    I think any book by Routledge has pretty decent overviews of topics/philosophers.

    Reply
  6. Josh

    Aquinas, De Ente et Essentia (available online here: http://dhspriory.org/thomas/DeEnte&Essentia.htm) is an underrated (and short!) introduction to some of the most fundamental and innovative aspects of his thought.

    Reply
  7. Dean C. Rowan

    I'm curious whether A.C. Ewing's The Fundamental Questions of Philosophy makes the cut. I remember its being recommended (by whom? to what purpose? I don't remember…) when I was in high school, so I bought a copy. Still own it. Haven't read it.

    Reply
  8. Daniel

    Here's a very nice list of 36 core papers (and a few books), with follow-ups for several in case you get more interested in particular topics.

    http://www.sinandogramaci.net/Site/Teaching_files/Reading%20List%20for%20Ph.D%20students.pdf

    Generally I'd think that reading 25 books is not a reasonable expectation, and you will be 8 books in, halfway through some insane medieval thing, when you burn out.

    Reply
  9. Tim O'Keefe

    Lots of great suggestions above. But I wonder whether trying to cram in 25 "must read" philosophy books on your own in the months prior to starting an MA program is actually going to be a good way to gain the background you want.

    At some point, obviously, you'll want to look at primary texts, but just for the sake of getting an overview of what's what in various areas of philosophy so that you have some idea of what's going on, maybe browsing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy would work better. Then you can follow that up with readings in the primary texts.

    Reply
  10. gt

    Having just finished a terminal MA myself in ol' Europe, I would say that 25 books might be a bit too much, especially since some of those might be awfully long (Kant's first critique is a MUST, but I would never read it in a row of 25 books to read). So, let's try to spit out some shorter one

    1) Plato – Parmenides
    2) Plato – Sophist
    3) Aristoteles – Metaphysics (Yep, it's long, but you can't escape it)
    4) Sextus Empiricus – Outline of Pyrrhonism
    5) Anselm – Monologion and Proslogion
    6) Duns Scotus – Quaestiones
    7) Ockham – Summary of Natural Philosophy
    8) Descartes – Meditations
    9) Berkeley – Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
    10) Spinoza – On the Improvement of the Understanding
    11) Hume – An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
    12) Kant – Prolegomena to any future Metaphysics
    13) Kant – Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals
    14) Fichte – The Vocation of Man (or also his 1804 lectures on The Science of Knowing)
    15) Hegel – The Science of Logic, Volume I of the Encyclopaedia (also long, but it's Hegel, for something shorter one might look into the essay on Skepticism)
    16) Marx – Theses on Feuerbach (I would recommend the German Ideology, but it's 700 pages long)
    17) Nietzsche – On the Genealogy of Morality
    18) Frege – On Sense and Reference
    19) Husserl – Cartesian Meditations
    20) Russell – On Denoting (if you are interested in Language and MEtaphysics) OR The Problems of Philosophy (for something a bit more general)
    21) Heidegger – The Concept of Time AND What is Metaphysics (both very short, among the shortest works he produced)
    22) WIttgenstein – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    23) Kuhn – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
    24) Quine – Two Dogmas of Empiricism
    25) Gadamer – Reason in the Age of Science

    Reply
  11. Craig

    My experience suggests that it's not a good idea to read, say, 20 'classics' in preparation for a Philosophy degree. As the above poster says, you'll burn out, and, even if you make it through them all, I'd suggest you won't have understood very much in any sort of depth, and depth is everything. No matter how smart you are, you're going to struggle to gain much of value if, say, you read Aristotle's Metaphysics, followed by Descartes' Meditations, followed by Kant's first Critique followed by Frege's 'On Sense and Reference'.

    I'd suggest finding one topic you're really interested in and just reading deeply in that topic. I think large-scale reading projects of the classics are best left to those who already have a lot of experience in Philosophy – they'll get the most out of it.

    Reply
  12. Jason Aleksander

    I would say that reading one very good, very dense, and very interesting book well (which certainly might include also reading a handful of important secondary sources responding to or grappling with that work–not just summarizing it, but really getting into the text's methods and problems) is a lot better than reading 25 books of any sort in a casual sort of way. And if reading a book well is as important as I think it is, then I would not recommend trying to read any more than about five important philosophical works in the course of a summer (and five is probably too many — it would be too many for me, anyway — but I think spending more than two weeks with a text is often necessary even to begin to understand it). As for which five one should read, it would be difficult to make a mistake by picking any that are listed above (and I'm personally delighted to see so many medieval recommendations).

    It also certainly would not damage (and might well aid) one's philosophical development to keep in mind some of the great works of literature that can stimulate philosophical inquiry and other varieties of intellectual reflection. That list is so large that it's silly to offer any examples, but I'll throw down some names here of some of the authors that have really revved my engine (not that I've read everything that all of these authors have written): Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Milton, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Hardy, Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Borges, Toni Morrison, David Foster Wallace, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy. And what the heck, I'll throw in Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, to boot.

    Anyway, there is just no substitute for the importance of inquisitiveness in any field of inquiry. So, those interested in pursuing inquiry in philosophy certainly need not limit themselves to "philosophical" works in the ordinary sense. And even leaving aside my literary recommendations, others might suggest a whole host of other texts outside the illusory disciplinary boundaries of philosophy that can stimulate philosophical inquisitiveness. There are, for instance, a good number of excellent and accessible works written by the likes of Richard Feynman and Stephen J. Gould that philosophers certainly can profit from reading even without having developed any particular expertise in the relevant field of study.

    In short, my advice would be: no more than five books, and, if you plan to read more than two good books, pick at least one that isn't a work of philosophy in the narrow sense of the term.

    Reply
  13. John Rapko

    John Searle bragged (brags?) that he had never read Plato's Republic. It seems to me that many morals could be drawn from this, not all of them congenial to Searle himself.–I've always found the most educational reading activity in philosophy to (re-)reading slender works/monographs many times. Aside from the most obvious suggestions (Plato's Theatetus, Descartes' Meditations), I would suggest Nietzsche (Genealogy of Morals), Anscombe (Intention), Wollheim (Art and its Objects), and Geuss (The Idea of a Critical Theory).

    Reply
  14. recent MA grad

    I've never a big fan of "big name classical" books – sure, they're must-reads if you go deep into philosophy, and they're the kind of books you'll always be proud to say that you've read them. But personally, I've found many or books the most informative, probably for the following reasons:
    1) good intro books are written explicitly for people who are new to the field, and so will carefully explain all the jargons;
    2) they put major works into perspective, making the significance of them easier to see (e.g., one would have a hard time seeing why Kant was cherished so much without knowing a little about the kind of problems he was trying to solve.);
    3) a good intro book makes one *want* to read the primary text despite its convolutedness, rather than forcing one to push on with the power of the will.
    4) a good intro book has many philosophically sophisticated ideas, too.

    The couple of intro books I've been reading and enjoying lately are: by David Papineau (this is fairly introductory, but has pretty good additional recommendations)
    and by Donald Gillies.

    Reply
  15. recent MA grad

    (follow 14)
    Apparently this website doesn't like angle brackets.

    What I meant was: I like "intro to…" and "history of…" books.
    The intro books I've been enjoying are "Philosophical Devices" by Papineau and "Philosophy of Science in the Twentieth Century" by Gillies.

    Reply
  16. Anonymous

    Everything by Carnap. Then everything by Quine. Then everything by Kripke. Maybe some Wittgenstein. Then whatever from the last ten years. Unless you're not interested in getting a job. In that case, by all means read things from more than 125 years ago. If you *do* want a job, however, you can ignore everything before Frege.

    BL COMMENT: This may seem funny, but is so wrong in the current job market that it defies belief anyone believes this anymore.

    Reply
  17. William Branch

    Best single book from a Continental perspective … A Brief History Of Thought by Luc Ferry

    Best one volume reference … Dictionary Of Philosophy And Religion by William Reese

    Reply
  18. Russell Blackford

    Someone who doesn't have a strong prior academic background in philosophy would, as 14 says above, probably be best off reading some good modern introductions to the fields that interest them. I also like the idea of taking just one major classic work and trying to master it over a period of weeks or months (to the extent that any of these works can be mastered!) by reading it carefully and systematically along with a lot of background material and much of the modern secondary material on it. My choice would be Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, which deals in depth with many of the central questions of modern philosophy, and is still, with relatively minor modifications, very much an influential and live combination of philosophical ideas.

    For what it's worth, the books that are the closest thing to my own canon of classics that I keep going back to and rereading include Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration and Mill's On Liberty. On the other hand, that reflects my particular interests in aspects of legal and political philosophy. On the gripping hand, both are short (especially the Locke)!

    Reply
  19. Justin Kalef

    If you're taking a graduate degree in physics or engineering, you really must spend the summer getting ready by reading the following classics:

    1) Plato – Meno
    2) Aristotle – Physics
    3) Aristotle – De Caelo
    4) Aristotle – Meteorology
    5) Euclid – The Elements
    6) Archimedes – On Floating Bodies
    7) Ptolemy – Almagest
    8) Avicenna – Summary of the Almagest
    9) al Hazen – Book of Optics
    10) Khayyam – Explanations of the Difficulties in the Postulates of Euclid
    11) Philoponus – Commentary on Aristotle's Physics
    12) Buridan – Subtilissimae Quaestiones super octo Physicorum libros Aristotelis
    13) Oresme – Livre du Ciel et du Monde
    14) Copernicus – de Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (with Osiander's Preface)
    15) Brahe – de Nova Stella
    16) Brahe – Introduction to the New Astronomy
    17) Kepler – Harmonices Mundi
    18) Bacon – Novum Organum
    19) Bacon – The Advancement of Learning
    20) Galileo – The Assayer
    21) Galileo – Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
    22) Descartes – Principles of Philosophy
    23) Newton – Principia
    24) Newton – Optics
    25) Einstein – Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie

    While you're reading them, it's best to supplement your growing understanding of physics and engineering with a reading of some of the classic works of English literature. Reading at least ten of Shakespeare's plays, and the complete works of John Donne, would be a good start. Ideally, you should also read the Iliad, the Aeneid, and Beowulf in the original. While reading, it wouldn't hurt to become familiar with Bach's cantatas and read some classic works on musical theory.

    I'm having a little fun, of course. No serious student of physics or engineering would ever go this route. But I'd be very interested to know why anyone thinks philosophy should be different. I often hear the accusation that philosophy is a dead discipline because we do little more than serve as custodians of dead people's ideas and try to get people interested in understanding and preserving them. I always tell such people that that may have been true of philosophy some time ago, but that that's not what we're doing now. Am I in the minority here? If not, then why are the lists being recommended to this student largely confined to very old works? I've been fortunate to have sat in on graduate seminars with many top-level philosophers. In many of these conversations and seminars, students would have been lost if they hadn't read some David Lewis or Saul Kripke. But I can't think of any seminars in which it's been expected that students will have _already_ read the great works of Plato or Spinoza. Professors conducting graduate seminars seem well aware of the need to assign what readings are needed from these works on those occasions when older writings are needed (and usually, in my experience, they aren't needed).

    To be clear, I've read many of the classic works on others' lists and very much enjoyed reading them. I don't deny that reading them had some philosophical purpose for me. But if I had just been planning to get ready for a Philosophy MA, I certainly would have been better off reading other, much more recent books. These reading lists may have been helpful for MA students 50 or 100 years ago when philosophy was taught very differently, and perhaps at some programs they still are useful. but this student should be aware of the fact that a great many highly successful philosophers today have read few or none of the old classics, and they seem to be no worse for it.

    Reply
  20. anonymous

    I would read fiction you've been meaning to read for some time. As time goes on you'll find less and less time to enjoy being able to just sit and read something nice for several an extended time.

    If you're determined to read some philosophy though, comment #11 is the most sensible. You won't gain anything useful from reading the classics, at least not by trying to read more than one of them.

    Another option (some may disagree with me here) is to look at what professors in your program have written recently, especially professors you might be interested in working with. This will give you a better sense of exactly what people are doing there and get you started on the relevant topics/debates.

    Reply
  21. V. Alan White

    I am of two–no, three–minds here. On the one hand I the suggestions of posts 3, 4, and 10 have great traction with me (though I'd add gender balance in recent modern). My own undergraduate education was very heavy in the history of philosophy. For example, I believe that understanding Chalmers' mind-body view not only profitably requires comparing it with Nagel, but also with Leibniz and Whitehead. On the other hand this background required a lot of work catching up with more contemporary philosophy in grad school. So maybe a compromise of reading classic works and contemporary overviews (such as the many "handbooks" available) would be the best strategy. But that still would require several years of reading to do a thorough job.

    My third mind has real sympathy with the first remarks of Jason @ 12. For the last two decades I have taught representative sections of Schopenhauer's Prize Essay on Freedom of the Will in my 101 class (it's a "single-topic" approach to introductory philosophy that stresses doing philosophy rather than learning content) as part of understanding the free will problem (yeah I have pubs on all this but they're badly dated). What the years have taught me is that understanding one rich work like that–which has bad parts, like his section on the concept of freedom–but also brilliant parts–like his answer to the Norwegian Royal Society's question which won the prize–and his perhaps most brilliant section on anticipating science's freight-train of explanation about human nature–is a big picture window into so, so many areas of philosophy.

    So my take is that in the house of mastering philosophy there are many mansions. Read some greats–men and women–but also survey your contemporary topic areas–and find some particular texts to luxuriate in.

    Reply
  22. Anonymous 2

    In response to a previous anti-historical message, Prof. Leiter wrote: "This … is so wrong in the current job market that it defies belief anyone believes this anymore." Perhaps the original respondent went a little too far. But I worry that Prof. Leiter has acclimated too thoroughly to the intellectual environment of the University of Chicago.

    Look, I love the history of philosophy, and it would obviously be enriching and rewarding to work through many of the classic works mentioned above by others. Would that the world of professional philosophy rewarded interest in such things!

    Most of my acquaintances who went to top 10 graduate schools and who have recently gotten jobs at top 30 programs have only passing familiarity with the history of philosophy. Their graduate educations focused almost entirely on post-1960s work in disciplines such as analytic metaphysics, logic, formal epistemology, philosophy of language / linguistics, philosophy of science, and metaethics. A shallow understanding of pre-Kripkean philosophy (and an even shallower understanding of pre-Fregean philosophy) doesn't seem to have hurt them!

    BL COMMENT: Top 30 PhD programs account for only a miniscule fraction of the jobs available in philosophy departments in the United States.

    Reply
  23. Ian

    I agree with comment 9 but disagree with comment 16. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is a great resource. I also think that it would be a mistake (as Prof Leiter pointed out) to ignore pre-Frege history of philosophy. I'd consider reading the SEP entries on: metaphysics, epistemology, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Hobbes, Spinoza, Berkeley, Locke, Leibniz, Kant and whoever or whatever else you find interesting there. Russ Shafer-Landau's companion books THE ETHICAL LIFE and THE FUNDAMENTALS OF ETHICS provide a nice intro to moral philosophy. Flipping through an intro to Critical Thinking, Logic and Reasoning is also really helpful. As for primary texts, Plato's dialogues are the place to start. Good luck and enjoy!

    Reply
  24. RJL

    For someone without much of a background in philosophy, I would recommend they first read one of the autobiographies written by philosophers that give the history of their own encounter with philosophy and, in the process, an introduction to some of the seminal debates. I have in mind Bryan Magee's "Confessions of a Philosopher", and Colin McGinn's "The Making of a Philosopher". Whatever one thinks of their philosophical positions, their personal stories interwoven with philosophical discussion makes for an entertaining read and a useful introduction to the field. After that, one can go back to the sources and read Kant, Kripke, Quine, &c for oneself.

    Reply
  25. Jon Lawhead

    Lots of people have already listed the canon, which is fine. I think it's also important to not neglect places where philosophy is making contact with contemporary problems, though. Just as with the canon, what you should read depends a lot on what you've read already–your background–and what you're interested in. I'd recommend some or all of the following, though; they're all books that I found really fascinating and thought provoking. They'll at least provide a little taste of some of the places where philosophy is interfacing with some contemporary issues.

    Natural Born Cyborgs, by Andy Clark.

    Every Thing Must Go, by James Ladyman & Don Ross.

    The Construction of Social Reality, by John Searle.

    The Metaphysics Within Physics, by Tim Maudlin.

    Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World, by John Broome.

    The Ethical Project, by Philip Kitcher.

    That's hardly 25, but it's a (non-exhaustive) smattering of different topics on which contemporary philosophers are making really great contributions. The canon is fine, but there's no need to neglect today, and any of these would make a good supplement to the standard books.

    I'm also inclined to agree with comment #20, though. You might want to use your time now to read something other than philosophy–either fiction or some other topic that interests you. Being more widely read will definitely help in grad school, and you'll have plenty of time to read philosophy soon enough.

    Reply
  26. David Mathers

    Whilst I'm not sure I'd go as far as Justin Kalef-there are important differences here between philosophy and scientific fields, I think-I do wonder why it's so normal to suggest that people who are starting philosophy start with classic historical texts, especially ancient Greek rather than early modern (or later texts). I remember, when I was an undergraduate, we started largely by working on contemporary ethics in our first term, and for me this worked wonderfully, far better than if we had started with Plato and Aristotle, for multiple reasons. Firstly, the texts were easily understood without masses of historical context, and dealt with things we all had an interest in already. And secondly 'classics' often contain arguments that, frankly seem a bit odd or silly or just based on obviously false premises in the current context, unless you already know how to read things from the past charitably, and with a sense of what was known at the time. At least, that was certainly my reaction when I first hard to read The Republic as a 2nd year undergrad. (I did find Hume and Descartes exciting right away, in fairness.) It seems to me better to start by getting beginners to think about philosophical ideas first, before we add the additional challenges that come from reading things originally written in 5th century Athens. I think this is true, even if one is not at all hostile to history of philosophy as an important part of the discipline, and very much has a conception of it as closer to the other humanities rather than maths and science. But judging by most of the first year syllabi I've seen, and the fact that ancient philosophy is considered an especially useful AoC for teaching purposes, that I'm in a minority here.

    Reply
  27. Fritzmc76

    I think Anon 20's advice to read work by people in your future grad program is really good advice. Especially if your program involves writing a thesis under the direction of an advisor. You will want to think about whom you want to work with. In my experience, your choice of grad school advisor makes a huge difference to the quality of your grad school experience. I read a book by my future advisor in the summer before I started grad school and it was excellent preparation.

    Reply
  28. David Wallace

    I don't really know how to think about this question other than by thinking of shorter lists in particular subjects (with the obvious understanding that entirely disjoint such lists could readily be put together, and so they're in no way "must read" in any sense). For instance (and off the top of my head), in philosophy of physics I might go with something like

    Harvey Brown, "Physical Relativity"
    David Albert, "Quantum Mechanics and Experience"
    Roger Penrose, "The Emperor's New Mind" (with a caveat about the philosophy of mind being very idiosyncratic)
    John Earman, "World Enough and Spacetime"
    Julian Barbour, "The Discovery of Dynamics"
    Lawrence Sklar, "Physics and Chance"

    (Those are all more or less accessible to someone without serious technical training, are all primary texts, exhibit a variety of relevant styles, and cover most of the field.)

    For general philosophy of science, maybe

    Bas van Fraassen, "The Scientific Image"
    Bill Newton-Smith, "The Rationality of Science"
    Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
    Nancy Cartwright, "How the Laws of Physics Lie"
    James Ladyman and Don Ross, "Every Thing Must Go"
    Stathis Psillos, "Scientific Realism"

    I could imagine writing similar "taster" lists of 4-6 books in Mind or Language, though others are much better positioned to come up with them.

    What I'm struggling with is the idea that one could somehow generate even a significantly longer list that is supposed to be subject-neutral. I think the reason people are either (a) ending up with very historically oriented lists, or (b) focussing on some core area, is because otherwise the task isn't really very well defined.

    Reply
  29. David Mathers

    Incidentally, although it probably a bit presumptuous of me to recommend something as a lowly grad student, Bernard Williams' 'The Self and the Future', which is not a book, but a short article, is just about the best introduction to the wonder and terror of philosophy as anyone could get, I think. Not only is it far easier for someone not versed in philosophy to get why the issues being discussed are important than say, any Kant (seriously, what sadist recommends Kant to someone just starting out in the subject) or Naming and Necessity, but it produces that unsettling feeling of intellectual vertigo that I think most of us associate with really thrilling philosophy.

    Reply
  30. Leslie Glazer PhD

    just a puzzle… why would someone with no background in the subject enter a philosophy MA program? .. I'm not exactly sure how that would happen. Something brought the inquirer to philosophy. In a similar vein I would suggest that the person pay more attention to what grabs them when they browse the philosophy section of a good bookstore or the university library. The phil. program will take care of all the "have to'"s. More importantly is to develop the capacity to follow ones intuitions and interests in surprising ways and to read deeply books that grab one's attention and challenge one's heart [and habitual assumptions and intellectual habits]. Learning to read deeply and to have a question is more important than any set of contents to read—- at least until one is having to demonstrate mastery of an area and its history.

    Reply
  31. Eric Rasmusen

    A list of 5 books would be more useful than a list of 25. It is also important to consider what books one is likely to actually force oneself to read over the summer.

    I saw Genealogy of Morals on a couple of these lists. I wonder why that's the Nietzsche to recommend. Isn't it one of the least philosophical of his books– more sociolory or psychology? And Zarathustra is more fun to read.

    BL COMMENT: Your impression of the Genealogy is mistaken; indeed, there's a book advertised in the right hand column of this blog that would clarify this! Zarathustra is, indeed, "fun," but an awful place to begin since its form–as a parody of the New Testament–raises a host of interpretive difficulties. I had an earlier discussion of the topic vis-à-vis Nietzsche here: http://brianleiternietzsche.blogspot.com/2004/12/where-should-beginner-start-with.html

    Reply
  32. Christopher Gifford

    Bertrand Russell, "The Problems of Philosophy". Ideal for someone without a background in philosophy.

    Reply

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