What are 100 good philosophical books frequently recommended by professional philosophers? [closed]

Question

I am a complete newbie to philosophy and have set myself a reading challenge of 100 books. The plan will be to curate a list of books and read them in that order. I would ideally like a selection that covers a wide range of Philosophy subjects, but is comprised mostly of books that specialise in one area (i.e. I don't want to read 100 'overviews')

Obviously I'm not expecting someone to answer with a full list. But if anyone has read several books about a certain topic, which one or two did you learn the most from ? Also, can anyone recommend to me any resources that will help me choose to the list? (For example, is there a 'guide to Philosophy' book that I could read and help me pick the list?)

I have some particular interests in language, mathematics and stoicism, but by no means want to be limited to these. Which books are typically recommended as being part of the philosophical canon by other philosophers?

Anything else that pops into your head about the order of books, which ones I should start and finish with, whether I should read source materials or not, Eastern/Western Philosophy, I would like to hear them, thank you!

Answer 1

• Science and Civilization in China, Joseph Needham, a.o.

  This is a monumental history of the development of science in China. Volume 1 and 2
  give an overview of the project and of the general, Chinese philosophical background. Needham's big question is: What made it possible for modern science to take off in Western Europe, during the Renaissance, even though Chinese science and technology during the previous millenium was often more advanced than Western?

• The Philosophy of Mozi, Chris Fraser (2016)

  One of the best current introductions to the most influential Chinese philosophy before the unification of the empire by Qin Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor (3d century BCE). The Mohists died out as a movement but had a strong influence on both Daoism and Confucianism. In the antique world they came closest to developing a formal logic, though their epistemology is very different from the representational ("knowledge as justified belief") epistemologies that dominate Western traditions. The Mohists were a group of engineers, organized as a quasi-religious organization. They were militant pacifists -- using their engineering expertise to come to the defence of city states attacked by other states. They were the first philosophical tradition to try to systematically develop a consequentialist ethics, leading them to a doctrine of "universal/impartial love". They studied both mechanics and optics and approached philosophical problems (in particular ethical argument) also with a kind of engineering mindset ("how can we make this work"). (The SEP entry about Mohism is also written by Fraser.)

For somewhat more light reading...

• Elbow Room - The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, Daniel Dennett (1984)

  Dennett's defense of compatibilism, showing how acting out of free will can be seen as compatible with being predictable and being determined. Like all of Dennett's work extremely well written.

• The Mind's I, Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett (1981)

  This is a rag bag of relatively short essays and stories by various authors. All around the theme of "what is consciousness".

Answer 2

This isn't remotely like the other question other than it's a comprehensive list request. The other post is looking for philosophy complementary to STEM, which I would suggest is largely modern and post-modern philosophy in the analytic tradition since it is strongly tied to STEM development. This request should be satisfied with Classical, Scholastic, and Continental Philosophy. (So don't take closure personally, of course.)

You can start with books that have that theme: greatest philosophers and greatest philosophy books. While this is somewhat dictated by style, personal preference, and politics, we can serve up a few examples starting with Mauro's suggestion and following it:

• Britannica's The 100 Most Influential Philosophers of All Time (GB)
• Bertrand Russell covers a comprehensive list, though dated in his History of Western Philosophy (GB)
• My personal favorite "guide" is a set of dated and hard to obtain books called Great Books of the Western World (bookfinder.com) edited by Mortimer Adler. I'll include his list of significant philosophers below.
• The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained (GB) is a contemporary overview. I know you want to read the books, but it's a good overview.

You can also find lists of philosophers in the following set of encyclopedias:

• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and it's table of contents
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and it's table of contents
• The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (paywalled)
• The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (print)

Of course, there's a political edge to your question which used to be called the culture wars. One forceful voice that we should continue on a path of continuity with our past is Allan Bloom in his The Closing of the American Mind. I leave you with an essay about the book and its influence (s-usih.org) from the popular media. Of course, the "Western canon" is not any one standard, but a general historical preference. My views neglect philosophy of India, China, and Japan mostly out of my philosophical ignorance and strong interest in analytical philosophy. Also, the views I present here favor Antiquity, the Medieval Era, and Modern philosophy, and neglect Postmodernist philosophy. There's also a modern political and stylistic distinction between the contemporary analytic and Continental activity.

Without more ado is the list of Great Books endorsed by the University of Chicago and Mortimer Adler from the original edition:

• Homer
• Aeschylus
• Sophocles
• Euripides
• Aristophanes
• Herodotus
• Thucydides
• Plato
• Aristotle
• Hippocrates
• Galen
• Euclid
• Archimedes
• Apollonius
• Nicomachus
• Lucretius
• Epictetus
• Marcus Aurelius
• Virgil
• Plutarch
• Tacitus
• Ptolemy
• Copernicus
• Kepler
• Plotinus
• Augustine
• Thomas Aquinas
• Dante
• Chaucer
• Miachiavelli
• Hobbes
• Rabelias
• Montaigne
• Shakespeare
• Gilbert
• Galileo
• Harvey
• Cervantes
• Francis Bacon
• Descartes
• Spinoza
• Milton
• Pascal
• Newton
• Huygens
• Locke
• Berkeley
• Hume
• Swift
• Sterne
• Fielding
• Montesquieu
• Rousseau
• Adam Smith
• Gibbon
• Kant
• The Federalist Papers
• J. S. Mill
• Boswell
• Lavoisier
• Fourier
• Faraday
• Hegel
• Goethe
• Melville
• Darwin
• Marx
• Engels
• Tolstoy
• Dostoevsky
• William James
• Freud

Answer 3

To some extent, it depends on what you are looking to do. Do you want to read the primary texts of the great philosophers? Or do you want an introduction to the subject from a modern perspective?

If the former, I would recommend:

• Plato: The Republic, Phaedo.
• Aristotle: Too much to choose from. Maybe the Nicomachean Ethics and the Organon.
• Seneca: Letters.
• Marcus Aurelius: Meditations.
• Thomas Aquinas: Summa Contra Gentiles.
• Descartes: Meditations, Discourse on Method.
• Hobbes: Leviathan.
• Locke: Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
• Spinoza: Ethics.
• Hume: Treatise on Human Nature.
• Leibniz: Too much to choose from. Maybe the Monadology and the Discourse on Metaphysics.
• Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgment.

Once you reach the last 200 years or so, there are a huge number of philosophers to consider and often no single text to choose from. At this stage, you are probably better off reading some secondary literature on the philosophical subjects that are of interest to you.

Within the realm of analytical philosophy, some of the more important texts are:

• Russell: Too much to choose from. Maybe An Outline of Philosophy.
• Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations.
• Quine: Word and Object, The Roots of Reference.
• Goodman: Fact, Fiction and Forecast.
• Kripke: Naming and Necessity.
• Searle: Speech Acts.
• Parfit: Reasons and Persons.
• Nozick: Philosophical Explanations.
• MacIntyre: After Virtue.
• Anscombe: Intention.
• Rawls: A Theory of Justice.
• Nagel: The View from Nowhere.
• Williamson: The Philosophy of Philosophy.

Inevitably, any kind of list reflects one's personal interests.