Guidance into philosophy

Question

I know one site: How to become a pure mathematician, there are levels of study on math, book recomendations and advices. I'm searching for something equivalent but for philosophy.

The math site I mentioned have a very important formatation for me, it tells me what I need to learn and where I am at the learning process, there are also commentaries on the cited books. At the moment, I'm only acquainted with universities syllabi.

There's also a great book I've found for math: All the mathematics you missed but need to know for graduate school which have small descriptions of some mathematical fields, it would be nice to have an equivalent one for philosophy.

Answer 1

I would make a division between (1) all the things you need to know to do philosophy and (2) important books and (3) "State of art"-philosophy if one wants to call it like that (those papers, essays and books that are written in the last 20 years or so, by people who we pay to do philosophy).

(1) In order to get into philosophical terms etc. I would suggest the book: "Philosophical Devices: Proofs, Probabilities, Possibilities and Sets", by David Papineau. I read it and it is awesome and very helpful. Another one that comes up often is Thomas Nagels "What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy". You would then know the relevant terms and got a neat overview what schools there are etc.

(2) Next step would be to read whatever you like. Let us pretend you are mostly interested in political philosophy. Then i´d go chronological and start by Platos Republic, Hobbes Leviathan, Rousseaus Social Contract, Kants Perpetual Peace, maybe mix some Marx in, and finally Rawls Theory of Justice. Depending wether you like Rawls or not, you can go into any direction from there (Nozick would be one example). Of course there might be different views on which books one should read. These books are probably found on the reading list of introductory courses for political philosophy at a lot of universities, though.

(3) If you´re done there, I would suggest, whatever your interest is after reading all this, to read what is written nowadays or in the past 20 years, e.g. in the Journal of Philosophy or some other Journal that is publishing philosophy.

Answer 2

For mathematics, it is quite easy how advanced you are: which problem can you solve, which problem can't you. (I'm not saying it is possible to make a ranking of best mathematicians though)

For philosophy however, there is no such thing as solving a problem. Therefore, it is not possible to draw a line and say: behind this point, we call you a philosopher. We can of course look at what you know and don't know, but philosophy is also about applying your knowledge in daily life, something very hard to measure.

Furthermore, philosophy is also a lot introspection. A book can tell you how you can learn the art of introspection, but it is not possible to create a guide to introspection. Every human being is different, so you cannot make an exercise to train introspection, with one right solution.

I therefore consider it impossible to create a reference which tells you what steps you have to take to get further in philosophy.

However, there are several introductions to philosophy available. As Mozibur Ullah already mentioned in his command, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/) can be very helpful, however in my opinion is too big for an introduction.
I would recommend you to buy a schoolbook on philosophy and read that.
You may also try wikibooks: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Philosophy