So lately I've been feeling that I've really been lacking in general knowledge of philosophy, truth be told I feel I really don't know much at all. So I decided to take the lazy way out and ask you folks. So, where do you go online to learn? Which are your favorites? I say online because I have a hell of a lot of books on the backburner already and I just started school as well so that takes up even more time. But if you have some must reads them I'm all ears and shall add them to the list. actually if this gets big enough I'll add everything to this posts so everyone interested can see. Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Guide to Philosophy Edge -has some interesting articles, kinda hard to navigate though Classical Literature Various Texts EpistmelLinks decent database Bertrand Russel Archives only started to look into him but so far i'm a fan Philpapers online articles Philosophy Bites podcasts Linguistics and Philosophy open courseware
I would recommend you check out the tao te ching. It's the "orignitating" text of Taoism you could say, written by Lao Tzu, an enlightened sage and the founder of Taoism. It holds a great many truths about life, in all of its aspects, as well as ultimate reality, which is referred to as the "Tao". The Tao means the Way things are, essentially. Tao Teh Ching - Beck Translation That website also has many other translations available if you want slightly different perspectives on the verses. Here: Tao Teh Ching - Index of Chapters When I first read the Tao te Ching in college it opened me up to an incredibly beautiful nature of the universe and truly changed my life. Hope it benefits you like it did me Peace
i have always looked at philosophy as the answer to the question 'how do you believe" as opposed to being asked 'what i believe' i try to follow a taoist philosophy which i like to sum up with the phrase "come what may , leave what must" the greatest early philosophers were greek and chinese , or at least the most famous i would look up Socrates , Aristotle , Plato , Confucinism , Taoism , Legalism from there just get into whichever tickles yer fancy
Waking life is interesting, heres the script James Skemp's StrivingLife | Waking Life Script with Revisions You could probably find the full movie split up into parts on youtube though, check it out. Some of Edgar Allan Poe is good, like these http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/eapoe/bl-eapoe-mes.htm http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/eapoe/bl-eapoe-colloquy.htm Fight club and V for Vendetta movies have interesting philosophies in it. Like how overcoming the fear of death, gives a man infinite opportunities. And how working on the destruction of a corrupt system benefits society as a whole. I found these movies interesting when I first started getting into philosophy.
updated- i'll add some original work later on (including tao and all that jazz), just wanted to add basic overviews first. if a site seems biased or something that would otherwise distort anything for personal gain point it out and i'll remove it If anyone knows some good video sites I would love to hear em (remember this is about philosophy, not spirituality and other biased opinions)
what got me started was a philosophy class at my local junior college. if you live in a town with a juco you should look into it. taking a single class wouldn't be expensive at all, and would be fairly easy to work around your work schedule.
yeah i've already taken an intro class and i'm taking ethics this year- even though i dont need it and it does nothing but add work for me i still enjoy it. plus my philosophy teacher likes to compliment me which makes me feel good haha
if anyone has any ideas on what to add ad the like feel free to share- pretty sure i'm just going to keep adding to this for a while. until i forget about this thread anyways-hopefully until then we can learn some new shit eh?
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFgEO8Pyh7s&feature=&p=57EE584B3CAC41B9&index=0&playnext=1]YouTube - CAMPING WITH ALAN WATTS 1 OF 5.mpg[/ame] Taoism is philosophy by the way. Lao Tzu was a philosopher. Great philosophy.
yes i know, like i said i'll add in original work later. along with the dhammapada and whatever else i can think of
bump- haven't had time for this but for gods sake there must be someone out there with some decent information. yeah i watched the first 20 minutes when you posted- it was interesting
That depends on how deep you're looking to get. Just a quick swim? 'The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy Made Lighter' is a pretty funny and cogent textbook that very lightly summarizes the most important figures in the history of philosophy. Also contains witty illustrations by the author; would be good for altered states of consciousness. If you wanted to get in a bit deeper, try just reading some of the pages on wikipedia, which is always a decent option: try the articles 'Philosophy of Language', 'Philosophy of the Mind', 'Metaphysics', or 'Ontology' as decent jumping off points. Alternatively, Nietzsche is a pretty easy read, despite being thematically dense and rather lively. He's also witty: the important things to take away from him are that reality is so absurd that if you're not making jokes in your philosophy, you're not doing it right; and that meglomania is the ideal psychological state. If you have some fairly serious academic chops and want to dive in, Immanual Kant is good, but fairly obfuscating. Probably the most interesting figures in modern philosophy are Luwig Wittgenstein--Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus or Philosophical Investigations are his works to read--or Saul Kripke--with Naming and Necessity. Or, try reading articles in journals; I recently read a good one called On Ontological Pluralism, which was just that. Wittgenstein and Kripke tend to be thought of as upper undergrad or even graduate level, especially the Tractatus. Immanuel Kant is generally pretty solidly undergrad, especially his ethics. This list generally represents my interests in philosophy, which are mainly language and metaphysics. If you're more politically inclined, Rousseau, Locke, Hobbes, and Dewey are all pretty good choices. Daniel Dennet is prominent in philosophy of the mind, I believe. If you would be so self-deprecating to get into continental philosophy, Michael Foucault is tolerable. If you're looking for more quasi-philosophy, anything by Richard Dawkins is good, as well as any Vonnegut or Heller. Siddhartha is excellent, and the Principia Discordia is the most transcendent esoteric text ever compiled. I would also recommend watching TED talks, which are good. You can also find lectures by professors on youtube; I believe there's a Yale professor who does decent ones. I would also highly recommend you get into symbolic logic, especially predicate logic and modal logic, which have become the core of the analytic movement. Wikipedia has a few entries: List of logic symbols - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and probably anything you can link to from it. Cheers; and again, these are just my opinions, so take them with a healthy dose of relativism.
this is precisely the kind of responses i was hoping for- much much obliged sir! i'll check some of those out for sure will do man
Mostly I just listen to a lot of Alan Watts on youtube, I like a lot of what he has to say and it makes me feel good about life.
I'm so disappointed that dude who was naming off philosophy of ethics works, didn't name John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, that's fucked up breh.
I usually just read about philosophers on Wikipedia, get a general feel for their ideas and go to the library if it interests me. When I'm through with the stuff that interests me, the stuff I learned from those books make me interested in reading other books that didn't interest me before. And so on...
Wikisource and wikibooks are two websites which provide full text for a lot of philosophy works. If you know the name of the title, you can google search for any philosopher before 1950 and get full text, translation, and commentary from various websites. If you want something awesome and mindblowing, check out cuiltheory.wikidot.com. If you're looking for specific ideas or topics and want to find the right articles/essays/books, just throw them out here and I'll see what I can do.