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I'd go with Simon Blackburn's Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy (Cambridge University Press 1999).
Here's the blurb:
This is a book about the big questions in life: knowledge, consciousness, fate, God, truth, goodness, justice. It is for anyone who believes there are big questions out there, but does not know how to approach them. Think ...
16
Is it that New Atheism isn't philosophy?
Yes -- it is not a philosophy; wikipedia describes it as "a social and political movement" first associated with Sam Harris, an American writer who holds a B.A. in philosophy and a Ph.D in neuroscience but does not practice either professionally in the sense of having academic tenure. Harris's works appear to be ...
9
Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder polarises opinion as it is a history of philosophy wrapped up in a children's story. As long as you feel OK with this mixture (and for me at 40 something it was not a problem) then this offers a gentle introduction. What I found especially good was that the explanations of the various philosophers' thoughts were put into a ...
8
History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell is usually recommended as a good place to start, haven't read it myself, but it gives you a thorough overview of philosophy and how it has changed over the times. It's usually recommended to read an overview book like this before jumping into a specific philosopher's work.
On a side note: there is a sort of ...
6
I have enjoyed the DK Publishing's The Philosophy Book(1)(2). It is an intro, it is basically written, and covers most of the topics.
To the complete novice learning about philosophy can be daunting - The Philosophy Book changes all that. With the use of powerful and easy to follow images, succinct quotations, and explanations that are easily ...
6
Sorry for turning up so late to the party. The front door was locked so I had to climb through a window.
Anyway, I've recently come across the following book:
Tetralogue: I'm Right, You're Wrong
Four people with radically different outlooks on the world meet on a
train and start talking about what they believe. Their conversation
varies from ...
6
I know that Derrida writes on dissemination and has an original theory of it
I think he uses the term in a reasonably conventional way; AFAIK it would be a bit of a red herring to say he has a distinct theory of it.
Note that the book Dissemination is actually a compendium of ostensibly unrelated material, but much of it is an examination of Plato's ...
5
As User10383 pointed out, Dissemination in Derrida should be contrasted with polysemy (among other things). An interpretation is constrained by polysemy if it considers only the various possible discrete meanings a text could have. For example, the two or more meanings of a pun. An interpretation recognizes the possibility of dissemination if it acknowledges ...
5
I really liked The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell for the following reasons:
It studied the thought of past philosophers by investigating a
particular subject (such as existence).
It is very readable.
It's freely available online at the above (and other) links.
5
Work that is sometimes called "speculative realism" or "object oriented ontology" might interest you. Most (if not all) of it is directly in dialogue with Kant. Timothy Morton in particular deals with aesthetics.
There is quite a bit of work on aesthetics since Kant. Aside from the above, Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory" comes to mind and more recently a good ...
5
What I'm asking is what is the impact of video games on philosophy. Can I read somewhere about it?
I am simply posting some materials which may be useful.
Playing with Good and Evil: Video games and Moral Philosophy
by Peter E. Rauch
ABSTRACT;
Despite an increasingly complex academic discourse, the video game medium lacks an agreed-upon definition.
...
5
Colin McGinn, in his book The Philosophy of Language, discusses at least four criticisms of Davidson's theory.
Is it enough to say that knowledge of meaning is knowledge of truth conditions - especially when we restrict ourselves homophonic statements of truth conditions? Can't we ask what this knowledge of truth conditions itself involves?
We need to ...
4
In terms of the pessimistic, anthropophobic aspect of Schopenhauer's philosophy, Ulrich Horstmann surely is one of his strongest living followers, though his writings are rather essayistic than scholarly philosophical. (Unfortunately, none has been translated into English as far as I know.)
Horstmann even critizises Schopenhauer for being not radical (that ...
4
Contemporary Consensus is hard to come by in Truth given its broad interest, but the philosophical literature around it is very much motivated by Paradox phenomena following from truth as a component of language. If Truth is taken to have a semantic character, such that it indicates a "real" property in a baseline metaphysics, then we might read proposed ...
4
I would think that Whitehead would be what you want. From Wikipedia...
Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of western philosophy. Whitehead argued that ...
4
The science that studies a be-ing is, for Heidegger, ontic [ontique], and it is necessary to distinguish it from the science of the being of a be-ing which alone is ontological [ontologique]. Let us examine these distinctions more
closely. The attributes of a be-ing make it to be of this or that determination. In identifying
its attributes, we say what ...
3
I'm going to answer my own question with Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, just to see how many votes it gets.
Easily the most engaging writer of Western intellectual history in the English language, Will Durant breathes life into philosophers and their ideas. He is colorful, witty, and above all, informative. Beginning with Socrates and ending with ...
3
I read this guy's Part II where he fits together the 4 formulae, the 4
discourses and topology as Lacan puts it forth in L'etourdit. The argument is that in no way is Lacan's use of topology metaphorical.
http://www.academia.edu/5984726/Sexuated_Topology_and_the_Suspension_of_Meaning_A_Non-Hermeneutical_Phenomenological_Approach_to_Textual_Analysis
3
W.D. Hart's Engines of the Soul (1980) gives a book-length defense for the indivisibility of mind and its substantial distinction from matter (as opposed to more modern property dualism). Unlike many works which merely analyze dualism Hart develops a full proposal for how minds/souls can be distinct from matter and how psycho-physical causation can work. He ...
3
I would say that the "ordinary individual" would find it easier to read the older philosophers in their original texts, while contemporary philosophers would be very difficult for such a person to follow. Contemporary philosophy has gotten very technical and typically one requires a lot of prerequisites to understand what is being said. The older authors on ...
3
I'd say no, but this is mostly just a matter of definition. Analytic philosophy is a particular modern strain of the western philosophical tradition. Its canonical writers are all Europeans and Americans writing in response to each other and earlier generations of European philosophers.
"Western" denotes a cultural and historical group. There aren't non-...
3
Shimon Malin’s “Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality, a Western Perspective” offers Whitehead as a 20th century philosopher that might be what you are looking for. Schrodinger and Heisenberg would be others.
His book attempts to explain the collapse of the wave function by linking fields of atemporal potentiality with the ...
2
I would posit that the naturalistic philosophies surrounding eugenics had a tremendous effect on the way we perceive human life. It was the way in which the Nazi sold mass murder to the German people.
The view that we should aid the evolutionary process seemed like a good endeavor to some. If we are all just the process of the mingling of the primordial ...
2
Alan Turing's conceptualization of modern computing was a philosophical thought experiment when he conceived it. But every computer-based technological advance since then has been founded on that thought-experiment. It's hard to imagine any other 20th century idea having as large a measurable impact to date.
answered Jan 31 '18 at 22:04
Chris Sunami supports Monica
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2
Not bad to have a look at Islamic philosophy also:
Our Philosophy
The Revealer, The Messenger, The Message
A History of Muslim Philosophy
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